Tag Archives: Meltzer

Marc Lavoie has written this post on the current inflation debates, which received some attention. We had a conversation (I don't say debate because we mostly agreed, and the video is here, last September). I also recommend Julia Braga and Franklin Serrano's paper on Marc's chapter on inflation, which is relevant for the current debates. The debate rages, within heterodoxy, as if a lot of the ideas are new, but quite frankly they are a recap of discussions of the past, particularly for those...

I finished Branko Milanovic's thought provoking Capitalism Alone this summer. But I haven't had much time to write on the blog, as you might have noticed. This is certainly not a review, and I would definitely suggest that you go and buy the book as soon as you can and read it. It is a serious discussion of the future of capitalism, that word that, as Heilbroner often reminded us, was at the center of the discipline, but seldom discussed openly by economists. He cited, if memory doesn't fail...

So last weekend I was at the Eastern Economic Association meetings, and I presented with Steve Bannister (on and off contributor to NK) a paper on Quantitative Easing in the 1930s. It's been a while since we looked at this work, which started long ago (4 years at least). One point worth noticing is that while most accounts of Eccles performance at the Fed suggest that he didn't do much (see Meltzer in his A History of the Federal Reserve), we suggest that he was crucial in pushing...