Archive for Financial Economics

A Nuanced Point in the Outrage Over Cyprus

I meant to remark on this a few days ago, but I’m a busy guy… When the Cyprus bailout-plus-tax-on-depositors was first announced, most people flipped out, saying it was stealing money from the average Joe in order to rectify the bad investment decisions of the fat cats. I myself took this tack in the March [...]

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Tucker Interviews Murphy on Illusion of Wealth

Laissez-Faire Books has released a new volume with excerpts of Mises talking about the business cycle. (Specifically, we went through Human Action and grabbed what the reader would need to fully understand the Austrian business cycle theory.) Here’s the interview about it. My son video-bombs us around 8:15.

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Memories of Armen Alchian

Arman Alchien is one of those economists–like Wicksteed–that I would read a lot more of, if I were on a deserted island. (That’s a compliment to them, and a criticism of myself.) He recently died, as most of you know, and so a lot of people who knew him were giving their appreciations. One of [...]

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Potpourri

==> An interesting inventory at IER of “federal assets above and below ground.” I didn’t do this particular blog post, but I think it draws on some numbers I compiled in the past. This notion that if the feds don’t get to raise the debt ceiling, they have no choice but to cut PBS and [...]

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Learning From Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman

[UPDATE below.] Rather than have a long series of posts discussing the fallout from my (price) inflation bet with David R. Henderson, I decided to do one comprehensive reply to Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman. I had toyed with not even responding, but two things ruled that out: (1) This isn’t a case of two [...]

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Money Is a Spontaneous Order Not a Social Contrivance

Everybody has been talking about this “is money a bubble?” controversy. (Nick Rowe, in addition to being awesome on OLG apple models, is also good at linking everybody in this debate.) I want to make two main points: (1) This isn’t even about fiat money per se. Even if we’re talking about gold, once it [...]

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Quick Clarification on the Great Debt Debate

My trip to NY has messed me up vis-a-vis my “day job” and so I can’t go nuts on the debt debate the way Nick Rowe is (here, here, here, and here). I hope later in the week to offer two more posts, one for the lay reader, and the other for professional economists. It [...]

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Sumner Courageously Admits He Can’t Explain Housing Bubble

I know a lot of you wonder why I am always so quick to volunteer the fact that I made erroneous warnings about official price measures thus far, but the reason is that I can’t stand analysts who make all kinds of predictions, and then only pat themselves on the back for the ones they [...]

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