Understanding The Modern Monetary System...
All of this started in an exchange I had with Steve Waldman a few weeks ago on twitter. Is fractional reserve banking possible with bitcoin? Well the answer is “NO”, and “yes”. SqueekyWheel makes a great point: “I think you misunderstand the bitcoin version of fractional reserve – it’s a bit more like gold standard [...]
All Hail Bitcoin. If bitcoin is to capture 10% of the U.S. transactions involved with GDP in 15 years, it needs to grow in value at 61%+ per year during that time. I think 15 years is a good amount of time as a rough and ready indication of what can happen on the internet, [...]
I’ve been getting into Solar lately – the fall in prices has been absolutely shocking over the last 2-4 years. We are seeing price drops closer to 20% per year after several decades at 6% price drops per year. 6% year is a fantastic rate of decreases, but 20% is simply astonishing. 20% is an [...]
A few days ago, I complained that Matt Yglesias seemed to be ripping off Monetary Realism posts, or at least riffing on them. selise pointed out perhaps “great minds think alike” and well, I guess it is in the air. I then said he would start writing about automating fiscal policy because we were writing [...]
We are trying to change the debate a bit over here at MR through a variety of methods, and so I was very happy to see Matt Yglesias rip off ideas from yet another MR comments thread – giving piles of money to the middle class is a good idea right now: “But doing this [...]
I’ve been reporting on the oddly strong consumer spending numbers out of Gallup for the last few months. Well it seems these numbers are finally starting to show up in the mainstream numbers. The Gallsup consumer spending numbers are still extremely strong – far stronger than I expected after the tax increases that hit consumers [...]
Paul Krugman and Simon Wren-Lewis make a good point – the reason capital-A Austerity seems to come back to us over and over has to do with the psychology of humans, and not as much with the underlying economics. Here’s Wren-Lewis: “when the market starts to punish fiscal profligacy, it is as if a parent [...]
A few years ago I predicted the “Godzilla of all bond rallies” once QE II ended. Let’s revisit this prediction, and talk for a minute about a recent post a certain Mr. Roche concocted over at PragCap. First, how did the prediction fare? Excellent! After I posted about a huge rally in bond prices (and [...]
I don’t know if this piece is flat out supporting wasteful spending, but it’s really close. The United States threw money down the toilet for about 35 years – until computers paid off. Ryan Avent says: “To give just one example: during the formative years of the computing era, government was an enormous source of [...]
NGDP level targeting is one of the huge successes of the economics blogosphere. The readers of this blog don’t need much background on NGDP, so but if you need some information, go read any post from Scott Sumner. He mentions NGDP level targeting in just about every post he writes, so you’ll get the picture [...]
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