The Grumpy Economist

A capital flight mechanism I hadn't thought of, from   Hans-Werner Sinn  (HT Marginal revolution) Basically, Greek citizens take out l...

The WSJ notable and quotable picked a lovely snippet from “ On Writing Well ” (1976) by William Zinsser, who died May 12 at age 92.  Clut...

I talked with Kathleen Hays and Michael McKee on  Bloomberg Radio  last week, and they asked (twice!) a question that comes up often in thi...

I had the pleasure last week of attending the conference on  Central Bank Governance And Oversight Reform  at Hoover, organized by John Tayl...

The Richmond Fed updated its "bailout barometer," at left.  Post here  and longer report here . (WSJ coverage here ) I found t...

Or at least that's how Google translate renders "straw man." Dick Thaler is in the news, with a long review of his book in t...

Martin Feldstein has an interesting Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, " Why the U.S. Underestimates Growth ." The basic idea is ...

Jamie McAndrews of the New York Fed has a  thoughtful and clear speech on negative nominal rates and the benefits of currency. (Some previo...

After my unit roots redux post, a few people have asked for a nontechnical explanation of what this is all about. Suppose there is an u...

Arnold Kling 's askblog and Roger Farmer have a little exchange on GDP and unit roots. My two cents here. I did a lot of work on this...

Just when you thought financial regulation couldn't get more expansive and incoherent, our Justice Department comes in to defend morons...

The consumption based model is not as bad as you think. (This is a problem set for my online PhD class , and I thought the result would be...

Last week I attended the first half of the conference on the Handbook of Macroeconomics Volume 2, organized by John Taylor and Harald Uhlig,...

A while ago in two blog posts here and here I suggested many ways other than currency to get a zero interest rate if the government tries ...

The little grumpy cartoon usually represents me pounding my coffee down in agreement as the WSJ exposes some idiocy. Last week, alas, I spil...

Olivier Blanchard, (IMF research director) has a thoughtful blog post, Contours of Macroeconomic Policy in the Future . In part it's bac...

How much do dividend-growth vs. discount-rate shocks account for stock price variations? An under-appreciated point occurred to me while p...

Illustration by Andrew Rae, source New York Times Adam Davidson has a very nice New York Times Magazine article, " Debunking the M...

A new  paper by that title, here . I propose a new structure for U. S. Federal debt. All debt should be perpetual, paying coupons forever ...

I learned an interesting continuous time trick recently. The context is a note, " The fragile benefits of endowment destruction ...