The Biden Budget: Smoke, Mirrors, and Class Warfare
As an academic economist, my job is to pursue the truth, so I am always flummoxed by the rhetoric coming out of that great regulatory factory on the Potomac, belching negative externalities that gum up the economy. In 2000, I chided the Trump-led CARES Act as a stimulus bill that wasn’t. Only about 20 percent […]
Wholesale prices post decline of 0.1%, retail sales fall
A customer looks over merchandise at a store on March 14, 2023 in Miami, Florida. Joe Raedle | Getty Images Wholesale prices posted an unexpected decline in February, providing some encouraging news on inflation as the Federal Reserve weighs its next move on interest rates. The producer price index fell 0.1% for the month, against […]
Fed unlikely to raise rates at March meeting, Moody’s Analytics says
Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi thinks the Federal Reserve is unlikely to raise interest rates at its March meeting as there is a “boatload of uncertainty” around the recent bank failures. The financial turmoil of the past few days will certainly affect monetary policy decision making when the Federal Open Market Committee meets next […]
For markets Silicon Valley Bank’s demise signals a painful new phase
To quell inflation, goes the adage, central bankers must tighten monetary policy until something breaks. For much of the past year this cliché has been easy to dismiss. Starting in March 2022, America’s Federal Reserve has raised rates at the fastest clip since the 1980s. Even as markets plunged, the world’s financial system stayed wreckage-free. […]
What Should Economists Do? Price Theory or Microeconomics?
In his 1963 Presidential Address to the Southern Economic Association, later published as “What Should Economists Do?”, James Buchanan called for “economists to modify their thought processes, to look at the same phenomena through ‘another window,’ to use Nietzsche’s appropriate metaphor. I want them to concentrate on ‘exchange’ rather than on ‘choice’” (1964, p. 217). […]
