Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Mysterious CNBC Blurb on Treasury Auction

I am not being sarcastic, I want someone to explain what the heck this means. Below is the headline and blurb on the front page of CNBC for this story: TREASURYS HOLD GAINS AFTERSTRONG AUCTION OF 2-YEAR DEBTUS Treasury debt prices held moderately positive after a record auction of two-year notes fetched strong demand but […]

We Told You FDIC Wasn’t Really "Insurance"

I could never work for the government. Besides my feelings of guilt, I would simply lack the creativity to come up with stuff like this: FDIC May Ask Banks for a Bailout Tired of the government bailing out banks? Get ready for this: officials may soon ask banks to bail out the government. Senior regulators […]

Glenn Greenwald 1, Bob Murphy 0

Dang, GG put the smackdown on me in the comments of this post. [Bob Murphy wrote:] “I am going to go out on a limb and say that Glenn Greenwald has listened to Beck’s radio program about as much as I listened to Al Franken’s.”__________________ [Glenn Greenwald answered:] This is false. Over the past 6 […]

Mainstream Macro’s Ridiculous Apologists

I actually have a ton of “real work” today so this may be my last post (unless gold shoots up $50 or something). First, I wanted to alert you that Floyd Norris has approved a bunch of our comments; some good ones in there from all of you. Second, Alex Tabarrok has a great post […]

Murphy in Seattle, on Bickering Economists and Unemployment in the Depression

This is the 30-minute talk I gave at the Seattle Mises Circle. To understand one of the opening jokes, you need to know that before my talk, Walter Block gave his. He has distributed a small sheet of paper with a table of present-value calculations at various interest rates and maturities. (E.g. $1 delivered in […]

Frank Rich on Glenn Beck

Apropos of my recent email exchange with Glenn Greenwald, I found this paragraph from a Frank Rich column (HT2LRC) interesting: “Wall Street owns our government,” Beck declared in one rant this July. “Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged.” He drew a chart to dramatize the revolving door between Washington and Goldman Sachs in […]

Caplan on Cowen

Bryan Caplan explains that a certain position is held by almost all GMU economists, and 75% of the analysts at Cato. Then he says: It is not Tyler’s take, as far as I can gather, because as usual Tyler rejects the standard libertarian view in favor of a complex, pluralistic story that satisfies no one […]

God the Father

I think I’ve blogged about this before, but it bears repeating: I understand our relationship to God a lot better, now that I have a child myself. The most striking example is obedience. I get really frustrated when my son insists on doing something his way, even after I’ve just told him not to. The […]