Tag Archives: price controls

Almost everybody these days accepts at face value that the result of the election was heavily determined by negative perceptions about Bidenomics, and that, in turn, resulted from inflation. Inflation was high (it wasn't, at least not that much), and people were pissed off. This is not just Larry Summers, who had argued (incorrectly in my view) that inflation was caused the large fiscal packages of an excessive generous government.In the heterodox camp, many have suggested that more should...

Suppose that you wake up tomorrow and discover that a sadistic alien has turned you into an economist.  You are just getting over your shock at your new predicament (“How will I make friends?  Will anyone ever trust me again?  At least I’m not a lawyer.”) when Kamala Harris, responding to voter concerns about inflation, makes a vague statement in favor of government restrictions on the price of groceries.  It just so happens that you have a...

I have written extensively over the years on inflation and some of that is here in the blog (see this or this, or this more recently on Volcker the inflation dragon slayer, if you believe in fairy tales; there's way more if you search the blog; I also highly recommend this paper by Perry and Cline in ROKE, which is open, btw). My more recent piece on inflation came out recently in Catalyst, just before the war in Ukraine (on the war see this by Palley, and this old piece by Gary Leupp after...

It’s back to school time, so I’ve been pondering what might be helpful for students. In particular, I’ve becomine sort of obsessed withthe distinctions among “price floors,” “quantity ceilings,” and “price supports,” especially since we’ve seen a few (misguided?) examples of each as of late. So here is what you need to know about price supports in order to ponder their potential reasonableness.