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 […]
The title should actually be “How Dollar Bills Move,” but it’s not as alliterative. A fascinating item on the work of Dirk Brockmann, who’s used WheresGeorge.com to map the movement of dollar bills, and the boundaries over which they’re least likely to cross: I have no idea what to do with this, or whether it […]
Steve Randy Waldman and Scott Sumner (plus many others, linked from Steve’s post) wade in on notions of saving and investment. (I’m endlessly amazed that the best econothinkers on the web — add Nick Rowe, Andy Harless, David Beckworth, Josh Mason, and many others to the list — constantly feel the need to think, re-think, […]
Erica Payne sent out a request for writeups from Patriotic Millionaires members, and I provided this. I hate not to re-use perfectly good copy… I live (quite well) off financial investments — no need to work any more — and my taxes every year are ridiculously, embarrassingly low. Meanwhile tens, hundreds of millions of hard […]
Matthew Yglesias riffs off my recent post, “Saving” ≠ “Saving Resources,” and there’s been quite a bit of commentary there, plus on Asymptosis and Angry Bear (plus a bit of twitter talk that I can’t figure out how to link to easily and usefully). There are a dozen things I want to discuss on the […]
Many economists — mostly the freshwater/neoclassical/supply-side/conservative types, but also many on the left — hold in their heads a very peculiar model of how economies work. It’s a model of a barter/real-goods economy in which money only plays the role of convenience. In this model, if you don’t eat some portion of the corn you […]
Following up on my earlier post, about people swimming in a stream of economic change over which they have no control: As I often do, I was re-reading some old Steve Randy Waldman posts, and came across one that made the same point quite elegantly: “Stabilizing prices is immoral“. (If you want to understand how […]
If you’re a fish merrily swimming in a stream, is it your fault if a flood — say from a large release from the dam upstream — causes you to be washed out through the sluicegates? Or if a drought leaves you trapped in a shrinking pool from which you cannot escape? That’s the question […]
Discussing the failure of modern macro to incorporate the financial system into its models, Ben asks, why did the bursting of the housing bubble spank the economy so much harder than the dot bomb crash? He sez (courtesy Brad DeLong, emphasis mine): …the decline in wealth associated with the tech bubble bursting [in 2001] and […]
Imagine that all bank deposits — the dollars in your checking account — were 100% backed, one-for-one, by your bank’s reserve holdings at the Fed (the modern, fiat-money-world equivalent of gold reserves). Runs on bank deposits would be impossible, because the outfit that issues reserves and currency can’t run out of reserves and currency — […]