Category Archives: Uncategorized

Ruminations about What (and How) to Post in the Current Times

Reader rtd admonishes me:

Someone with your smarts & level of education should be able to ignore these types of political rhetoric & certainly not induce you to create a blog post devoted to such atrocious comments & lunacy (particularly considering, as you’ve explicitly noted in the past, that you hold your readers to a relatively high regard as it relates to their intellectual capabilities). Unfortunately your (persistent) biases & subjectivity don’t seem to allow you to take the high road

He’s writing in response to the December 2015 post entitled NYT: “Donald Trump Calls for Barring Muslims From Entering U.S.”. At the time, I re-worded the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to fit then-candidate-Trump’s call.

Now, in the context of the Mr. Trump’s recent discussion of determining immigration and refugee status, rtd says, don’t sink to the level of Mr. Trump’s terminology of “s***hole” countries, as Mr. Trump considers what legislation he is willing to sign.

I will admit in these changed times, it is hard to stomach much of the language being used (it’s not how my parents taught me to speak) — as well as the intent behind this language. The question is, if Mr. Trump is saying he’s going to do X, shouldn’t we consider outcomes if he does X (taking into account that within the first week of his administration, he did try to ban residents from several majority Muslim countries from entering the country — and finally managed to)? In other words, will ignoring coarse language and intent make those things disappear?

My answer is no.

Negative interest rates

A few years ago, most economic models presumed that interest rates were subject to a lower bound of zero. Why lend a dollar to someone who only promises to pay you back 99 cents, when you could just hold on to the dollar yourself? But we now have several years of experience from Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Japan, and the European Central Bank in which the central bank successfully induced negative interest rates in hopes of stimulating a greater level of spending on goods and services. We have enough data now to take a look at how much that seems to have accomplished, and update my earlier discussion of this topic.
Continue reading →