Financial Economics

Archive for Financial Economics

Murphy, Former Disciple of Abba Lerner

I think I’ve got this debt stuff resolved, after spending about a week on an intellectual odyssey. This is truly one of the biggest shifts in my thinking on something that I thought I had down pat, in my life. First, let’s go to Nick Rowe’s taxonomy of the various positions one could hold on […]

Breaking News…Murphy Surges in the Geeconosphere

The evangelical blogger from Nashville is surprising everyone by surging in the discussions of government debt. I don’t have time to write it up right now–got my mind on my money and my money on my mind–but check out the comments in this Landsburg post to see me on the cusp of solving this. I […]

A Burdensome Dialog on Debt

I can’t work until the Iowa results are in. So, consider the following dialog: BOB: (writing checks) Man, this is painful. I have to write two $1,000 debt payments this month. Fortunately, only one is really a burden, since I owe the other one to myself. STEVE: What do you mean? BOB: Well, the one […]

Potpourri

I’m still buried with “day job” work, but at this point I have so many tabs on my Firefox browser that it’s slowing me down. So this post is an investment in my future productivity, see. * Glenn Greenwald once again delivers a very fair assessment of the political culture. It’s really impressive that GG […]

The Financial Entangling Alliances Thicken

From CNBC: The world’s major central banks unleashed coordinated action Wednesday to ease the increasing strains on the global financial system, a move that sent stock markets up sharply. The European Central Bank, U.S. Federal Reserve [cnbc explains] , the Bank of England and the central banks of Canada, Japan, and Switzerland are all taking […]

Karl Smith Shouldn’t Start a Mutual Fund

I really like Karl Smith as a person. During our debate–where Karl knew he was entering the lion’s den of Mises fans–one of his slides said he was going to “teach Bob how to dance.” At the time I was so busy analyzing his arguments, I didn’t realize that was a white guy joke. Awesome. […]

Wolf vs. Krugman: Separating the Economist From the (Bad) Accountant

Not surprisingly, both my allies and critics seem to be missing the point of my previous post on Krugman and (alleged) accounting identities. So some clarification is in order. First, here’s a simple one I made in the comments on the definition of income: If I do a consulting project for a guy and he […]

Proof That Krugman Doesn’t Read Mises.org

Well I really thought a few weeks ago I demonstrated that you need more than simple accounting to come up with Krugman’s constant assertions that debt reduction will lead to lower incomes. But Krugman writes today, in a post entitled “Death By Accounting Identity“: Martin Wolf has a somewhat despairing-sounding column this morning, in effect […]