Monthly Archives: February 2014

Paul Krugman let off an angry post castigating the OECD for carping about structural reform being necessary to help solve the crisis, and at the same time poking fun at their support for austerity fiscal policies in the Euro Area.  … Continue reading →

Draghi recently commented that ‘we are not seeing deflation’.  He elaborated.  They weren’t ‘seeing’ people postpone purchases until prices fell.  The ECB were ready to act [presumably when they did ‘see it’].  But there was no need to act further … Continue reading →

This was Miles Kimball’ contention, questioned by David Andolfatto recently.   An anecdote from the sticky price DSGE literature.  Suppose we take the view that the Great Recession was primarily a credit crunch.  As such, looser policy would have been a … Continue reading →

Last week the UK underwent a surprising constitutional change, and one that seems to have gone without much comment or analysis in UK media, as pointed out to me in an email from Jonathan Portes.  The Treasury’s top civil servant, … Continue reading →

Yesterday [13 Feb 2014] was a big moment in the  life of the UK constitution.  As part of an all party media campaign to communicate that no possible future UK government would agree to a currency union with a putative … Continue reading →

Today was an exciting day for Bank of England junkies, in fact for anyone who gets off on central banking and monetary policy communication [cue to those of you who don’t to quit reading this].  The Monetary Policy Committee ‘updated’ … Continue reading →

It’s fascinating when macroeconomics and finance becomes a matter of constitutional law, as is happening in Germany, where their constitutional court has ruled on the legality of outright monetary transactions, or OMTs.  Their justification for ruling is that the ECB’s … Continue reading →

This is prompted by the latest post by Steve Williamson, where he reiterates a view he’s expressed a few times, that the Fed’s [and other central banks’] efforts to keep interest rates pinned at the zero bound, in an effort … Continue reading →

A link to my post on the Guardian blog site, which is a compact version of my rant about fiscal policy a few posts ago. http://bit.ly/1e0GPJG