A slightly off-center perspective on monetary problems.
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This will be my final Money Illusion post. The blog began on February 2, 2009. But the events that led to the blog took place in late 2008. Indeed my life can be divided into two segments, before and...
In the mid-1990s, the consensus view was that central banks should target inflation at 2%. Then in the late 1990s, a light rain of “magic dust” descended on the islands of Japan. The dust made people passive and fatalistic, and the economists there suddenly forgot how to create inflation, a previously...
A recent Bloomberg article suggested that we may be moving toward a regime characterized by fiscal dominance, at least part of the time:
In their paper, three economists from New York University, Stanford and London Business School argue that the US is moving from a regime of “monetary dominance” to one of...
If you looked at certain polls, you’d think the economy was doing poorly. On the other hand, if you looked at state economic performance polls, or polls asking about an individual’s personal financial situation, then things look far better. But one thing is...
I’ve been amazed by the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The most militarily expansionist leader since Hitler and Stalin starts a war that threatens to spiral out of control. He leads a country with enough weapons to destroy most of the US population. He threatens to use nuclear weapons (and...
There has recently been a lot of discussion about how all of the conspiracy nuts are moving over to the GOP, whereas not so long ago they were at least as common among Democrats. Matt Yglesias has a very good post that points out how this is a problem for both sides.
One of my biggest frustrations over the past 15 years has been the economics profession’s drift away from certain well established propositions, such as the fact that the Fed controls the price level. But there are signs of light. David Beckworth has a twitter thread discussing how inflation has recently...
Brad DeLong directed me to a tweet that contained this intriguing graph:
If you polled 51 million Americans and found that 50 million supported X, whereas 1 million opposed X, that would be a highly significant survey. So what should we make of the fact that over the past 35 years, Democratic presidents have...
We can already see Republican candidates and institutions shifting over to Gribble messaging. The Heritage Foundation, once believed to represent elite conservative thought, goes to Twitter and implies that the Secret Service tried to assassinate Trump. JD Vance has praised Alex...
The FT has a good article that might be seen as being tangentially related to my earlier post on lab leak vs. zoonosis:
If a screenwriter were to come up with a storyline in which a tech tycoon drowns when his luxury yacht is hit by a freak storm just two days after his co-defendant in a multibillion dollar...
