Economics

Here's a very good video on MMT with Stephanie Kelton, the chair of the Economics department at the University of Missouri at Kansas City talking to Lauren Lyster of RT's Capital Account. As you know, despite my Austrian bias and my…

A few weeks ago, I postulated that Christine Lagarde was increasingly moving the IMF away from its position as 'enforcer' of orthodox neoclassical economic policy. I backed this up with three specific ways in which the IMF was becoming a…

Spiegel, a widely-read German magazine, has published a trilogy of articles on inflation in German that it has also translated into English. The theme is “How Monetary Policy Threatens Savings” and I see this as a must-read for those…

By Andrew G Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, Bank of England There is a long list of culprits when it comes to assigning blame for the financial crisis. This column argues economists are among the guilty, having succumbed…

Note: this post has been changed to state that my analysis assumes that negative real rates are indicative of a loose monetary policy. When it comes to the efficacy of Fed policy, there are a number of people you have to read. I like…

The global economy has been slowing for nearly a year now, both in developed economies and in emerging markets. Things were already weak before this global growth slowdown began. It almost seems like we have been in a permanent state of…

By Rick Bookstaber Medical care is famously immune to the usual market incentives; the patient has little reason to make a cost-benefit tradeoff. Doctors and hospitals hardly do either; indeed the opposite seems to be the case. Matters are…

In May I wrote a post asking "Why can’t people understand national accounting?" and I was heartened that the post seemed to get a lot of traction. Most people don't get it. In fact, I didn't get it until a few years ago. Here's a chart…

The culture of fraud in economics is a severe problem, and Harvard is a “hot spot” of that culture.

One thing Austrians harp on is the misallocation of resources caused by heavy handed and persistent interest rate market intervention. They are right that the industrial organization and the structure of investment capital priorities is…