The Grumpy Economist

Jeff Clemens offers a "roadmap for navigating recent research" on minimum wages in a nice CATO policy analysis .  A review and a d...

My Hoover colleague Russ Roberts just finished a nice video on inequality : Among other takeaways, he stresses that the people who were...

California, despite being a one-party state, is actively debating SB50  that would over-ride local zoning laws and allow construction of apa...

We recently watched " Free Solo ", the great movie about Alex Honnold's free (no aids, no ropes) solo climb of El Capitan. Amo...

Torsten Slok sends this lovely picture of the S&P500 and the price index for portfolio management and investment advice services. Tors...

"kevinsch" posts an remarkable essay on rent control on a  Seattle city council blog (HT Marginal Revolution ). I’m not an econo...

Holman Jenkins "Obamacare is popular because it failed" from a week ago is worth savoring and has an interesting new idea. On O...

Over the weekend, Greg Ip at WSJ wrote a   nice piece on the carbon tax . Greg addresses some common objections. This urge to stop at no...

Many blog readers have asked for my opinions of "Modern Monetary Theory." I haven't written yet, because I try to read about t...

Torsten Slok of Deutsche Bank sends along the following fascinating graphs The titles seem a little off. Yes, the market is expecting ...

David Henderson posts a thoughtful  draft op-ed by Jonathan Meer on minimum wages. Two talents of  great economists are to recognize that av...

The Fed sets interests rates. But how does the Fed set interest rates? The Fed is undergoing a big review of this question. We had a littl...

I'm on a panel at the " ECB and its watchers " conference Wednesday, to discuss central bank independence. Here are my comment...

Is the US economy getting more concentrated or less? At the aggregate level, more. This is a widely noted fact, leading quickly to calls for...

Torsten Slok at DB sent along this lovely graph. The underlying paper  "Eclipse of the Public Corporation or Eclipse of the Public ...

Timothy Taylor, the Conversable Economist, tracks down the oft-told story of William Lee and his knitting machine . ...the 2019 World Deve...

In its death note to narrow banks  (link to  Federal Register  where you can post comments;  previous post ),  the Fed claimed charmingly th...

Suppose an entrepreneur came up with a plan for a financial institution that is completely safe -- it can never fail, it can never suffer a ...

People really do not need health insurance for regular small expenses, as they do not need car insurance to "pay for" oil changes....