Consulting by RPM || Free Advice Blog

Potpourri

==> David Gordon walks through some of the issues with praxeology, which I’ve found is the chief stumbling block people have to Misesian economics.

==> On April 11 the Mises Institute will host a seminar on “Inflation” for high school and college students. Details here. (You can apply for in-person attendance at the Institute itself in Auburn, or you can watch it online.)

==> I had someone ask me about the “stock-rigging” allegations flying around. I haven’t looked into the specific allegations, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there were skullduggery afoot with the cozy Wall Street/Fed/Treasury nexus. However, it’s still useful to think through the logic of stock market speculation–and how it’s socially beneficial–in a genuinely free market.

==> I’m sorry, but John Cochrane did NOT do a good job responding to Krugman in this post, even though lots of people on Facebook and Twitter are doing victory dances. Unless DeLong misquoted Cochrane, or somehow reversed the context, DeLong did indeed show that Cochrane sure seemed to be contrasting two different explanations for what happens with conventional monetary policy near the zero lower bound. I thought DeLong and Krugman made a good point, and I’m not exactly unbiased in this regard. So for Cochrane to come back and (a) ask Krugman to produce a citation for an obviously generic insult that he wasn’t literally attributing to Cochrane and then (b) to point to his general body of work on New Keynesianism, is goofy. If someone found a quote of me saying, “Unlike Mises, I think business cycles can be explained by artificially low interest rates,” I couldn’t get out of that pickle by pointing to my dissertation. No, I would have to explain exactly what I was talking about in that specific quotation, and why the critic was wrong.