This is a very important point since one criticism of my last post is the view that “only taxes levied by the state and the need to pay those taxes in the state-issued fiat money drive the demand for, and value of, that fiat money and its use as a general medium of exchange in modern nations” is not actually held by L. Randall Wray, the most prominent academic advocate of MMT. So it turns out that, on this issue, I have to eat some humble pie!Rather, the view I forumlated seems to be held...

At a first glance, DSGE models seem to imply total ignorance because representative agents (or representative groups of agents with limited heterogeneity) featuring objective utility functions populate the literature. At a second glance, however, it becomes obvious that “methodological individualism” prevails and even dominates. To understand this dominance one only has to once again note that the representative agent has fixed properties only within any given model, or paper....

This is a window where you want to be raising cash. 

There is some commentary emerging that is finally starting to question the reliance on monetary policy (setting interest rates) as the primary macroeconomic policy tool with fiscal policy forced into a passive role. In Australia, this debate has intensified in the last week following the hubris from the new Reserve Bank governor, who thinks her role is to sound like a ‘tough guy’ dishing out threats of ever increasing interest rate rises even as inflation falls. There was an Op Ed in the...

from Lars Syll This is not new to most of you of course. You are already steeped in McCloskey’s Rhetoric. Or you ought to be. After all economists are simply telling stories about the economy. Sometimes we are taken in. Sometimes we are not. Unfortunately McCloskey herself gets a little too caught up in her stories. As in her explanation as to how she can be both a feminist and a free market economist: “The market is the great liberator of women; it has not been the state, which is after...

“New Keynesian” DSGE models To be fair to academia, it has realized that the pure DSGE model is incapable of explaining observable phenomena so they have introduced numerous amendments, known, oddly, as “imperfections” in the model. Long-term nominal contracts, other labour market frictions, imperfection in credit markets, all these and more are prayed in aid and, either rigorously or more usually ad hoc, introduced into the model, generating lags that...

1.0 Introduction This post is an update, based on suggestions from a user on reddit. I have explained this before. Suppose one insists socialism requires central planning. In his 1920 paper, 'Economic calculation in the socialist commonwealth', Ludwig Von Mises claims that a central planner requires prices for capital goods and unproduced resources to successfully plan an economy. The claim that central planning is impossible without market prices is supposed to be a matter of scientific...

 If you have been keeping up with New Deal democrat’s reports on the economy. He is not yet quite sold on the US slipping into recession. The Establishment Survey numbers are still positive. Numbers He believes and the numbers support his beliefs we are in a slight expansion mode. NDd also believe it is time to turn lose on the FED rates as it is in a slight expansion. Frustration of Claudia Sahm As Her Recession Indicator Triggers From the...

What if you had an accident and the closest Emergency Room was over 30 minutes away or what if you were sick and there were no physicians or hospital beds in your community? Millions of Americans are facing this situation because rural hospitals are being forced to close. Why More Than 30% of Rural Hospitals Are at Risk of Closure, MedCity News As told by CHQPR, more than 700 rural hospitals in the U.S. are at risk of closing due to their...

by Joyce Vance Civil Discourse Today, these crimes occur with frightening regularity. In 1986, it was still shocking. This shooting and several others around the time led to the use of the phrase “going postal.” After last term at the Supreme Court, we have to worry about whether the next Patrick Sherrill will have a gun equipped with a bump stock, which permits a firearm to function like a fully automatic weapon, a machine gun, even though...