Financial Economics

Archive for Financial Economics

Is Social Security “Cashflow Negative” This Year? Yes and No

Yikes, there is a subtlety in the Social Security debate that just bit me in the buttocks. (Fortunately we all have health care now.) I am participating in another “Public Square” debate, like the one I did earlier on the New Deal. (The links to that earlier debate are dead; I don’t know what the […]

Krugman’s “Call” Back in Early 2009

One of the great things about this piece (which I linked earlier) is that the guy, relying on comments at Krugman’s own blog, refreshes our memory on exactly what the Nobel laureate said back when the stimulus was being discussed. You see, if you had just been reading Krugman lately, you would have thought that […]

IMF Plans for a Global Currency?

Michael McKay showed me a rather alarming paper from the IMF [.pdf]. (Thanks to Floy Lilley for finding the online version; McKay said it had been yanked from the place he originally got it.) I don’t have time to do a full analysis anytime soon, so I wanted to at least get this out into […]

Hayek on Firing Line

Bob Roddis came to the Night of Clarity earlier this month and hand-delivered some audio clips of Hayek. In this one he talks about Keynes with William F. Buckley. (It’s 4:44 long.) I think this clip made the rounds on the blogosphere before, but apparently the links are all dead. So Bob wanted me to […]

Krugman vs. Sumner

It would be nice if at least one of them struck a fatal blow… I am at Mises U and they’ve got me working my tail off this year [.pdf]; I give a lecture every day except Saturday I think. And tomorrow morning’s 9am lecture is a brand new one for me (on banking), so […]

Konfident Krugman

Joseph Gagnon recommends a three-pronged attack by the Fed: First, the Fed should lower the interest rate it pays on bank reserves to zero….Three-month Treasury bills currently yield 0.15 percent, and that rate, too, should be brought down to zero. Second, the Fed should bring down the rates on longer-term Treasury securities by targeting the […]

Jim Grant Makes Bloomberg Interviewer Raise Her Eyebrows

The whole thing is great; HT2 the mysterious von Pepe. But at the end Grant really lets the Fed have it, and the interviewer is visibly taken aback.

Inflationist, Heal Thyself

I was reading Scott Sumner and came across this: Benjamin Strong was President of the New York Fed during the 1920s, which effectively made him the Ben Bernanke of his time. According to Liaquat Ahamed (p. 293-94), Strong favored a policy that attempted to stabilize the economy by looking at “the trend in prices and […]