The Grumpy Economist

A draft of a new paper is up on my webpage, " Michelson-Morley, Occam and Fisher: The Radical Implications of Stable Inflation at Near-...

Source: Wall Street Journal "President-elect Donald Trump owns a helicopter in Scotland. To be more precise, he has a revocable t...

Source: Wall Street Journal On November 7 I wrote " Don't believe the economic pessimists ," an oped about growth in th...

Where will the next crisis come from?  Every crisis starts with a pile of debt that can't be paid back, and shady accounting to hide tha...

The Fed has a huge "balance sheet" -- It owns about $3 trillion of government bonds and mortgage backed securities, which it finan...

When Paul Krugman, Larry Summers ,  Sarah Palin, and the Wall Street Journal  all agree on something -- that presidential deal-making and st...

Roll up your shirtsleeves, financial economists. As reported by Elizabeth Dexheimer at Bloomberg , Rep. Jeb Hensarling is “interested in wor...

I'll be part of " Central Bank Governance and Oversight Reform: A Panel Discussion " at the Hoover Institution Washington DC...

For Thanksgiving, I offer a rumination. Last month, the Hoover Institution's fall retreat was organized around the theme of American E...

From Chris Kirkham in today's Wall Street Journal , department of you can't make this stuff up: Nearly two-thirds of Los Angeles v...

Matt Yglesias (HT Marginal Revolution ) writes well of the danger facing America in the era of the regulatory state. Those who support th...

Dear President-Elect Trump: The media and punditocracy are full of speculation about your "100 day" program. It sounds like you ...

Source: Wall Street Journal No matter who wins Tuesday’s presidential election, now ought to be the time that policy makers in Washingto...

Fed chair Janet Yellen gave a remarkable speech at a Fed conference in Boston. I have long wanted to ask her, "what are the questions ...

Here are comments on Xavier Gabaix' " A Behavioral new-Keynesian model ." Xavier presented at the October 21 NBER Economic Fl...

I disagree rather profoundly with crucial parts of Marc Levison's essay " Why the Economy Doesn't Roar Anymore " in the ...

"Five Books to Change Liberals' Minds" is the title of a remarkable post by Cass Sunstein. It can be easy and tempting, esp...

This is a little essay on the puzzle of volume, disguised as comments on a paper by Fernando Alvarez and Andy Atkeson, presented at the  Be...

What's an easy way to get going on progressive income taxes? Simply remove all limits on contributions to and withdrawals from IRAs. (I ...

As I see it, important points about the Trump tax affair are not yet reflected in media coverage. 1) This affair reflects the intrinsic diff...