but it doesn’t do that much for the rest of us. Via The Ambrosini Critique, Scott Sumner discovers there was no housing crash: The BLS claims that housing prices are up 2.1% in the last 12 months….According to the BLS, housing makes up nearly 40% of the core basket of goods and services. Further reading […]

Our findings do not provide much support for the usefulness of monetary aggregates in forecasting inflation. See more at the St. Louis Fed. Did building realistic macroeconomic models just get a touch more difficult?

Robert Waldmann Matthew Yglesias is very smart, but he is not omniscient. In particular he doesn’t remember things that happened before he was born and it appears that he has fallen for some Republican propaganda. He writes In the late 1970s, it just so happened to be the case that the structure of Great Society […]

by: Divorced one like Bush Just a little point of order regarding how bad this economy is. Lost in Space 120 episodes, 33.2 per seasonBatman (on twice weekly) 120 episodes, 53.33 per seasonThe Virginian, 249 episodes, 27.67 per seasonThe Beverly Hillbillies, 274 episodes, 30 per seasonGilligan’s Island, 98 episodes, 32.67 per season New season started […]

There are things that economists “know” that (let us be nice; economists, sometimes understandably, have delicate sensibilities) are not demonstrably true, and other things that economists Of A Certain Age may be motivated to believe, even if they are demonstrably untrue.

Since I’m trying to cut a 24-page paper down closer to 15 today, I’ll leave the Heavy Lifting to other. But two things probably should be discussed (or at least noted) here: Brad DeLong appears (to me) to confuse perceiving a move from Democratic Republic to Empire—and therefore away from any Competitive Advantage for the […]

Tom’s doing some heavy lifting, PGL is in form, Bruce has started SocSec 101, and the entire economics blogsphere is having so many conniptions over Hillary that you’d think the CEA was actually the Shadow Government. So I just want start easy, and take a look at three easy-to-compare data points:First, the Federal Funds target […]

The NY Times had a very good article on inflationary pressure from Asia this morning. The article was titled Asian Inflation Begins to Sting US Shoppers. It did a very good job of giving information about how inflationary pressures were driving prices higher in Asia and correctlypointed out that it was showing up in US […]

Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Just to put things in perspective, the inflation rate was 4.4%, the same as it is right now, when Nixon imposed price controls in 1971. P.S. He knew the inflation rate was slowing. But he imposed price controls as part of his package to […]