A fairly large number of economists have argued that Keynesians predicted that the fiscal cliff January 2013 and sequestration March 2013 would cause a recession. A fairly large number of Keynesian economists have denied personally making that prediction (including the oversigned). Only following a complaint in comments will I look up all the links at […]
A month late, I learn from brilliant economist Simon Wren-Lewis about the 3.5 year late revelation of the utter contempt that then European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet had for Democracy. I hand the microphone over to brilliant economist Paul DeGrauwe The ECB’s letter to the Spanish government is not the only one the ECB […]
The markets have been showing a rather particular schizophrenia over the last dozen or so years — but not, perhaps, the one you may be thinking of. This schizo-disconnect is between the goods markets and the asset markets, and their valuations of U.S. production. In short, the existing-asset markets think we’re producing and saving far […]
Nick Rowe wonders why no one talks about price controls any more. I think this is related to his discussion of the gigantic influence of Milton Friedman on new Keynesian macroeconomics. See also this. Due to the same exchange, I recall tax based incomes policy. IIRC Paul Samuelson and especially Robert Solow were quite enthusiastic […]
Noah Smith put up a post Sunday purporting to show that things aren’t so bad for the middle class. Then he immediately shows us a chart of median household income. Stop right there. As I have argued before, this is always going to give you a rosier picture than reality. We need to look at […]
There is continued discussion of how fiscal tightening in the first quarter of 2013 (the fiscal cliff in January and Sequestration in March) was followed by decent growth in the second half of 2014. I have already written much more than enough about this, but I have two more thoughts. First 2013 was not just […]
As often, Paul Krugman has an extremely interesting thought. Discussing the sudden end of the Swiss Franc Eur peg he wrote This in turn helps us put the explicit exchange rate target into the right slot: it was about making QE effective through commitment, so that you got the maximum impact on expectations. Actually, the […]
Barack Obama has released the details of a fairly radical proposal to increase tax progressivity which he will make in his state of the union address. The political impact will dwarf that of Chris Van Hollen’s proposal (which I am sad to say, has been quite dwarfish already). I am very enthusiastic about this. Even […]
Well, I should have taken my own advice and not waited until the last minute to submit my own comments on the proposed standards for government accounting of subsidies. But, at long last, they are in. Below please find them in their entirety. Director of Research and Technical Activities Project No. 19-20E Government Accounting Standards […]
Who or what is ‘Social Security Defender’? Well it is basically a G-mail account controlled by me: [email protected] . Which is kind of pretentious and vainglorious on my part but does allow a platform for some attached products including the blog Social Security Defender and a Google Drive. In which as an experiment I have […]