The Grumpy Economist

A correspondent sent me a link to the Belgian Doctors' open letter on covid-19. I found it original, documented, and worth reading and ...

It always struck me that research inside the Fed seems to produce answers closer to the views of Fed officials than does research outside of...

"You're Hired!" is Casey Mulligan's memoir of a year spent as Chief Economist of the Council of Economic Advisers.  The bo...

Is economic growth inexorably slowing down? Such is the depressing conclusion of  Nick Bloom, Chad Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb ...

As part of an email conversation about testing, Paul Romer sent the following message. He so beautifully encapsulated the case for testing,...

Casey Mulligan tweeted an interesting report on the coronavirus from Jacobin online magazine as "makes the most sense." Given th...

I am very worried about how the next election will play out. I am more worried than most commenters, hence this post, because as an economis...

" Municipal bond investors have to share the burden in state bailouts " writes my colleague Josh Rauh, and he is exactly right. Ba...

A group of Stanford faculty recently circulated, and then posted, an open letter objecting to my Hoover colleague Scott Atlas, who serves a...

  The Grumpy Economist podcast is back, with some thought on the debt issues from my last posts here and here . David Andofatto had some fi...

"Fintech can come out of the shadows" is the title that Wall Street Journal editors gave to  Brian Brooks and Charles Calomiris...

  For another purpose, I had reason to look up TIPS yields.  The current Treasury Inflation-Protected Security (TIPS) yields are -1.27% (5 y...

The latest Goodfellows discussion. Embedded, hopefully, here:  or direct link here . (Try that if the embed fails. Youtube has started ce...

 I was driving in Northern California on Labor Day, contemplating the 1-2 mile visibility in thick smoke through the Central Valley, and lis...

Following my last post on debt  I've thought a bit more, and received some very useful emails from colleagues.  A central clarifying t...

Chris Pullman and Richard Reeves at Brookings write opposing a reinstatement of the deduction for state and local taxes on the federal inco...

Debt Matters (This is a draft of an oped. I got done and saw it's 1500 words, so I'm posting it for your enjoyment rather than go th...

A good read: Graeme Wood's Atlantic essay  covering Vicky Osterweil, her popular book In Defense of Looting , and NPR interview . (HT Ni...

Context: Cheap, fast, tests can stop this pandemic quickly, even if they are not very accurate. Last week, Abbott Labs announced  (more i...

So we enter another week enveloped in smoke, here in California. My thought for the day: Can you imagine the public and political react...