Bob Murphy

Author Archive

How to Identify the Good Guys

Brad DeLong writes: “A certain asymmetry here, by which, IMHO, you can tell the good guys who respect argument and evidence from the bad guys who do not…” Then he goes on to show that Keynes and Paul Samuelson showed much more respect for Hayek’s contributions, than vice versa. Using this criterion, we should look […]

It Helps to Know the Author

UPDATED below. My son and I have been reading the Harry Potter books (we’re on the 5th one now), and we also recently spent 12 hours together in the car, driving to my parents’ house. My son was asking me to give a meta-analysis (not his term obviously) of the series, since he wanted to […]

“Years Left” of Oil and Natural Gas

This post is mostly for my online class in Energy Economics. Here is the EIA data for worldwide total proved reserves of oil and natural gas, annual figures, divided by that year’s total production of each (with “dry natural gas” being used for the latter). According to some naive treatments, in 1980 the world had […]

Questions for Keynesians

1) When it comes to the “zero lower bound,” what’s the relevant maturity? Scott Sumner and Tyler Cowen are celebrating the end of the liquidity trap, but their argument makes no sense to me: Short-term Treasury yields are still basically zero, and long-term yields were never near zero. But then, if the Keynesian answer is […]

“Love Shack”

If you’re too busy to soak in the entire episode of epicness, just watch from 4:00 to 5:00. It’s not bad.

Krugman Debate Update

Well, I adopted a laissez-faire approach to see if this problem would magically cure itself, but alas, it looks like it’s here to stay. With no notice, the entire site ThePoint.com went defunct. This was the third-party host of the pledges for my debate challenge to Paul Krugman. In the grand scheme, this actually isn’t […]

Krugman Joins the Club

Back on June 29, Krugman had a post called “The Always-Wrong Club,” which covered familiar ground for our hero: Aha. Floyd Norris reminds us of the 23-economist letter from 2010, warning of dire consequences — “currency debasement and inflation” — from quantitative easing. The signatories are kind of a who’s who of wrongness, ranging from […]

Can the Fed Become Insolvent?

In light of my recent posts on Morgan Stanley’s analysis of this question–which show that a rise of less than a percentage point across the yield curve would render the Fed “bankrupt”–let me direct you to my original Mises.org essay on this question. I walk through various hypothetical Fed balance sheets to show what we […]