By the start of 1948, there could no longer be any doubt: the Great Depression wasn't coming back. Instead of collapsing at war's end, as many feared it would, combined government and private spending (as measured by nominal Gross Domestic Product) hardly budged between 1945 and 1946,…
Lately the old-timers here at Cato's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives — which is to say, Jim Dorn and I — have been talking a lot about the Phillips Curve, which seems to be playing a part in monetary policy discussions today almost as big as…
At next week’s FOMC meeting, the state of the labor market will play a key role in policy deliberations. But there’s a lot more going on underneath top line unemployment numbers that make them a bad tool for monetary policy decision-making. The May employment report is a…
Lately more and more people seem inclined to congratulate the Fed for the great job it has done saving us from another Great Depression and getting the U.S. economy back on its feet. Frankly, I’m getting tired of it. It’s not that I’m cock-sure that the Fed’s post-2008 actions haven’t…