Have a great Christmas and we’ll be back in the New Year. If you’re feeling starved of economics over the next ten days The Atlantic has a selection of beautiful Christmas cards to send to your loved ones:
If you need something a little more stimulating then you can catch up on some of the debates you missed on the blogs over the past week. Read more
Bank of England Chief Economist Andy Haldane:
“I have a dream. It involves a Star Trek chair and a bank of monitors. It would involve tracking the global flow of funds in close to real time, in much the same way as happens with global weather systems.”
Is the binding constraint on better macroprudential policy a lack of timely information? If they had that information, could a world regulator really have averted the crisis in 2007?
Full speech here.
I like the influence that physicists are having on economics. Moving towards agent-based modelling in some areas of the discipline is a great idea. But, in addition to lending their novel insights, some seem to enjoy piling on economics generally. Generally you have to take the good with the bad but Mark Buchanan’s latest article is so shockingly bad that I can’t help picking on it. Read more
The Treasury has just released a crop of Working Papers. Great to see and will read them with interest.
I had a quick read through the first one, which is on “Recent Unemployment Experience in New Zealand”
It’s an interesting paper and worth a read. But they reach a surprisingly strong conclusion, where I think a more nuanced interpretation is required: Read more
There has been a series of posts by people discussing a new book, “Big Ideas in Macroeconomics“. Ryan Decker points out a good post by Steven Williamson that has links to other posts. I haven’t read the book, in fact I haven’t ordered it yet (but intend to) – but I don’t really intend to talk about the book, so I think I’ll be ok. Instead, I am going to discuss the posts – as I’ve been reading them as they have come out.
The first post was over at Uneasy Money, a blog I really enjoy if you don’t already read it 🙂