ALL BLOG POSTS

I wonder if any of my readers remember my post about how "“Good E-money” can solve Zimbabwe’s ‘coin problem’".

Last week George Selgin warned us (the Market Monetarists) about getting to excited about the recent actions of the Federal Reserve. Now fellow Free Banker Larry White raises a similar critique in a post on freebanking.org.

This week I attended a presentation by my good friend and professor of political science at the University Copenhagen Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard about the upcoming US presidential elections. In his presentation Peter presented some of his models for predicting the outcome of US presidential elections.

This is from Bloomberg:

Even though George Selgin never said he was a Market Monetarists – he dislikes labels like that – he is awfully close to being a Market Monetarist and many of us are certainly Selginians. So when George speaks we all tend to listen.

It is rather seldom we get worldclass economists to Copenhagen, but in the coming week that is going to change as Robert Hetzel is in town. The Danish free market think tank Cepos has invited Bob to speak a seminar tomorrow (Monday) night. I will certainly make sure to be there!

Sometimes simple macroeconomic models can help us understand the world better and even though I am not uncritical about the IS/LM model it nonetheless has some interesting features which from time to time makes it useful for policy analysis (if you are careful).

We nearly got what Market Monetarists have been asking for - the Federal Reserve now have a relatively clear defined target and it will implement it through changes to the money base (by buying Mortgage backed securities). It is not a NGDP level target, but probably more a light version of the Mankiw rule or the so-called Evans rule.

This is what I in a post earlier today asked the Federal Reserve to do:

This week has been nearly 100% about monetary policy in the financial markets and in the international financial media. In fact since 2008 monetary policy has been the main driver of prices in basically all asset classes. In the markets the main job of investors is to guess what the ECB or the Federal Reserve will do next. However, the problem is that there is tremendous uncertainty about what the central banks will do and this uncertainty is multi-dimensional. Hence, the question is not only whether XYZ central bank will ease monetary policy or not, but also about how it will do it.