Jason Furman Hyperventilates about Wages and Inflation
Jason Furman has had an admirable career as an economist and policy adviser. He was on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Clinton administrations, was Assistant Director of the...
View ArticleThe Road to Incoherence: Arthur Burns and the Agony of Central Banking
UPDATE: My concluding paragraph was inadverently deleted from my post, so even if you’ve already read the post, you may want to go back and read my concluding paragraph. Last December, Nathan Tankus...
View ArticleRalph Hawtrey, Part 1: An Overview of his Career
One of my goals when launching this blog in 2011 was to revive interest in the important, but unfortunately neglected and largely forgotten, contributions to monetary and macroeconomic theory of Ralph...
View ArticleCentral Banking and the Real-Bills Doctrine
Robert Hetzel, a distinguished historian of monetary theory and of monetary institutions, deployed his expertise in both fields in his recent The Federal Reserve: A New History. Hetzel’s...
View ArticleHetzel Withholds Credit from Hawtrey for his Monetary Explanation of the...
In my previous post, I explained how the real-bills doctrine originally espoused by Adam Smith was later misunderstood and misapplied as a policy guide for central banking, not, as Smith understood...
View ArticleMattei Misjudges Hawtrey
Clara Mattei, associate professor of economics at the New School for Social Research, recently published a book, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism,...
View ArticleT. C. Koopmans Demolishes the Phillips Curve as a Guide to Policy
Nobel Laureate T. C. Koopmans wrote one of the most famous economics articles of the twentieth century, “Measurement Without Theory,” a devastating review of an important, and in many ways useful and...
View ArticleMy New Paper on Hawtrey Is Available on SSRN
Last fall and early winter I posted a series of four blogposts (here, here, here, and here) about or related to Ralph Hawtrey as I was trying to gather my thoughts about an essay I wanted to write...
View ArticleMy Article “Ralph Hawtrey: A Forgotten Pioneer of Macroeconomics” Has Been...
The published version of the article is now available on the Economic Afairs website https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14680270/2024/44/2. Here’s the abstract: This article considers the...
View ArticleThought and Details on the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level
The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level has been percolating among monetary theorists for over three decades: Eric Leeper being the first to offer a formalization of the idea, with Chris Sims and Michael...
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