FTPL is not dead
Noah Smith (@noahpinion) recently wrote a blog on bloomberg about how our most cherished economic theories have been burried by the economic reality of Japan. One of the economic theories that have failed, according to Noah, is…
Do not blame central banks for low productivity
Jeroen Blokland recently posted something on his blog about the causes of lower productivity in advanced economies. He mentioned that the drag on productivity might have been caused by the loose monetary policy of central banks. I…
Graph: Americans live a lot shorter than Italians
A recent ECB paper by Ferrero et al (2017) on the effects of demographics on interest rates, contained an interesting chart that showed the life expectancy of several countries. And the USA is not doing…
UK employment got saved by inflation
During my morning FTea (Financial Times + tea), I read an article by Chris Giles that contained some interesting graphs on the UK economy. However, I believe they might have been misinterpreted. The first graph was on…
Helicopter money – It works! It works!
Last year I wrote several articles on helicopter money in which I critisized the work of economists as Buiter (2016) and Boonstra (2016) who claimed that the implementation of helicopter money would guarantee higher inflation…
Have you seen that spectacular movement in core inflation lately?
Exactly, there wasn’t any:
The difference between nominal, real and natural interest rates
In these strange times of zero and negative interest rates, it might sometimes be hard to understand what Central Banks try to achieve with their unconventional policies. In order to understand the current unconventional policies…
Could lower interest rates increase savings?
I got back from vacation and I thought it was time to write a short blog about a subject that caught my attention before my vacation after reading an article on it. Central banks of developed countries…