Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Yet Another Reason Paying Interest on Fed Reserves Stinks

I think it’s safe to say that the standard economist take on the Fed paying interest on reserves is that it was a tool to (try to) keep the federal funds rate from sinking. The Fed had flooded the market with tons of new reserves (see my new favorite chart below), and so naturally the […]

Total Costs of Bailouts So Far…

This Slate piece tallies them up. In terms of commitments (not actual money going out the door), the government had promised, as of Nov. 25, $5.6 trillion in new handouts, er, measures to revitalize the economy. (I think it starts with the Term Auction Facility from the end of 2007.) To put it in perspective, […]

Obama Raises Target to 3 Million New Jobs

This job creation stuff is really getting absurd. Now the President-Elect and his partner in crime are saying they will create 3 million jobs, not the 2.5 million they promised earlier, because (according to Biden) the economy is in worse shape than they originally realized. The CNBC article doesn’t say how much more it will […]

Epstein Hearts Callahan

Gene Epstein places Gene Callahan’s Economics for Real People (book or pdf) at the top of his holiday list. (In the box it’s third in the list, but Epstein discusses it first.) It really is the best intro to Austrian economics available; I used it as a textbook in my Austrian I class at Hillsdale. […]

I’ve Found an Even Better Alter Ego

…or is it doppelganger? Anyway, for a while I’ve been amused by the Robert Murphy who is a left-leaning historian of economic thought in Boston. However, his middle initial is different from mine. Well today my good friend Google Alerts notified me of a guy who is a “planning consultant” for local government projects. His […]

I’m the Lyrical Gangster–Savior Style

This will no doubt be either irrelevant or old news to many readers, but in the past few years I have a newfound appreciation for the lyrics of Christmas carols. When I was younger, they were just what they were, and I didn’t think about them. Then I spent several years being “rational” and didn’t […]

Government "Creating Jobs"–Someone Please Make It Stop

(Ha ha get it? My title has at least two meanings. One of which is mildly amusing.) My next mises.org piece is going to tackle this whole notion of idle resources and how there is (allegedly) no tradeoff involved when the government directs workers and other resources into public works boondog–I mean investments in infrastructure. […]

The Guys At Env-Econ Smell A Green Jobs Rat

I’m glad to report that the two (fairly clever) guys over at Environmental Economics have been questioning the green jobs/fiscal stimulus orthodoxy. Now to be clear, they actually agree that there is a huge market failure and that the government should take steps to make greenhouse gas emitters “internalize the externalities.” But the point is, […]