I would be lying if I said this didn’t depress me. Economists, great economists, economists I idolize stating that there are “imbalances” we must solve – and then telling us how to solve them without actually describing what the imbalance is and why it exists.
In the comments of this post, Andrew Coleman and myself decided to place down a little wager on price level growth during the next five years. The bet goes as follows: If the CPI grows by more than 15% between its December 2010 level and its December 2015 level (excluding any changes to the GST […]
As soon as you guys have read the title and saw the article I’m discussing, you are probably expected me to go off about Stiglitz – given that, although he’s a genius, his views tend to be a touch unorthodox and I’m a slave to orthodox economic theory. But this isn’t the case. There are […]
Via the always excellent SMBC. I would say this is a close approximation to how I operate in town – I just usually forget the notepad 😉 On a more serious note, it is true that people who do economics do tend to be very analytical about social situations – that is the field we […]
There are a larger and larger number of analysts and journalists complaining about inflation at present. The view seems to be that since the price of some goods are increase (fuel and food primarily) there is an inflation problem, and “something must be done”. Because people have heard the RBNZ mention inflation they figure that […]
There was an interesting little shift in the dollar recently – one that was a little bit surprising at first look. In the past month the dollar has been falling, first as a result of the Canterbury earthquake, then due to the 50bp cut in the official cash rate by the RBNZ. This all makes […]