Olivier Blanchard’s recent speech at the Brookings Institution event “What’s (not) up with inflation?” encouraged me to write this post. Blanchard is still my second favourite economist (after Matt Nolan of course 🙂 ). But despite that I felt that some of the important elements of the discussion was missing, and I didn’t fully agree with some of Blanchard’s arguments […]
Former Fed Chair Janet Yellen has recently suggested it is a good time to run the US economy hot (in the short-run) underpinned by the argument that the further fall in unemployment rate didn’t drag the inflation up. The justification behind this is that the Phillips curve appears to have become quite flat. As a result, stronger […]
Last week I discussed GDP-B and its potential impact on monetary policy. The main takeaway was that, if GDP-B led to a higher production figure it didn’t necessarily mean that monetary policy needed to be tighter or looser – instead it is changes in prices and inflation expectations that remain key. However, there is a […]
At the 61st Annual Meeting of the National Association for Business Economics, The Fed’s chair Jerome Powell gave an insightful speech. The key takeaway from the speech was that in an evolving economy, monetary policy is very data driven. Powell touched on three aspects of evolving economy: the consequences of an oil price spike, the […]
In this post, I am going to talk about the efficacy of monetary policy in the face of uncertainty. In an earlier post, I have talked about uncertainty reducing interest rate sensitivity – but does that mean that the efficacy of monetary policy has declined? No, as ultimately, we need to think about how any […]
In this post I am going to discuss how a change in labour force growth can explain firms’ entry/ exit rates. Recent findings by Hopenhayn et al (2018) for the US motivated me to think about this relationship in a NZ context. Furthermore, the authors linked these entry and exit rates to “dynamism” and therefore […]