Simon Wren-Lewis gets me going again He wrote Rational expectations do not prevent us understanding sustained periods of deficient demand when an inflation targeting central bank hits a lower bound. Indeed they help, because with rational expectations inflation targeting prevents inflation expectations delivering the real interest rate we need, as I have argued here. and […]

by Mike Kimel In this post, I will show that during the New Deal era, changes in the real economic growth rate can be explained almost entirely by the earlier changes in federal government’s non-defense spending. There are going to be a lot of words at first – but if you’re the impatient type, feel […]

by Mike Kimel Another Look at Keynesianism and the Great Stagnation Cross-posted at the Presimetrics blog Last week I had a post noting that the US government followed more or less naive Keynesian policies (whether on purpose or not I cannot say) from the early 1930s to the late 1960s. The post also notes that […]

by Mike Kimel A Critique of Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation, by way of Alex Tabarrok’s Criticism of Keynesian Politics Cross posted at the Presimetrics blog Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen are libertarian professors from George Mason University who post at the very popular Marginal Revolution blog. I often don’t agree with what they write, […]

Ex-food and energy, inflation is at 0.9% for the past twelvemonth. Even if you include those in the longer measure, annual inflation has been 1.7%. (Recall that we paid an average of more than $3.00/gallon for most of the Spring of 2010, for instance.) There is a simple reason “everyone” expected higher numbers: they were […]