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Carola Binder on Technopopulism and Central Banks
In her CMFA working paper, Carola Binder discusses a new approach for understanding why central bankers are pressured—by both politicians and the public—to deviate from their mandates. Further, Binder...
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A Primer on Inflation
Everyone is talking about inflation, but what is it? Why does it matter? What causes it? And what can the Federal Reserve do about it? This primer will address those questions with the goal of...
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Reifschneider and Wilcox's Case for a Three Percent Inflation Target
In view of the Fed's failure to achieve two percent inflation for much of the post-2007 period, the suggestion that it will find it easier to hit a higher target may well strike many as perverse—as if...
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Inflation: A Brief Look Back, and A Path Forward
Starting with the April 2021 release, virtually every monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) report has indicated some form of abnormally high inflation. For instance, the April CPI rose 4.2 percent over...
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Producer Prices for Goods Rise and Fall with Oil Prices
Ever since Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell described cyclical or COVID-related elements of inflation as "transitory" (an ambiguous phrase now retired), critics repeatedly seized on year-to-year...
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The New Deal and Recovery, Part 17: The Keynesian Myth, Concluded
(Previous installments of "The Keynesian Myth" are here and here.) Balancing Act As Richard Adelstein (1991, p. 177) observes, far from taking Keynes's advice that he ratchet-up the federal...
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The Menace of Fiscal Inflation
Today, inflation has reached a 40-year high, in response to fiscal profligacy and accommodative monetary policy. Direct cash payments to individuals and businesses in 2020 and 2021, which totaled more...
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Stop Lionizing Paul Volcker and Villainizing Arthur Burns
In a recent Bloomberg column, former New York Fed President Bill Dudley echoes a conventional Fed narrative, contrasting Fed interest rate cycles under two supposedly distinct Chairmen. “Powell will...
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The New Deal and Recovery, Part 21: Happy Days
By the start of 1948, there could no longer be any doubt: the Great Depression wasn't coming back. Instead of collapsing at war's end, as many feared it would, combined government and private spending...
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The New Deal and Recovery, Part 22: Postwar Monetary Policy
After an interruption due mostly to my move to Spain, I'm pleased to be back in the saddle again, wrapping up my series on the New Deal. I ended a previous installment of this series by observing that,...
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