I can’t resist commenting on the discussion between Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong on the young Stanley Fischer (part of the problem is I can’t get the equitablog comment system to work). The one minute summary is that Brad discussed the history of thought and noted that way back when new Keynesian macro was new, […]
What does or would it mean to say that Social Security was ‘solvent’? Under the rules that govern the Trustees of Social Security the test for any given year is pretty simple: did or will the year end with all obligations/cost met while still retaining assets equal to the next year’s cost. To determine this […]
Emerging Strategy for the DEMS; Karoli at Crooks and Liars, Dems Strategy on Extending Unemployment Insurance Dems will leverage their votes to pass the Farm Bill for an extension of Unemployment . “Now that Congress is set to leave town even as unemployment benefits for 1.3 million Americans are set to expire just after Christmas, […]
I normally don’t post here about high-profile news stories on which I have nothing, really, to add to what has been reported extensively in news stories or argued in opinion pieces in the mainstream media. So my first inclination when I saw an email from Dan Crawford yesterday suggesting that I post on the affluenza […]
Recently I wrote several posts about macro models with optimizing agents but with downward nominal rigidity. I’ve putten the thoughts together here (pdf warning) with greek letters and subscripts (but without an equation editor). Here is an updated effort (still a pdf)
When you hear people talk about the Global Savings Glut, you can be quite sure they are talking about monetary “savings” — the global aggregate stock of money embodied in financial assets. What they don’t seem to realize is that the net holdings of global financial assets minus liabilities — claims and counterclaims — is […]
Joseph P. Joyce (is a Professor of Economics at Wellesley College and the Faculty Director of the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs Guest post: Speaking Truth to Power When the full history of the European debt crisis is related, one important part of the story will be the uneasy relationship of the International […]
From author Heidi Shierholz at Economic Policy Institute: A blog post by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa in the Wall Street Journal highlights findings from a paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia that much of the shrinking of the U.S. workforce has been due to workers retiring early… … I’ve looked at the breakdown […]
The story of how the Fed controlled inflation after the 1970’s is long. Below I present a perspective that you probably have never seen. I have never seen it presented. The story uses the monetary model of effective demand to show how the Fed lost control of inflation in 1978 and then was able to […]