Posts tagged columns

Here is a link to my 23d column on Quartz: “Even economists need lessons in quantitative easing, Bernanke style.” 

As I tweeted,

My editor @mitrakalita was amazing, supporting me in doing a very serious treatment of QE on Quartz

Even so, there are many issues I raise in the column that deserve discussion, but would ideally call for a back-and-forth dialogue with Martin Feldstein himself to make the issues understandable.

Here is a link to my 22d column on Quartz: “An economist’s mea culpa: I relied on Reinhart and Rogoff.” 

Let me also reprint here from my update to “Noah Smith Joins My Debate with Paul Krugman: Debt, National Lines of Credit and Politics” in the light of recent events:

You can see what I have to say in the wake of Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin’s critique of Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff’s work on national debt and growth in my column “An economists mea culpa: I relied on Reinhart and Rogoff.” (You can see my same-day reaction here.) Also, on the substance, see Owen Zidar’s nice graph in his post “Debt to GDP & Future Economic Growth.” I sent a query to Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff about whether any adjustments are needed to the two figures from the paper with Vincent Reinhart that I display below, but it is too soon to have gotten a reply. I think that covers most of the issues that recent revelations raise. 

Note that I have revised “What Paul Krugman got wrong about Italy’s economy.” [My post “Noah Smith Joins My Debate with Paul Krugman: Debt, National Lines of Credit and Politics”] is now the go-to source for what I originally said there, relying on “Debt Overhangs, Past and Present” (which has Vincent Reinhart as a coauthor along with Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff). 

One final thought. Given the spotlight they put on Reinhart and Rogoff, and the spotlight that is therefore on them as well, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin may not be as careful as they should be. Am I mistaken in what I said in this tweet:

Herndon, Ash & Pollin report 11% p-value for 30-60% debt GDP vs. BOTH 60-90% and >90% bins, but don’t report p-value for 60-90% vs. >90% !

One way or the other, they should report the p-value for the 60-90% bin vs. the above 90% bin alongside the test they do report, which is less germane to the controversy about the 90% threshold. They should have made the results of the 60-90% vs. above 90% statistical test impossible to miss. How easy is it to find their report of that statistic in their paper?

Note on Comments on this Blog: I want to encourage more commentary on my blog. I need to approve each comment unless you are whitelisted. But if you send me a tweet to let me know you need a comment approved, I will get to it quicker, and normally approve it and whitelist you. I do try to enforce a certain level of civility and decorum (including a language filter), but on substance, I want a robust debate. For Quartz columns, the link I post on my blog (usually the day after the column appears) is a good place to make comments. 

Here is the link to my 21st Column on Quartz: “This economic theory was born in the blogosphere and could save markets from collapse.”

Even before I started blogging, Noah Smith told me I should write a post about NGDP targeting. This is that post. And it is also the post on “Optimal Monetary Policy” that I have been promising for some time. 

Here is a link to my 20th column on Quartz: “Why Austerity Budgets Won’t Save Your Economy.”

The link has the abbreviated title “Austerity is Bad Economic Policy”:

http://qz.com/69302/austerity-is-bad-economic-policy/

To interpret that abbreviated title, let me claim that austerity plus electronic money is so dramatically different from austerity alone, that it would not be called “austerity.” 

Here is a link to my 19th column on Quartz: “Four More Years: The US economy needs a third term of Ben Bernanke.”

“Here is a link to my 18th column on Quartz: “The Stanford economists are so wrong: A tighter budget won’t be accompanied by tighter monetary policy.” I honestly couldn’t think of a good working title of my own before my editor Mitra Kalita gave it the title it has on Quartz. But it finally came to me what I wanted my version of the title to be: the main theme is short-run monetary policy dominance, so my title is “Show Me the Money!”

The heart of this column is a discussion of the paper I wrote with Susanto Basu and John Fernald: “Are Technology Improvements Contractionary?”

Here is a link to my 17th column on Quartz: “What Paul Krugman got wrong about Italy’s Economy.” My original working title was “How Italy and the UK Can Stimulate Their Economies Without Further Damaging Their Credit Ratings.”

Here is a link to my 16th column on Quartz: “Queasy Money: We should stop expecting monetary policy alone to save the US economy.” 

Here is a link to my 15th column on Quartz: “How to stabilize the financial system and make money for US Taxpayers.” My proposal for A US Sovereign Wealth Fund is about more than monetary policy.

Here is a link to my 14th column on Quartz: “Off the Rails: What the heck is happening to the US economy? How to get the recovery back on track.” 

This column gives a better overall picture of my economic policy stance than any other single post so far. From the conclusion: 

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Franklin Roosevelt famously said:

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

We at such a moment again. The usual remedies have failed. It is time to try something new. Any one of these proposals could make a major difference. In combination, they would transform the world.