Values in economics
A philosophical aside
I feel obliged to declare my biases up front. I've spent almost as much time studying moral philosophy as economic theory. Somewhat ironically, I decided to study economics after I had re...
r* and the range of irrelevance
Despite the fact that interest rates determine all asset valuations, there is nothing close to a general theory of interest rate determination. The rule of thumb when I started working in financial markets was ...
Safe asset issuance & the discovery of oil
(with guest author, Tristan Hanson)
Last month, we made a proposal for a sovereign wealth fund (‘SWF’). It triggered a substantial debate. How would it operate in practice? Are we trying to fund investment o...
Rethinking Brexit, via Kilkenny & Oxford
Mark Blyth and I have been arguing that nationalism is a global virus, filling the vacuum created by the erosion of political identity under neo-liberalism. The Cold War era now appears, almost nostalgically, a...
MMT part III – conclusion, and a conversation with Ben Bernanke
My last two blogs have revisited the issue of whether or not base money is a liability of the state. The issue played a central role in a discussion over the future of monetary policy at the Brussels think-tank...
MMT part II: a synthesis, an olive branch, and a defence of Twitter
This is a short follow-up to my previous post, ‘MMT - sophistry or substance?’, and Simon Wren-Lewis’s ‘Why is MMT so popular?'.
Summarising, I suggest the two defining characteristics of MMT are: (1) a theo...
MMT: school of thought or set of personalities?
MMT revisited
Simon Wren-Lewis’s recent post on why MMT is so popular makes a number of important points. The Twitter response to Simon’s post was fairly representative - to its credit, MMT has a committed c...
Raising rates is a stimulus
There are two broad categories of monetary policy instrument: 1) measures which are aimed at influencing market interest rates, and 2) transfers from the central bank to the private sector.
‘Conventional’ m...
Money and language
The great Scottish philosopher David Hume may have been the first to understand that the economics of money is closest to that of language.
Money is one of the most essential social conventions, the other t...
Language and money
Language is perhaps the most useful social convention, followed by law. Words are exchanged by humans to coordinate action, express thoughts and feelings, and to entertain. It is difficult to imagine much human...