Angry Bear will be posting writing by writers less well known and will usually be twenty and thirty years old as well. Here is another one: by David Parkman The End of an Era: Ben Bernanke Passes the Torch After an eight-year term, Ben Bernanke arrives at Brookings Institution for his first day of work […]
Brad DeLong has a spat with Scott Sumner: The IS-LM model led economic historians to argue money was easy in 1929-30, because rates fell sharply. It led modern Keynesians to assume that money was easy in 2008, because rates fell sharply… Well, I would say that not just “modern Keynesians” but a lot of people […]
Economists for Obama suddenly showed up in my RSS reader again. It’s not a pretty sight: I suppose I might change my mind, but after watching the President give in to the Boehner-McConnell blackmail axis, I don’t imagine I’ll be spending much of my time advocating his re-election. Assuming he’s the Democratic nominee, which I […]
The world would be a much better place if people had listened to Tom last August: Now some elite opinion favors Ben Bernanke’s reappointment, but politicians are irritated over Fed stonewalling of bailout oversight and others (e.g. Dean Baker) point out that Ben Bernanke who put the Fed throttles to the firewall to save the […]
Via David Wessel’s Twitter feed, the WSJ publishes a letter: Ben Bernanke is a good person, a fine academic and a well-respected professor. But those traits have no bearing on whether he should be reconfirmed as Federal Reserve chairman…. Applying accountability principles, there’s no way Chairman Bernanke should be reconfirmed by the Senate, let alone […]
It’s bad enough to violate Brad DeLong’s first rule (which, I hasten to rationalize, was posted when DeLong himself was disagreeing). It’s worse when the opposition to Krugman is coming from…the WSJ editorial page. (Or, as Barry Ritholtz correctly describes it, “the comics section.” Just less funny, and more likely to make the two-drink minimum […]
Via (what else?) Alea’s Twitter feed, John Taylor defends himself against Ben Bernanke: “The evidence is overwhelming that those low interest rates were not only unusually low but they logically were a factor in the housing boom and therefore ultimately the bust,” Taylor, a Stanford University economist, said in an interview today in Atlanta. It’s […]
UPDATE: CR appears to agree with me, even as he raises another point: Bernanke used data from other countries to suggest monetary policy was not a huge contributor to the bubble … however, Bernanke didn’t discuss if non-traditional mortgage products contributed to housing bubbles in other countries. This would seem like a key missing part […]
Now that I know we’re just members of the “Peanut Gallery,”* let this random links post work as a placeholder for longer posts as we prepare for the “holiday”: Shorter Mark Thoma at Marketwatch: If you can’t build a better model, best to reappoint a man who doesn’t think he has to do half of […]
We are now almost 24 months into the Great Recession. While many expect NBER will eventually say that The Great Recession ended several months ago, they have not yet. By contrast, the recession that began The Great Depression, per NBER, lasted 43 months. It seems only fair to compare the two, so I trust I […]