The Grumpy Economist

The U.S. and NATO must fight (Coauthored with Elizabeth Fama) Why are we — the U.S., NATO, the civilized western world — not fighting for Uk...

This weekend's WSJ essay " How the Fed Averted Economic Disaster "  by Nick Timiraos finally brings into public discussion the...

Just as I hit publish on my last post , the Wall Street Journal publishes a much better essay  by Ted Nordhaus on the impossibility of buil...

The US, and New York State in particular, are embarked on a decarbonization agenda. Canada has a lot of hydropower to spare, which emits no ...

What rights do we need to guarantee our political freedom. Well, the right to speak freely, of course. The right peaceably to assemble, and ...

  Fed Pick Raskin Tries to Mollify GOP Critics on Climate Stance is the Bloomberg.com headline.  I previously praised Raskin for the clari...

The saga (WSJ)  [link now works] of "free" Covid testing is a great parable for many things wrong with the American health payment...

Congress passed a much-ballyhooed "infrastructure" bill. "Roads and bridges." Well, not much of it went to roads and bri...

  Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, passes along the above gorgeous graph. Fed forecasts of interest rates behave...

Why do so many Americans believe crazy things? Maybe not "crazy," but beliefs that wildly get wrong factual costs and benefits, su...

  Having just plugged " portfolios for long-term investors " again, I really should opine on its message about the recent stock ma...

"Portfolios for long-term investors" is published, Review of Finance   26(1), 1-42. (2022). This  standard link works if you have...

We need to be reminded occasionally that nothing matters but long-run growth, and long-run growth all comes from productivity, better knowle...

A Project Syndicate Essay. Before it moves on to climate change, inequality, and racial issues, the Fed should have to think just a little ...

I salute President Biden's nominations for the Federal Reserve Board, especially Sarah Bloom Raskin and Lisa Cook. (Philip Jefferson see...

This is an essay, prepared for the CATO 39th annual monetary policy conference.  It will appear in a CATO book edited by Jim Dorn. This is a...

Two pieces stood out from some weekend internet meandering.  Marginal Revolution  points to an excellent long letter from Dan Wang  on China...

This is part of an ongoing series of essays on inflation.  This one is at Project Syndicate . The next post is somewhat longer and more aca...

Whew. The penultimate draft of The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level  is now done, and in the hands of the copy-editors at Princeton. There i...

Google/Youtube's "misinformation" policy.   You may not "contradict... local health authorities' (LHA) or the World H...