Arnold Kling from Econlog has an excellent post on the debates between economists. One of the best quote for me was: There are economists making the case against the stimulus in ways that I find unpersuasive (Eugene Fama, for example). But the economists making the case for the stimulus are not doing a very good […]
Over at Anti-Dismal, Paul Walker has replied to a comment I posted with a couple of posts. Now I thought I should repay the favour by writing something up 🙂 Update: Paul replies here. I agree with absolutely everything he says, but ultimately I think our views on what constitutes “optimal” action still differ as […]
It appears that one of President Obama’s first concerns is “currency manipulation” by China – very interesting. The administrations view seems to be: The US has long felt that China has artificially depressed the value of its currency to boost exports – to the detriment of US business – but the Bush administration always stopped […]
Given the increasing importance of China as a trading partner to New Zealand (they are our 4th largest trading partner, account for 4.5% of our exports in the year to November *) and as a major support for our main trading partner, Australia, the rapid slowdown in growth in China should be concerning. Both Calculated […]
Originally I was going to post this as a comment on Anti-Dismal’s blog. But then I realised that I’m probably the busiest I’ve been in my life at the moment, and I need to make anything I can into a blog post. So here is a comment on this post.
Greg Mankiw has made an implicit call that there are long lags to infrastructural policy – and therefore such policy seems difficult to justify as a short-term stimulus (Anti-Dismal and Kiwiblog also link to this approvingly). Now this is a very fair point, however I was initially going to criticise it on the simple ground […]