Over at Rates Blog the trilogy of articles I’ve put up about the GFC has been completed with this one. The first two artices are here and here, and the blog post I did on them are here and here. Infometrics will be popping up some more articles on Tuesday’s, but they won’t be on […]
There has been a long-running debate in New Zealand and around the world about the “hollowing out” of manufacturing – ultimately this is a subset of the wider concern about tradable vs non-tradable economic activity in NZ. Also as we have said, it may be possible that what we are seeing is scarcity easing in […]
In New Zealand a strange thing is happening. While other countries are looking at making their inflation targets more explicit following the crisis, and many more countries are debating whether to use a level or growth target (eg the NGDP target is essentially a price level target with some flexibility – while flexible inflation targeting […]
Rates blog posted another article by me, this time talking about why the GFC persisted. So in the first one I laid down Fed actions as the catalyst, and in the second one I’ve primarily laid the blame on institutional confusion in Europe. I’m not sure anyone will find this article, by itself, particularly enlightening. […]
I have a sneaking suspicion that the term moral hazard is getting a bit abused at the moment. Let’s use the Wikipedia definition: A moral hazard is a situation where a party will have a tendency to take risks because the costs that could incur will not be felt by the party taking the risk […]
I’ve been thinking about potential justifications for building a stock of state housing when we have no issues of credit constraints. Say we have a bunch of people walking around wanting to buy two goods – housing services and non-housing goods and services. People will, on average, allocate their spending such that the marginal benefit […]