The Grumpy Economist

A VAT (value added tax) with no other tax — no income, corporate, estate, etc. etc. etc. — is pretty much the economists’ ideal. But how do ...

Luigi Zingales inaugurated a series of essays in Il Sole 24 Ore , an Italian newspaper, on whether Italy should stay in or get out of the E...

These are comments I gave on "Inflating away the public debt? An empirical assessment" by Jens Hilscher, Alon Aviv, and Ricardo...

Òscar Jordà, Björn Richter, Moritz Schularick, and Alan Taylor wrote a provocative What has bank capital ever done for us?  at VoxEu, advert...

Commentators seem to have noticed a lot of the economics  of the United fiasco: Yes, don't stop auctions at $800. ( WSJ review and outlo...

Whenever I advance one or another view of how a relatively free health care and insurance market could work a lot better than the mess we ha...

Jon Hartley,  writing in Forbes,  offers a great graph of the overnight Federal Funds rate, This graph  mirrors nicely the graph I post...

I was interested to read in the Financial Times , "Iceland weighs plan to peg krona to another currency": Iceland’s finance mini...

Random Critical Analysis has a really interesting blog post from a while ago, on the difference between consumption and income as measures ...

I usually leave Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman alone. If you haven't figured them out by now, you are beyond my help. In particular, Bra...

Several correspondents were kind enough to send me additional work on covered interest parity. There are two big questions (and a third a...

The February Issue of the Journal of Finance made it to the top of my stack, and it has a lot of good articles. The first two especially ca...

Here's how covered interest parity works. Think of two ways to invest money, risklessly, for a year. Option 1: buy a one-year CD (concep...

Daniel Hannan, a (soon to be unemployed?) UK member of the European Parliament, writes insightfully about trade in the Saturday Wall Street ...

The media are usually fixated on the angels on heads of pins question, will she or won't she raise rates 0.25%? As such Fed discussion m...

More Bank Capital Could Kill the Economy  write Tim Congdon and the usually sensible Steve Hanke in today's Wall Street Journal. I was...

What should the Federal Reserve do, to control inflation, given that nominal interest rate = real interest rate + expected inflation, a...

Russ Roberts has an excellent essay, What do economists know?  on economic humility. (HT Marginal Revolution ) A journalist once asked me ...

What should the Fed's long-run interest rate target be? The traditional view is that the glide path should aim at 4% -- 2% real plus 2% ...

Nicholas Eberstadt in Commentary , (HT Marginal Revolution) offers a revealing look at what's wrong with "middle" America...