We can still learn much from Milton Friedman, as we celebrate his 105th birthday today.  Here I consider what we can learn from his participation in the monetary policy debates in the 1960s and 1970s. I draw from a 2002 paper that I presented to lead off his 90th birthday celebration in Chicago in 2002  and from two 2012 pieces: a paper I presented at the centennial of his birth in 2012 and an article written on his 100th birthday in 2012.The lessons are very relevant to the debates raging during the last 15 years and continuing today.
Back in the early 1960s, the Keynesian school first came to Washington led by Paul Samuelson who advised John F. Kennedy during the 1960 election campaign and recruited Walter Heller and James Tobin to serve on the Council of Economic Advisers. The

Today is the launch of the online version of my Economics 1 course (and namesake of this Blog and my Twitter handle) on the Principles of Economics for summer 2017. This year is also the tenth anniversary of the start of the Global Financial Crisis and the Great Recession which began in 2007.
During these ten years there has been great deal of hand-wringing among economists and others about the subject of Economics. This is an important debate, and the different positions deserve to be covered in the basic economics course.
As early as 2009, a cover of The Economist magazine showed a book titled “Modern Economic Theory” melting into a puddle to illustrate what the writers viewed as the problem with economics. It was the most talked about issue of the year.
Some economists have been

This summer I will be offering my Stanford course Principles of Economics online for free.  You can find out more and register for the course, Economics 1, on Stanford’s open on-line platform Lagunita.  The course starts at 8 am PT Monday July 17, when I will post the first week’s videos and reading material, and it goes through 11:59 pm PT September 18. It is possible to register and join the course at any time throughout this period.
The course is based on my on-campus course at Stanford. Each day after giving a 50-minute lecture, I recorded the same lecture divided into smaller segments for online viewing. We added graphs, photos, and other illustrations–just as in the on-campus course; we captioned and indexed the videos–an attraction not in the on-campus course; and we added

The Federal Reserve Board’s semi-annual Monetary Policy Report issued by Chair Janet Yellen last Friday contains a whole new section called “Monetary Policy Rules and Their Role in the Federal Reserve’s Policy Process.” The section contains new information and is well worth reading. Below is an excerpt which first lists three “key principles of good monetary policy” that the Fed says are incorporated into policy rules; it then lists five policy rules, including the Taylor rule and four variations on that rule that the Fed uses, with helpful references in notes which are also excerpted below.
The three principles sound quite reasonable: on the third–called the “Taylor Principle” by Mike Woodford and others–the Fed is quite specific in that it gives the numerical range for the

Every summer since 2010 I’ve charted the latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) long-term projection of the federal debt, noting the similarity with the Fourth of July fireworks. But during these years, the CBO has changed its procedures several times, fogging up comparisons over time and lessons from experience.
Starting with my first post in 2010 on this topic, CBO reported projections of the debt as a percentage of GDP going out 75 years based on their “alternative fiscal scenario” which is more realistic than their “baseline scenario” that assumes no-change in current law. Here’s what CBO projections made in 2009 and 2010 looked like. You can see the explosions clearly as the debt to GDP ratio forecast reached 767% by 2083 in the 2009 estimate, and even higher in the 2010

Last week a new Macroeconomic Modelling and Model Comparison Network (MMCN) was launched with a research conference at Goethe University Frankfurt. Economists from the IMF, the Fed, the ECB, and other central banks presented and compared policy models along with academics from Chicago, Penn, Amsterdam and elsewhere.  Such collaboration and exchange will define the new network.  Judging from the first conference, it got off to a good start.
The conference led off with a critical review of macroeconomic models used for policy from a finance perspective by Winston Dou, Andrew Lo, Ameya Muley, and Harald Uhlig. The paper surveyed monetary models used at central banks, and it pointed out problems with current models, especially linearized versions, suggesting newer solution, estimation,

An important part of the Fed’s normalization policy is to reduce its holdings of securities and thereby reserve balances—deposits of banks at the Fed—used to finance these holdings. As I argued when quantitative easing began in 2009, this reduction should be predictable and strategic.  That view was given some empirical support by the “taper tantrum” in 2013, when Ben Bernanke abruptly said in a congressional hearing that the Fed’s purchases of securities would taper in “the next few meetings.” In contrast, when the tapering later became more predictable, markets digested it easily.
The Addendum to the Policy Normalization Principles and Plans recently issued by the Fed conforms to this gradual and predictable approach. The Fed said it intends to reduce its holdings of Treasury and

