Financial Economics

Archive for Financial Economics

Potpourri

==> An interesting inventory at IER of “federal assets above and below ground.” I didn’t do this particular blog post, but I think it draws on some numbers I compiled in the past. This notion that if the feds don’t get to raise the debt ceiling, they have no choice but to cut PBS and […]

Learning From Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman

[UPDATE below.] Rather than have a long series of posts discussing the fallout from my (price) inflation bet with David R. Henderson, I decided to do one comprehensive reply to Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman. I had toyed with not even responding, but two things ruled that out: (1) This isn’t a case of two […]

Money Is a Spontaneous Order Not a Social Contrivance

Everybody has been talking about this “is money a bubble?” controversy. (Nick Rowe, in addition to being awesome on OLG apple models, is also good at linking everybody in this debate.) I want to make two main points: (1) This isn’t even about fiat money per se. Even if we’re talking about gold, once it […]

Quick Clarification on the Great Debt Debate

My trip to NY has messed me up vis-a-vis my “day job” and so I can’t go nuts on the debt debate the way Nick Rowe is (here, here, here, and here). I hope later in the week to offer two more posts, one for the lay reader, and the other for professional economists. It […]

Sumner Courageously Admits He Can’t Explain Housing Bubble

I know a lot of you wonder why I am always so quick to volunteer the fact that I made erroneous warnings about official price measures thus far, but the reason is that I can’t stand analysts who make all kinds of predictions, and then only pat themselves on the back for the ones they […]

Mises on “We Owe the Debt to Ourselves”

Wow, did I blog about this back when we had the fall of Western civilization? Anyway Mises–in a footnote of course–could have saved all of us a month of hassle: The most popular of these doctrines is crystallized in the phrase: A public debt is no burden because we owe it to ourselves. If this […]

Popping Sumner’s Bubble

[UPDATE below.] I’m telling you guys, “Scott Sumner” is a computer program from another planet, sent to destroy the dollar and soften up Earth for the invasion. Today he writes: I am constantly amazed that so many highly intelligent economists and finance-types seem incapable of understanding something as simple as an asset price bubble. There […]

Updated Yield Curve Chart

For my Anatomy of the Fed class, I showed how the Austrian theory of the business cycle actually has a very natural explanation of the yield curve’s ability to “predict” recessions. (Details in my paper here.) Some people asked me to update the charts. Here ya go: