Category Archives: Teaching macroeconomics

John Cochrane discusses an oped by Charles Calomiris and Willem Buiter and colleagues at Citi have a sketch of a proposal for breaking the cycle.  Time commitment problem, seems to still be there.

Since I am teaching intermediate macroeconomics, yesterday we reviewed what the drachma option was for Greece, very simple version.  Journalism and blogosphere seem bifurcated between (1) audience that looks at pictures of crowds in Greece with caption “something wrong” and … Continue reading →

A nice interview with John Cochrane from University of Chicago on Economic Rockstars.  He has good sensible things to say about all sorts of subjects, and you learn he is an avid glider pilot.  Wow!  Highly recommended, but for me … Continue reading →

Surowiecki a bit glib, if you ask me.  Does he have any evidence that the government has not been supporting the tourism sector?  Has the Dominican Republic strategy perhaps generated a lot of environmental spillovers? DR also is five times … Continue reading →

Go James Stock! CONGRESS long ago established a basic principle governing the extraction of coal from public lands by private companies: American taxpayers should be paid fair value for it. They own the coal, after all. Lawmakers set a royalty … Continue reading →

A colleague here at SCU shared with me this: “Corporate taxes account for about 10 percent of the total tax take, at $273.5 billion in 2013. Lawrence Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University, calculates that eliminating the corporate tax, while raising income … Continue reading →

At least I have a brother who is a bankruptcy lawyer, so my family’s “beta” is better than other’s… Critical elements of Puerto Rico’s plan to avert financial disaster are in jeopardy, after a federal judge struck down a law … Continue reading →

King Abdullah of Jordan picked up the tab for a Christie family weekend at the end of the trip. The governor and two staff members who accompanied him came back to New Jersey bubbling that they had celebrated with Bono, … Continue reading →

A report on wage stagnation in the United States, that I quickly perused, prompted the following question on style:  Why do so many prominent economists think that nobody cares what they write as long as they understand the general thrust … Continue reading →

Since the housing and financial crises of the late 2000s there has been no recovery in the wealth of the middle class and the poor. The average wealth of the bottom 90 percent of families is equal to $80,000 in … Continue reading →

The challenge for the Fed is to hold rates low without inflating bubbles. The way to do so is to control speculation through stepped-up regulation of banks and other financial institutions. Instead, the Fed has been inclined to ease up … Continue reading →

The Labor Department reported Friday that employers added 321,000 jobs in November — a much stronger number than expected — but perhaps even more significant was the biggest gain in average hourly earnings since June 2013. Hourly earnings rose by … Continue reading →

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Look at the FRED graph of inflation.  U.S. has only had inflation lower than 2% basically once (early 1960s) in last 50 years.  The economy has done pretty well in that whole time period.  So why mess with success?  I … Continue reading →

Stockton, California, won court approval of its plan to exit bankruptcy by paying bond investors pennies on the dollar while shielding public pensions, in a case watched by other cities facing heavy retiree costs.“This plan, I’m persuaded, is the best … Continue reading →

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury … Continue reading →

The U.S. economy finally seems to be climbing out of the deep hole it entered during the global financial crisis. Unfortunately, Europe, the other epicenter of crisis, can’t say the same. Unemployment in the euro area is stalled at almost … Continue reading →