Monetary Policy
|
Will Congress ever reform the Fed?
“This week’s Senate floor votes on the powers of the Federal Reserve caught my attention. Despite Congress’s bipartisan lashing of the Fed for its performance before and after the financial crisis of 2008, the Fed this week defeated two challenges to its autonomy as a central bank. Granted, Congress’s pummeling of the Fed (recall Bernanke’s…
|
“Warning: Inflation May Be Harmful to Your Growth”
“While few doubt that very high inflation is bad for growth, there is less agreement about the effects of moderate inflation. Using panel regressions and allowing for a nonlinear specification, this paper finds a statistically and economically significant negative relationship between inflation and growth, which holds robustly at all but the lowest inflation rates. A…
|
“The Relationship Between Inflation and the Budget Deficit in Turkey”
“For Turkey, Metin (1995) analyzed inflation using a general framework of sectoral relationships and found that fiscal expansion was a determining factor for inflation. The excess demand for money affected inflation positively, but only in the short run. On the other hand, imported inflation, the excess demand for goods, and the excess demand for assets…
|
“Calculating the Candy Price Index”
“In this classroom experiment, students develop a price index based on candy-purchasing decisions made by members of their class. They use their index to practice calculationg inflation rates and to consider the strengths and weaknesses of the consumer prices index (CPI). Instructors can use the experiment as an introduction to the topic of inflation and…
|
“Economic Calculation and Monetary Stability”
“My thesis will be that monetarists, while their criticism ofthe Fed’sthesis will be that monetarists, while their criticism ofthe Fed’s expansionist history has been most welcome and has been instrumental in the struggle against inflation, do not go far enough. In particular I will stress two issues which most monetarists have ignoredinstrumental in the struggle…
|
Carmen Reinhart on Debt Crises
University of Maryland economist Carmen Reinhart recently published a book with co-researcher Kennet Rogoff presenting several hundred years of data on financial crises. The title This Time Is Different alludes to the mentality that often develops during unsustainable booms–namely the belief that the old rules of valution does not apply anymore because of some technological…
|
Hayek’s Contribution to Monetary Theory
“Those who wish to preserve freedom should recognize, however, that inflation is probably the most important single factor in that vicious circle wherein one kind of government action makes more and more government control necessary. For this reason, all those who wish to stop the drift toward increasing government control should concentrate their efforts on…
|
Spending on Full
On Wednesday, I posted a link to a Freedom Daily article by Jim Powell. It was a very interesting article. I highly recommend it for those who are not aware of the history of Argentina and its fall from prosperity. I also highly recommend it to those who have still not yet grasped the truth…
|
“The euro: love it or leave it?”
“The world economy is continually changing, but one constant is dissatisfaction with the euro. Toward the beginning of the decade, the main complaint was that the euro was too weak for booming economies like Ireland. Now the complaint is that it is too strong for growth-challenged countries like Italy. To be sure, the source of…
|
“The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle”
“Nowadays it is usual in economics to talk about the Austrian theory of the trade cycle. This description is extremely flattering for us Austrian economists, and we greatly appreciate the honor thereby given us. Like all other scientific contributions, however, the modern theory of economic crises is not the work of one nation. As with…
|
“How a Rich and Proud Nation Went Broke”
“On Loyalty Day, October 17, 1951, Evita declared, “I ask you today, comrades, only one thing — that we will all swear publicly to defend Perón and fight to the death.” She died in 1952 of cervical cancer, and to this day people leave flowers at her family vault in Buenos Aires. The personality cult,…
|
Let’s Talk Some Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle
“For the graduate students, my focus is both to communicate the basic idea (and research puzzles) of how to study intertemporal coordination. I have asked them to think about the relationship between Hayek’s 1928 paper on price equilibrium and movements in the value of money, his 1933 paper on price expectations, monetary disturbances and malinvestments,…