Walter Lippman (1889-1974) is usually remembered, if at all, as a journalist and political commentator, and certainly not as an economist. But that is exactly how we should understand him, so argues Craufurd Goodwin, in his last book Walter Lippman, Public Economist. The reason we don’t see him as an economist is that our understanding […]
The following is in blog form the substance of a talk I gave Sept 7 at a Mercatus conference, “Monetary Policy Rules for a Post-Crisis World.” “Rules versus discretion” is a hardy perennial of monetary policy debate, dating from earliest debates between Bullionists and anti-Bullionists, to the 19th century Currency School versus Banking School, up […]
You can title your conference whatever you want, but the actual content will depend on the speaker list. The convenors of the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium apparently hoped to generate discussion about “Designing Resilient Monetary Policy Frameworks for the Future”. Having read all the papers, I can report that only one of them really engages […]
Financialization is not new, nor is discontent with it. “Capitalism is essentially a financial system, and the peculiar behavioral attributes of a capitalist economy center around the impact of finance upon system behavior.” Minsky (1967) Fifty years ago, Minsky zeroed in on instability as the central flaw of the financial system of his time, and […]
What would Charlie have made of Brexit? Charles P. Kindleberger’s very last book-length effort was the slim volume titled Centralization versus Pluralism, a historical examination of political-economic struggles and swings within some leading nations (1996). In his frame, the historical struggles and swings he recounts–in the Dutch Republic, Germany, France, Britain, Canada, The United States, […]
“I wouldn’t start from here,” the BIS never says explicitly in its recent Annual Report, but nevertheless it goes on to paint a rather comprehensive and compelling picture of a possible future toward which they think we should be trying to head, and of the present dysfunctional economic policies that are daily making it harder […]
[Remarks at Jack Treynor Memorial, MIT Chapel, June 19, 2016] “Jack has never been easy,” wrote Charles D. Ellis in 1981 as Jack stepped down from his position as editor of the Financial Analysts Journal which he had held since 1969. In Jack’s own departing words in the same issue of the FAJ, he described […]
Today global money is largely private credit money, the issue of a profit-seeking bank that promises ultimate payment in public money which is the issue of some state, quite possibly a different state from the one where the bank is chartered and does its business. Global money is also largely dollar-denominated, even when the ultimate […]
A History of Macroeconomics, by Michel De Vroey. Cambridge University Press, 2016. De Vroey’s book reads like a travelogue recounting his life journey as a macroeconomist, and his considered response to key texts he encountered along the way. Always thoughtful and penetrating, he stimulates this reader to reflect anew on how we got to where […]
In retrospect, it is easy to see why most observers didn’t see the crisis coming. The crisis was a stress test of shadow banking, “money market funding of capital market lending”. In most universities, including mine, monetary economics and financial economics are separate fields with their own specialized language and faculty, and the regulatory apparatus […]