Monthly Archives: August 2013

Back in April, the Treasury published a report explaining, in short, that an independent Scotland could not be a member of a currency union, managed by the Bank of England, without considerable fiscal oversight.  The Scottish National Party (SNP) dismissed … Continue reading →

Not the modest interventions to try to stimulate lending, but the huge subsidies to bank borrowing implied by the state guarantee to prevent banks failing (discussed in various writings by Andrew Haldane), which allows them to borrow from private markets … Continue reading →

Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, spoke yesterday to try to convince markets that interest rates will stay lower for longer than they expect.  Assuming that was the intention, it wasn’t very succesful. Why don’t markets share the … Continue reading →

Recently Roger Farmer published an open letter criticising Krugman’s commentary on modern macro.  He points out that Krugman frequently alludes to the fact that the Great Recession is due to self-fulfilling prophecies, without citing Roger’s prior work.  Krugman replied, explaining … Continue reading →

This is a brief response to Allister Heath, of CityAM, who has been writing and tweeting about how desirable it would be to build more new houses in the UK, and how meagre new building is in the UK compared … Continue reading →

Increasingly, I find Paul Krugman’s [PK] forays into macroeconomics (or rather, the history and sociology of macroeonomic thought) bizarre, highly selective (selected in order to back his own view that unlimited stimulus obtained anyhow is great) and ridiculous.  This post … Continue reading →

Two more thoughts on the Fudged Guidance, which I think more accurately describes the launch of the new framework than ‘Forward Guidance’.  Both are repeats.   The first rants about the ‘Fudge’, in the Guidance.  The second is about the … Continue reading →

The key question at the heart of the revelation of the new framework for the implementation of monetary policy is whether it constitutes a loosening of monetary policy, relative to what was envisaged before. It seems inconceivable that there could … Continue reading →

In a typically entertaining and provocative recent blog post, Noah Smith pronounced ‘the death of theory’, and then proceeded to offer a post-mortem.  Paul Krugman thought he had exaggerated a little, but still accepted the basic premise, and then offered … Continue reading →

The MPC will shortly publish its August inflation forecast, and its evaluation of the policy of ‘forward guidance’, commissioned back in March by the Treasury (an action I previously noted was tantamount to saying ‘how about looser monetary policy, folks?).  … Continue reading →