For those of you who care................

 

...........about the future of the Federal Reserve.

experiments....................

 

Central bankers, who resort to printing money, manipulating interest rates and fueling asset price bubbles, exude a similar air of infallibility.  The fail to heed Cantillon's warning that it's all very well to embark on a grand monetary experiment, but there is no painless exit.  "What central bankers are doing now is exactly what Law recommended," Law's biographer Antoin Murphy wrote in the wake of the global financial crisis.  "From this perspective, it may be argued that, notwithstanding the failure of the Mississippi System, Law's banking successors have been Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen and Mario Draghi."

-Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest

purpose......................

 

The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.

-Joan Robinson

On rhetorical battles.........................

....................if you want a reason to smile today, read this one.

Like zombies and Russian spies, there are more economists among us than you might think. This can be dangerous because studies show that economists are more likely than normal people to graze their goats too long on the town commons, to rat out their co-conspirators in jailhouse interrogations, and to show up drunk on their last day at a job. This appears to be both because unethical people are drawn to economics and because economics itself teaches people to be both untrusting and untrustworthy. This feedback loop has led to the creation of famously difficult economists like John Stuart Mill and….well, it’s a long list. Like halitosis and comb-overs, the problem is worse in Washington.

-William Carrington