An email correspondent sent the above graph. The title is [Federal Reserve] Liabilities and Capital: Liabilities: Earnings Remittances Due to the U.S. Treasury. The Treasury pays the Fed interest on the Fed's asset holdings.…

I was researching the European Stability Mechanism this morning for a paper on the evolution of the euro, and I ran across this gem of economics art on the ESM webpage .   Put on your mechanical engineer hat for a moment. This is…

Nobel Prize season is around the corner. Last year, I blogged in favor of Tom Sowell . I update, with some edits.  Dear Nobel Committee: How can you  not  give the prize to  Tom Sowell  this year?  Tom's work evidently merits…

Policy Tensor on the consequences of a Russian nuke ( HT Marginal Revolution ) was very interesting:  Consider the least escalatory option, that of a “demonstration detonation”: Russian forces air-burst (to avoid the nuclear fal…

While the rest of the Fed climbs on the maybe-anvils-might-fall-from-the sky climate financial risk fantasy,  Chris Waller has the courage in Haiku-simple prose to state that the emperor has no clothes.  I cannot support this i…

I was for Fixit, not Brexit. The EU is a great idea. They put together articles of confederation, empowering an out of control bureaucracy. OK, we did that too, minus the bureaucracy part. Try again, with a real constitution, a r…

Expectations and the Neutrality of Interest Rates  is a new paper. It's an essay, really, expanding on a lunch talk I was privileged to give at the Minneapolis Fed "Foundations of Monetary Policy" conference  in hon…

Mark Perry recently updated a fabulous chart:  Not all inflation is the same.  Some interpretations, from Mark. Tradeable (international competition) / non tradeable; government intervention / free market; durable goods / serv…

This beautiful graph comes from calculatedriskblog.com . (Courtesy Andy Atkeson who used it in a nice discussion of a great paper by Ivan Werning at the Minneapolis Fed Foundations of Monetary Policy conference .)  The central …

(At National Review ) What This Year’s Nobel Economists Can Teach Us about Financial Crises This week, economists are celebrating the Nobel Prize given to Ben Bernanke, Doug Diamond and Phil Dybvig for their work on banking. Ber…

Phil Gramm and John Early have a new WSJ oped, based on their smashing new book . Both are based on an astounding fact: The numbers used by the Census Bureau, and countless following researchers, to define income inequality and …

So if the Fed raises interest rates, how much and how soon will that help inflation? For another project , I went back to Valerie Ramey's classic review . Here is her replication and update of two classic estimates:  Two est…

A few Stanford colleagues got together to talk about inflation, and that gave me an incentive to summarize recent writings as compactly as possible. Here goes, and thanks to everyone for a great discussion.  The big question Here…

I wrote a review of Stuart Kirk's climate finance speech , which among other things criticized the Dutch Central Bank for putting fingers on the scale in order to make "climate financial risk" look bigger than it is…

The   Speech  by the ECB's Isabel Schnabel, advertised on the official ECB twitter stream  caused a characteristically grumpy outburst from me . Savor the ECB's tweet in all of its glory:  We will not tolerate changes in…

Doug Irwin of Dartmouth gave a really informative talk at the Hoover Economic Policy Working Group, based on his paper The Trade Reform Wave 1985-1995 , AER May 2022.  Embed (hopefully) below, or go to the link here .     Doug op…