According to exit polls the leftist party Syriza clearly won the Greek elections Two exit polls show Syriza with a 12.5 percentage point lead over nearest party, New Demoracy. update a bit more: One poll suggested Syriza took 35.5% of the votes, and the other suggested it took 39.5%, well ahead of the ruling New […]

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 […]

Mario Draghi announced European Central Bank Quantitative Easing yesterday. The plan is to buy long term public bonds for 60 billion euros a month from March at least through September 2016. Draghi said the program could be extended if inflation of slightly below 2% isn’t achieved. 60 billion a month is slightly above analysts’ average […]

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 […]