With all the chaff that’s been flying around (recently, and for years now) about saving and investment, dissaving, and lending/borrowing, I felt the need to go back to the numbers and see how they’ve played out over the decades in what we tend to call the “real” economy — domestic households and nonfinancial business. Click […]
MEV will be moving us over to our WordPress platform and new look Tuesday early morning. They have assured us the glitches have been corrected…rss feeds should continue, and links to old posts will be maintained. Please let me know right away if problems develop… Dan
Lifted from Robert Waldmann’s Stochastic Thoughts: In the post below, I vigorously criticize IMF staff and Ryan Avent for claiming that central banks adopted low inflation targets in the early 80s without noting that the Fed did not adopt an inflation target until January 25 2012. I have now read Avent’s post as patiently as […]
by Mike Kimel Reagan and Rios Montt: The Company You Keep Former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt is on trial for genocide. I was born in the US, but my formative years were spent in South America in the 1980s. That the right wing Guatamelan military dictatorship was massacring unarmed civilians on a large scale […]
Lifted from comments comes a beginning thought on the term ‘sustainability’ for programs…Sustainability Rusty asks: Is there an accepted definition for “sustainability?”I tend to think of it in an environmental context, but apparently it is used more broadly. Your thoughts? Bruce Webb’s quick reply: STR, well in Social Security lingo ‘sustainable’ is mostly used in […]
by Linda Beale Senator Warren prods bank regulators Somehow, more Senators need to start doing what Senator Warren does. Review the facts. Ask questions that force regulators to admit to what they are doing. Point out the lopsided nature of the regulators’ activities that demonstrate that they are acting more to protect the Big Banks […]
A while back Nick Rowe challenged amateur internet econocranks (my word, not Nick’s) like me to actually go read an intro econ textbook. (He was specifically targeting the author of Unlearning Economics — who I, at least, don’t consider to be an econocrank, he’s far better-versed than I am, though Nick might.) I took him […]
I’m just sayin’. (Emphasis mine, words Solow’s): [Bernanke’s] preferred answer is better and more system-oriented regulation. One has to ask then why regulation failed to see the crisis of 2007–2008 coming and take action to head it off. Bernanke suggests that regulators were lulled into inattention by the so-called Great Moderation. Our masters are all […]
Mark Thoma once claimed to be pleased that I was shrilly criticizing him. I sure hope he meant it, because here I go again. HeUpdate: I have trouble with reading comprehension. A one syllable name was too hard. I am commenting on Tim Duy who posted at Mark Thoma’s site. I apologize for the mistake. […]
Simon Wren-Lewis wrote I think there were three important contributory factors to what happened in the 1970s that are just not present today. First, our knowledge of inflation output trade-offs, although hardly complete now, was much weaker back then. Second, the Fed and other monetary policy makers did not have clear inflation targets that they were […]