Brine, Kevin R. and Mary Poovey. Finance in America, an unfinished story. University of Chicago Press, 2017. The authors of this book are respectively a non-academic Wall Street practitioner and a non-economist academic, but the text is nonetheless of considerable interest to economists and in particular to historians of economics since it represents an outsider […]
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 […]
[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 […]
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 […]
Peter Conti-Brown, The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve (Princeton 2016) A powerful meme has taken possession of popular, and even professional, understanding of the role of the Fed. To wit, political forces (specifically the US President) are supposedly always pushing for excessive expansion, and the role of the Fed (specifically the Fed Chair) […]
Does this sound familiar? Falling commodity prices, unsustainable official debts, crashing stock markets, pullback in global lending by dominant megabanks, misaligned currencies, plus a healthy dose of political dysfunction. These are the ingredients, according to Charles Kindleberger, that made for world depression in 1929-1939. “My contention is that the difficulty lay in considerable latent instability […]