In a recent speech at the Economic Club of New York, Fed Governor Jay Powell stated that the endpoint of the Fed’s normalization process “will occur when our target reaches the long-run neutral rate of interest. Estimates of that rate are subject to significant uncertainty. The median estimate of its level by FOMC participants in March was 3 percent, more than a full percentage point below pre-crisis estimates.” The neutral rate of interest is commonly designated as R*. (Sometimes R* is stated in real terms, rather than nominal terms. With an inflation target of 2 percent, a real neutral rate would would be 1 percent according to the FOMC median of 3 percent nominal.)
Actually the estimated drop in R* is quite recent: the FOMC median nominal R* was 4 percent just 4 years ago, which

I’m really excited about the 8th Edition (I should say Version 8.0) of my introductory economics text with Akila Weerapana because it comes from a new publisher, FlatWorld, and will be sold at a much more reasonable price—only 10% to 25%, depending on the order, of the price charged for the old edition.  In the past I told students to buy used copies because the price was so high, but no more: I got the publication rights back and found a new publisher, Flatworld. In addition to charging a reasonable price, Flatworld will also provide access to the book to wide audience with more flexible formats suited to the needs of students and teachers. The FlatWorld platform will allow us to update the book on a regular basis with minimal disruption. In addition to using the text in Stanford’s

Many (see here, here, here, and here) are listing takeaways from President Trump’s trip abroad, such as the unusual pomp and circumstance in Saudi Arabia, the unprecedented non-stop flight from Riyadh to Jerusalem, the significance of the follow-up leg to Rome, and the interactions with NATO and the G7 countries.
A takeaway that has received far too little attention, in my view, is the announcement of an agreement between the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council to set up a new effort to combat terrorist financing. It highlights the role that finance and economics can play in foreign policy and national security. In the speech in Saudi Arabia at the Arab Islamic American Summit, Trump announced “that the nations here today will be signing an

Hundreds of financial market participants and news reporters showed up for the 18th annual “ECB and its Watchers” conference in Frankfurt last week. I was one of the speakers as I was at the first conference in 1999. It was a good day for talking about policy with candid questions and answers.  ECB President Mario Draghi led off with a review of current policy; I followed with a talk about asset purchase programs (my assigned topic), and for the rest of the day we listened to presentations and discussion of unconventional policy, structural reform, international coordination, and an enlightening debate between Volker Wieland and John Williams on the “neutral” real interest rate moderated by Sam Fleming of the FT.
The previous time I spoke at this event in 2014 I examined the implications of the Fed’s large-scale asset purchases from 2009 to 2014. I argued then that the purchases did not lower longer term rates except for possible signaling and temporary announcement effects, and I pointed to ten possible negative unintended consequences:
Distortion of price discovery in markets
Unresponsiveness of long-term rates to key events as in normal times.

Today the House Judiciary Subcommittee lead by Tom Marino held a hearing on the Financial Institution Bankruptcy Act (FIBA) which lays out in clear legislative language the “Chapter 14 type” reform proposals that Stanford’s Hoover Resolution Project have been working on since the financial crisis. Based on this hearing, which included top legal experts familiar with the bankruptcy code, including Bankruptcy Judge Mary Walrath, I am optimistic that the bill will become law soon.  The written testimony of all of the witnesses, including me, can be found here.
As I stated in my opening remarks at the hearing, FIBA, which adds a new Subchapter to Chapter 11, is an essential element of a pro-growth economic program.  The legislation makes failure feasible under clear rules without disruptive spillovers. It would
help prevent bailouts
diminish excessive risk-taking
remove uncertainty associated with an ad hoc bailout process
reduce the likelihood and severity of financial crises and thereby lead to stronger economic growth.
Chapter 11 has many benefits, including its basic reliance on the rule of law, but for large complex financial institutions it has shortcomings because it is likely to be too slow and cumbersome to deal with runs on failing financial institutions.

Today’s hearing of the House Monetary Policy subcommittee—the first of the new Congress with the new chair Andy Barr from Kentucky—provided a good opportunity to discuss policy in light of new and different decisions by the Fed, new and different speeches by FOMC members, and of course a new Administration. I testified along with John Allison, Marvin Goodfriend, and Joshua Bivens. It was a good, candid hearing, which moved reform efforts forward.
Though it may seem like a long time ago, it is crucial to remember that it was back in 2003-2005 that the Fed departed from the policy of the previous two decades of good economic performance by holding the federal funds rate “too low for too long.”  Along with a breakdown in the regulatory process, this policy decision was a key factor leading to the financial crisis and the terribly high unemployment that followed.  It is telling in this regard that Josh Bivens, in his more positive assessment of recent monetary policy at the hearing, did not even discuss the possible role of policy leading up to the crisis and the large increase in unemployment.
After the panic in the fall of 2008, Fed policy moved sharply in an unconventional direction. The Fed purchased large amounts of U.

