The idea of crowding out mentioned here appears to have made some uncomfortable. On the face of it, people may feel that this sort of conclusion would mean that I agree with this sort of statement from Neil Ferguson (I don’t): You can’t be a monetarist and a Keynesian simultaneously—at least I can’t see how […]
I see that discussions with financial market officials has seen the government come out and say that it is going to look at doing something about the interest rate premium in NZ. Immediately you would expect me to nod and agree. I’ve been talking about (*,*,*) a “high” real exchange rate, “high” interest rates, and […]
Over on Rates Blog I’ve knocked up an entry on exchange rates. In it, I spend a bunch of time just talking about “what an exchange rate is” – all with the aim of turning around and saying that given it is a price, we need to understand what it is telling us and why […]
On bubbles (My point: I keep hearing bubbles matter because “financial stability influences monetary policy” like it is a big idea … but really, no sh*t. Government spending “influences” monetary policy. So does competition policy. They all change the time profile of the natural interest rate. The fact is that we have monetary policy to […]
As we all know there are few things sexier than economics. And it seems this applies to New Zealand economists as well with a massive 407 votes cast in the “New Zealand’s sexiest economist poll”. This was especially impressive as voting was via IP address, meaning that many large organisation could only cast one vote. […]
Fascinating post by Stephen Williams, who is a great monetary economist. In it, he goes through speeches at the Federal Reserve from September 2007 – a few months into the burgeoning credit crisis. In it he shows that there was a debate between the views of “inherent instability” and “induced fragility” for what was going […]