Inflation

Archive for Inflation

Resolution of the Sumner/Richman Showdown

[UPDATE below.] You may recall that I was earlier puzzled at Scott Sumner’s commentary on a Sheldon Richman article talking about Cantillon effects. If you care, I now have the resolution, because of Scott’s follow-up post. Scott actually doesn’t dispute anything in what the Austrians have in mind when they say “it matters who gets […]

Scott Sumner and I Have a Failure to Communicate

This is really freaky. It’s like with the “top income tax rate in 2013” debacle. Can somebody read the exchanges between Sumner and me in this post–responding to a Sheldon Richman article–and tell me what the heck is going on? As best I can tell, Scott position is the following: “You Austrians are nutty for […]

Paul Krugman Boosts LMR Circulation

Wow, just when Carlos and I interview Peter Schiff in the November Lara-Murphy Report, Krugman rips into him here: Some readers may recall the “Peter Schiff was right” campaign of 2009, a sort of public-relations blitz claiming that Schiff, an Austrian-oriented commentator, had foreseen everything correctly. It wasn’t really true even then… What the heck?! […]

Uno Momento Por Favor, Senor Krugman

I am not going to bother employing my army of employees to fact-check this, but it looks plausible enough to quote and walk away… (HT2 somebody in the comments of an earlier post.) Paul Krugman, May 2012: Matt Yglesias, who just spent time in Argentina, writes about the lessons of that country’s recovery following its exit […]

Krugman Ignores His Own Theory and Misses An Important Piece of European History

This whole “what danger is there for a country issuing its own currency?” argument is really slippery. First of all, what these people really mean is, “What danger is there for a country issuing its own currency and in which most of its debts are denominated in this currency?” I.e., even on their own terms, […]

Noah Pinion Shows Yet Again That Economists Will Be Strung Up Right After Investment Bankers

[UPDATE below.] I knew right off the bat that Noahpinion was doing something wrong in this patronizing post on inflation, but it took me a minute to figure out where the error was creeping in. But don’t worry, I finally got it. Here’s Noah: Inflation is one of those things that almost nobody who isn’t […]

Krugman on the 1920s: A One-Act Play

TOM WOODS & BOB MURPHY: The Keynesians are all wet when they distill their “lessons from the Great Depression” and recommend bigger deficits and looser money for today’s crisis. After World War I, the U.S. government had run up a massive debt, and yr/yr consumer price inflation was higher than 20%. In this grim situation, […]

An Interesting Measure of Prices

I am trying to get some historical statistics to deal with the claims that the Great Depression saw unprecedented action by central banks. Along the way, Daniel Kuehn pointed me to this intriguing chart of the NBER’s “Index of the General Price Level for the United States”: The constituents of the graph (and their weights) […]