In any case, I find conditional forecasts to be far more interesting. This tweet caught my eye: Yikes? I say “yeah!”. I’d be thrilled with 0.5% RGDP growth in 2023. That would probably represent something close to a soft landing, particularly if overall NGDP growth were around 4% (as implicitly forecast by the Fed.) Keep […]

In America, it’s not easy to figure out exactly what’s going on with monetary policy. Europe is even more opaque. Indeed we still don’t know the third quarter figures for Eurozone NGDP, and won’t find them out for months. Nonetheless, I’ll take a stab at the question, as well as a few observations on the […]

1. Our tort system is a huge part of our broader regulatory system. Thus while repealing Section 230 (which shields tech companies from liability for material on their platforms) might be seen as “deregulation”, it would actually represent a huge increase in the government’s role in our economy. Both Dems and Republicans want to get […]

Pundits often make the mistake of assuming that expansionary monetary policy somehow uses up “ammunition” by reducing interest rates, which gives central banks less room to cut rates in a future recession. Actually, the reverse is true. Expansionary monetary policy boosts the equilibrium (or natural) nominal interest rate, and hence gives central banks more “ammunition” […]

Recently, there’s been a tendency for people to try to expand the definition of recessions. You see people talking about declines per capita GDP in Australia, or “manufacturing recessions” in various countries. I’d like to see us go in the other direction, tightening the definition. In the past, I’ve discussed three “phony recessions” in Japan […]