The labor market is (very gradually) healing
Tyler Cowen has a post on the labor market, and also links to a response by Adam Ozimek. I mostly agree with Adam, but would like to make the points in a slightly different way. Here’s how Tyler...
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Lars Christensen on the euro disaster
Lars has a great new post on the euro disaster: The graph below shows the growth performance for these two groups of European countries in the period from 2007 (the year prior to the crisis hit) to...
View ArticleTargeting inflation and offsetting fiscal austerity are the exact same thing
Stephen Williamson has a very good post on the Canadian austerity of the 1990s. But in the comment section I think he misunderstands the concept of “fiscal offset.” First an anonymous commenter says:...
View ArticleThe wrong question
The Neo-Fisherian debate continues, and continues to miss the point. The debate is framed in terms of whether a higher interest rate causes higher inflation. But that’s not even a question. Or at...
View ArticleThe NSA is going to love this
I’ve been telling people that 1984 is coming, but no one seems to care. Here’s one more indication: Samsung SmartTV The Samsung SmartTV has a built-in microphone that is equipped with voice...
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Germany doesn’t benefit from a weak euro
The past week it’s been open season on Germany. Even I have occasionally bashed them for their views on monetary policy. In a way this is odd, because in many respects Germany has been (since 1945)...
View ArticleGovernment and culture
Matt Yglesias: My view is that the biggest relevance of Southern Europe to the United States is the current high social prestige enjoyed by the twin ideas that the social responsibility of a...
View ArticleLetter to the NYT, etc.
My posting will be relatively infrequent for the next couple of weeks. I just returned from DC, where I finally got a chance to meet John Cochrane. He’s taken a position at the Hoover Institute....
View ArticleDon’t waste time looking for Ratex alternatives
Noah Smith has a new post discussing the current fad of looking for alternatives to the rational expectations model. The motivation seems to be that we need to explain the collapse of bubble...
View ArticleIs it time for the Fed to cut rates?
This is a rather shocking data point: The ECI is widely viewed by policymakers and economists as one of the better measures of labor market slack. It is also considered a better predictor of core...
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