In honor of Tom Sargent's prize, I extract the last section of (forgive the self-promotion) my forthcoming book The Clash of Economic Ideas (due out in April from Cambridge University Press). Unpleasant monetarist arithmetic During the early 1980s a group of economists then at the University of…
(This is another piece originally written for the now-defunct Free Market News Network. Although the piece is mainly aimed at "Rothbardian" claims to the effect that fractional-reserve banking is inflationary, advocates of free-banking are sometimes also guilty of exaggerating the influence of banking-industry structure on inflation, as…
I am, generally, a big fan of Robert Higgs, but I have some quibbles with this analysis (though this analysis is common among other people I like). Higgs outlines his arguments in a blog post here. His main argument is that Since late December 2008, the bank…
John Tamny in a column over at Forbes argues, rightly, that there's no reason that debt problems within certain euro countries should lead to the extinction of what is merely a "unit", or a concept meant to put a money price on goods and investments. A default…
Happy days are, make that, stagflation is here again. So says Ronald McKinnon in a Wall Street Journal column. Stagflation was memorialized by the 1970s experience of high inflation and economic stagnation. The Stanford professor says it's rearing its ugly head again. He lays out the cause:…