Financial Economics

Archive for Financial Economics

Landsburg vs. Murphy on the Supercommittee

Oh boy, strap on your seatbelts kids because Landsburg and I are going at it. You will never see such rapid-fire deployment of assumptions, rhetorical tricks, absurd scenarios, and kidney punches as when the two raconteurs from Rochester duke it out in the comments of his blog. (I was born and raised in Rochester, and […]

Depreciation Rules and Investment Swings

And now for something, completely different. Since there aren’t too many people willing to pay me to spin out the implications of a private legal system, I have been focusing more on research for investors. (In all seriousness, if you are curious about such individualized consultting work, drop me an email.) Tom Landstreet and I […]

An Interesting Zinger From Tom Woods

I’m sure this is partly confirmation bias, and that the regulators amongst us will hasten to point out the flaw in the argument. But anyway I really liked this zinger from Tom Woods (HT2 Robert Wenzel): The Glass-Steagall-did-it crowd is the same crowd that likes to claim Canada avoided the worst of the U.S. crisis […]

Krugman Is the Herman Cain of Bailouts and the Euro

No, I don’t mean Krugman favors a $999 billion bailout (that’s much too small), I mean that he simultaneously tries to take both sides of a hot-button issue. (Poor John Stossel!) In a snarky post entitled, “A Tale of Two Krugmans,” I alluded to the fact that Krugman thought he blew up the case for […]

Krugman Accounting Bask

I’m being serious in this post (for once), I want someone to explain exactly where Krugman is coming from when he writes: [Martin Wolf is] reacting to Cameron’s statement, semi-withdrawn but not really, that what Britain needs is for everyone to pay down debt, said in obvious obliviousness to the fact that if everyone cuts […]

Leveraging the EFSF Bailout Fund would Leave European Taxpayers More Vulnerable

This is such an obvious point, but I still haven’t seen anybody spell it out. So the context is the stabilization fund that the European powers are setting up to bail out the PIIGS: As Europe continues to battle its debt crisis, Timothy Geithner has a suggestion. The Treasury secretary today called on euro zone […]

Caitlin Long Surprises Talking Heads By Suggesting Low Interest Rates Could Be Bad

Caitlin Long works at Morgan Stanley and was at the Mises event in Vienna. She doesn’t really get a chance to say much in this clip. I mostly find it funny that the smartest guys in the room (well I don’t know if the camera person is a man) have never heard the idea that […]

Scott Sumner, the Unbeatable Foe

When last we left, in March our anti-hero Scott Sumner was hanging up the keyboard, having taken credit for getting Bernanke to inflate more, and thereby creating several trillion dollars in worldwide wealth. But now Scott’s back, and his printing press is more powerful than ever. In the comments of a recent post, I was […]