Everybody’s talking about deflation all of a sudden. I was a month and a half early, I guess. (Okay, okay, it was a footnote, but still.) What I said then was, we won’t allow deflation. And we have the means at hand to prevent it. Of course, monetizing the debt only goes so far when […]

“Reckless, booming anarchy,” in short, produced fundamental progress. It was not a stable system, racked as it was by bank failures and collapsed business ventures, outrageous speculation and defaulted loans. Yet it was also energetic and inventive, creating permanent economic growth that endured after the froth was blown away. This is Greider describing the 1830’s. […]

Surowiecki has an interesting take on the obvious up on his New Yorker blog. And I don’t mean that in a bad way: it seems economists could usefully spend much of their time reviewing the obvious and why it doesn’t fit our overly simplistic economic models. He notes the fact that when stock prices go […]