Bob Murphy

Author Archive

John Taylor (of Rule fame): Proper Fed Target Is +0.5%, not -5.0%

You gotta love it. Is everyone still really confident that Ben Bernanke will suck all those reserves out of the system in the nick of time? Is it at all troublesome that Fed officials are using the “Taylor rule” to come up with a target interest rate of -5.0%, while Taylor himself thinks the proper […]

Stand-Up Economist Rips Macroeconomists

Now that I’ve gotten over my initial jealousy, this guy is pretty good. (HT2 Mark Thornton) If you get bored, fast forward to about 3:20 and listen to the hamster bit.

Benefits/Costs of Waxman-Markey

At MasterResource I summarize the latest goings-on in the climate wars. An excerpt: [S]ome of the most credentialed and respected supporters of cap & trade…agree with the numbers: Waxman-Markey would cost households $3,100 in higher prices per year (possibly offset through truly productive government spending and/or tax relief), in exchange for a world which warms […]

Garrison Rejoinder to DeLong

Here Roger Garrison responds to DeLong’s critique of Garrison’s Freeman article. I think Garrison makes some good points, and he certainly provides the larger context within which to contrast the Austrian versus Keynesian approach to business cycles. However, I don’t know if Garrison made the right move here: DeLong writes that “Garrison and the other […]

Geithner Blames Central Bankers, But Greenspan Only Teeny Weeny Bit

John Cochrane sends this WSJ article relaying portions of a Charlie Rose interview with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (who was head of the NY Fed from late 2003 – January 2009) talking about the causes of the worldwide financial crisis: The revelation [of central bank responsibility] came from Timothy Geithner last Wednesday with PBS’s Charlie […]

Inflation Update

I have been watching certain figures fairly closely, inasmuch as I have been telling everybody to hedge himself (that sounds funny but it’s grammatical?) against possibly huge price increases that will manifest themselves by the end of 2009. Since I hate it when gurus make bold statements that technically aren’t falsifiable, in a recent post […]

Unscientific Commentary at NPR

Uh oh! I was listening to an NPR story on the plight of the polar bears (because of global warming), and the reporter explained that the shrinking ice spelled disaster. Some scientists had proposed a refuge area for the bears, while waiting for the climate to cool back down after the appropriate policies had been […]

Name Dropping

I met some interesting people on my recent travels: * I went to dinner with Kevin Duffy, an Austrian (in the economic sense) hedge fund manager who had quite a good 2008. The industrious von Pepe has located an April 2007 interview with Duffy. * During my lunch talk in the Q&A someone challenged my […]