The Grumpy Economist

I wrote a piece for Project Syndicate, here,  on climate financial risk.  (This resulted from a presentation on a panel at the NBER summer ...

There was an error in a post with this title, so I have taken it down. Since nothing is ever fully erased on the web, this note states that ...

I was inspired to think again about climate economics from Esteban Rossi-Habnsberg's excellent presentation at the  Hoover Economic Poli...

How much does climate change* actually affect GDP? How much will currently-envisioned climate policies reduce that damage, and thereby raise...

After great events, will the US government and political system learn from mistakes? Or will we raise the bridges and enshrine whatever was ...

One of the great insights of modern growth theory -- Paul Romer's Nobel Prize -- is that ideas are the foundation of economic growth. Id...

You may have thought of finance professors at business schools as likely to be a fairly conservative lot, or at least to include a good numb...

Luis Garicano has just posted a very interesting free e-book, " Capitalism after covid: Conversations with 21 economists. " I was ...

Adrian Woolridge wrote a thought-provoking essay titled "Meritocracy, Not Democracy, Is the Golden Ticket to Growth ," advertising...

  Source . Everyone seems tired of covid. And sure, inflation, debts, "infrastructure," competing voting narratives and so on are ...

  All pre-covid. European GDP per capita fell in the decade following the financial crisis. US growth was nothing to write home about, but ...

I gave the UCSD economic roundtable lecture Friday June 11 on inflation and the future of the Fed. It summarizes quickly a number of themes...

This spring's spurt of inflation clearly already means one thing: The end of "the end of inflation."  For 25 years inflation h...

  Banks to Companies: No More Deposits, Please , says the puzzling headline at WSJ.  Why would bankers not want to take any amount of deposi...

 The latest inflation numbers are out, up 0.64% from April to May (7.7% annualized), on top of 0.77% (9.2% annualized) from March to April. ...

From the lovely Minneapolis Fed website that computes probabilities from option prices.  

What about Japan? It's a question I often hear from advocates of fiscal expansion. Japan has huge debts and no crisis or inflation (so f...

A correspondent asked for comment on the new ESG trend among asset managers. For example, BlackRock , and the recent Exxon upheaval with two...

This marvelous plot comes from an interesting article, The Monetary and Fiscal History of Brazil, 1960-2016 by Joao Ayres, Marcio Garcia, D...

I just got the program for the upcoming NBER summer institute monetary economics conference program .  Who says academics aren't up to t...