It may be snowing back east, but March Madness has arrived just the same. Time to invite everyone to test your uncanny ability to predict the outcome of the U.S. college mens’ basketball tournament. Field seems particularly wide open this year. If you want to participate, go to the Econbrowser group at ESPN, do some minor registering to create a free ESPN account if you haven’t used that site before, and fill in your bracket with who you think might be the winners of each game. Just be sure you complete your predictions before Thursday, because the Econbrowser group does not allow changes in your bracket after the round of 65 begins on Thursday.
Author Archives: James_Hamilton
Addressing growing student debt
Mortgage and credit card debt today are lower than they were before the Great Recession. But the dollar value of outstanding student loans has surged, growing from 4% of GDP in 2007 to over 7% today.
Relaxing restrictions on U.S. exports of oil and natural gas
Tensions between Russia and Ukraine have prompted some discussion of revisiting U.S. policy on exports of oil and natural gas.
Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) last week called for faster Energy Department approval of facilities to export liquefied natural gas (LNG). Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) called for lifting the ban on U.S. crude oil exports. Here I offer an assessment of these proposals.
A bull’s-eye for Fed accountability
I was in New York on Friday attending the U.S. Monetary Policy Forum. One of the sessions was on how central banks could better communicate their plans for using unconventional monetary policy. Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Charles Evans presented some very interesting ideas.
Use of logarithms in economics
Why do economists always want to take the natural logarithm of everything? Here’s the answer,if you don’t mind looking at a few equations and graphs.
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Digital transaction security
Bits and bytes can be stolen just like the cash under your mattress.
Who anticipated the Great Depression?
Here’s the abstract from a paper by Doug Irwin in the February issue of the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking:
The intellectual response to the Great Depression is often portrayed as a battle between the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Yet both the Austrian and the Keynesian interpretations of the Depression were incomplete. Austrians could explain how a country might get into a depression (bust following a credit-fueled investment boom) but not how to get out of one (liquidation). Keynesians could explain how a country might get out of a depression (government spending on public works) but not how it got into one (animal spirits). By contrast, the monetary approach of Gustav Cassel has been ignored. As early as 1920, Cassel warned that mismanagement of the gold standard could lead to a severe depression. Cassel not only explained how this could occur, but his explanation anticipates the way that scholars today describe how the Great Depression actually occurred. Unlike Keynes or Hayek, Cassel analyzed both how a country could get into a depression (deflation due to tight monetary policies) and how it could get out of one (monetary expansion).
CBO deficit projections
The U.S. federal deficit fell from around $1.1 trillion for fiscal year 2012 to under $700 billion for 2013, and is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to be below $500 B by 2015. Although it sounds like continuing improvement, the CBO’s projected path is actually unsustainable. Here’s why.
Economics of Bitcoin
Bitcoin is a digital currency for which no government, bank, or corporation takes responsibility. Like many others, I was curious to learn how it works and why it seems to be succeeding.
Big oil companies spending more and producing less
From the Wall Street Journal:
