The Grumpy Economist

My dream of equity-financed banking may be coming true under our noses. In " the Uberization of banking " Andy Kessler at the WSJ ...

I did a podcast with David Beckworth, in his "macro musings" series, on the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level, blogging, and a few ...

Alan Blinder has an excellent op-ed in the WSJ on trade. It's hard to excerpt as every bit is good. 1. Most job losses are not due to ...

I spent last week traveling and giving talks. I always learn a lot from this. One insight I got:  Real interest rates are really important ...

V. V. Chari and Pat Kehoe have a very nice article on bank reform, " A Proposal to Eliminate the Distortions Caused by Bailouts ,"...

"US rejects 'living wills' of 5 banks,"  from FT .  WSJ puts this event in the larger story of Dodd Frank unraveling. J...

What does "systemically important" mean? How can an institution, per se, be "systemically important?"  The WSJ coverage ...

On Friday I attended the NBER Asset Pricing meeting (program here)  in Chicago, organized by Adrien Verdelhan and Debby Lucas. The papers we...

Last Friday April 1, Eric Leeper Tom Coleman and I organized a conference at the Becker-Friedman Institute,  " Next Steps for the Fisca...

Raise interest rates to raise inflation? Lower interest rates to lower inflation? It's not that simple. A correspondent from an emerg...

A sharp colleague recently pushed me to write down a really simple model that can clarify the intuition of how raising interest rates migh...

Two news items cropped up this week on the general topic of central banks as emergent central planers.: a nice WSJ  editorial by James Macki...

The Habit Habit. This is an essay expanding slightly on a talk I gave at the University of Melbourne's excellent "Finance Down Un...

Larry Summers writes an eloquent FT column " A world stumped by stubbornly low inflation " Market measures of inflation expectat...

Marginal Revolution and the Wall Street Journal both pass on a great quote from Warren Buffett: It’s understandable that the sponsor of ...

The critiques of Gerald Friedman's analysis of the Sanders economic plan   continue. The latest and most detailed and careful so far is ...

I've devoted most of my monetary economics research agenda to the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level in the last two decades ( collection ...

An interview for the Greek Reporter , in English, perhaps cheering the like-minded and sure to infuriate some conventional wisdom. I agree...

I was listening to NPR this morning over coffee, and nearly spilled it. Host Steve Inskeep was interviewing Mark Surman , Mozilla founder, o...

Neel Kashkari, the new president of the Minneapolis Fed, is making a splash with a speech about too big to fail , and the need for a deeper ...