Author Archives: Tony Yates

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

As the ECB slides inexorably towards a liquidity trap, debate focuses on whether it might be prepared to engage in a forward guidance policy that implied a Woodford-style inflation target overshoot.  Simon Wren Lewis suggests that a more palatable way … Continue reading →

This is really just a comment on Noah Smith’s blog post about the oddity of the Nobel Committee awarding the Economics prize to Kydland and Prescott for finding that the business cycle was caused by technology shocks, and then later … Continue reading →

Reading about Draghi’s comments that the ECB would not be engaging in quantitative easing (QE) because this would amount to ‘monetary financing’ prompted a burst of nostalgia for the time when Willem Buiter was writing his ‘Maverecon’ for public consumption, … Continue reading →

The last few days have seen the UK Chancellor George Osborne and Ed Balls try to out-do each other in promising a fiscal surplus.  Labour have also put on the table the proposal to bring back the 50% income tax … Continue reading →