Category Archives: Teaching macroeconomics

My MBA class is using Mishkin’s macro textbook, and we are exploring his notoriety as author of an analysis of Iceland’s macroeconomy circa 2006. The quote of the day, from Thorvaldur Gylfason: In 2012, senior Central Bank officials testified in … Continue reading →

Pretty gosh darn clear explanation.  Get that money working.  If you earn nothing (or negative return) then you are more likely to lend the funds to someone who is actually going to do something (start a restaurant, expand a cleaning … Continue reading →

From NY Times: The long-term unemployment rate, which soared in 2009 to heights not seen since the Great Depression, is finally declining rapidly. The proportion of the work force that has been unemployed for at least 27 weeks has fallen … Continue reading →

The International Monetary Fund’s projections for Gross Domestic Product GDP growth in Argentina since 1999, and in Venezuela since 2003, contain a pattern of large errors that raises serious questions about the objectivity of these estimates. In Argentina, the IMF … Continue reading →

Sal Khan does a nice job explaining the graph itself and starting at 6:00 explaining the intuition/justification. Short run aggregate supply: Justifications for the aggregate supply curve to be upward sloping in the short-run

Our evidence that, regardless of the policy rule or the loss function, economic performance in rules-based eras is always better than economic performance in discretionary eras supports the concept of a Directive Policy Rule chosen by the Fed. But our … Continue reading →

Here’s the predicament that Ms. Yellen and other top policy makers face. The last two U.S. recessions have been caused by the popping of asset bubbles first the stock market in 2000, then housing in 2007.Meanwhile, the mission they are … Continue reading →

With QE3, which started in late 2012 and continues today, the Fed took a different approach. Instead of announcing a time limit, the Fed made the program open-ended, promising to buy tens of billions of dollars of assets per month … Continue reading →

It is a staple of every macroeconomics textbook.  Essential to any understanding of the money supply in a modern economy (that the banking system creates money). Here is an excellent blog post on the Indian money multiplier.  Notice that India … Continue reading →