Milton Friedman on Freedom is a delightful new book of Friedman’s best works on freedom compiled and edited by Robert Leeson and Charles Palm.  It is a delight to have these writings in one lean volume, and the book also highlights a new and much larger on-line collection of Friedman’s writings, recordings, correspondence compiled by Leeson and Palm at the Hoover Institution.
Both the book and online collection are sorely needed now. People often channel Friedman to support their own views, even if they are contrary to his actual views!  So he deserves to be read in the original, and readers will find the book refreshing even if they are already familiar with Friedman.
Leeson and Palm arrange the essays chronologically, starting with one of Friedman’s first articles on freedom from the 1950s where he notes that liberalism in the classical sense “takes freedom of the individual—really, of the family—as its ultimate value.”
Friedman wrote often about the connection between economic freedom and other freedoms, and he believed that “economic freedom, in and of itself, is an extremely important part of total freedom.”  What we sometimes forget, however, is that he thought that the loss of total freedom caused by restrictions on economic freedom were as much a concern as the loss of economic prosperity caused by such restrictions.

“Growth Conundrum” sets the theme for the many fascinating articles in the latest issue of the IMF’s quarterly magazine Finance and Development which includes an opening essay by Nicholas Crafts and a profile of Kristin Forbes. I was asked to write one of the articles summarizing my recent research on the recent slow growth in which I have been critical of the secular stagnation view. In this post I reprint that article, but also add references to articles and papers by me and others providing relevant background and support, which I could not put in the published article due to understandable space constraints.
The article is one part of a two-part “Point-Counterpoint: Secular Stagnation” in which Brad DeLong takes the other side. Brad has already responded to my article on his blog, but he apparently did not have the benefit of these references and he was completely off point in his counter point to the magazine’s point-counter point.
Here’s my article from F&D with the additional reference notes in italics:
Policy Is the Problem. Secular stagnation has been the subject of much debate ever since 2013, when Lawrence Summers proposed the hypothesis “that the economy as currently structured is not capable of achieving satisfactory growth and stable financial conditions simultaneously.

During the past two days, economists from around the world gathered at the Hoover Institution to focus on the crucial problem of how to restore prosperity. They took stock of lessons from past experiences in the US and Europe, and considered possibilities with a new Administration in Washington. It was a follow up to a conference and book that Lee Ohanian and I organized 5 years ago with Ian Wright. This year Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde joined with Lee and me in the planning, adding important economic and political perspectives as well as views from Europe.
Needless to say, the need to restore prosperity is still with us, as illustrated by the chart on this cover of 2012 book (Government Policies and the Delayed Recovery) along side the updated version today—the employment-to-population ratio is still barely above the level at the end of the recession in 2009. We have go a long way to go.
A huge amount of useful new facts and ideas were put forth at the conference so a book is again planned. The conference was also notable for topics that did not come up. No one suggested secular stagnation, as introduced by Larry Summers in a 2013 Hoover-Brookings conference, as a factor in the recent slow growth. Nor did anyone suggest demand-side fiscal stimulus packages as a means of restoring prosperity.

In a recent VOX article, Henrike Michaelis and Volker Wieland write favorably about the approach taken by Fed Chair Janet Yellen in a recent speech where she compares recent Fed policy actions with several monetary policy rules—including the Taylor rule—much as would be required by recent legislation in the U.S. Congress. They argue that these kinds of “comparisons of Fed policy to simple reference rules show how such legislation would serve to bolster the Federal Reserve’s independence…. By referring to such legislation and appropriate reference rules, the Fed would be able to better stand up to … [political] pressure and more effectively communicate its reasons to the public.”  The article also refers to this statement by economists supporting the legislation.
As an illustration of the kind of constructive criticism that would likely be the healthy outcome of such comparisons, Michaelis and Wieland also take issue with one aspect of the Fed Chair’s comparison. They show that the comparison is incomplete, and thereby potentially misleading, because it uses only part of recent research by Holston, Laubach, and Williams (HLW).  The comparison applies the shift in the equilibrium interest rate r* from HLW, but not the associated shift in potential GDP that is an integral part of that study.

At its meeting this week the Fed decided not to post changes in its “Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy” as might have been expected as part of its annual organizational meeting actions as it did last year at this time. The January 2016 statement is still on the Fed’s web page.  Maybe they will make changes at the next meeting, and, in particular, add some words about the Fed’s strategy for the policy instruments.  Despite the use of the phrase “Monetary Policy Strategy” in the title, a strategy for the policy instruments does not now appear in the statement. If you read the statement you will find nice clear sentences about goals, but little in the way of a strategy for the policy instruments to achieve the goals. As former Fed Staff member Andy Levin explains in a chapter in a recent book “the FOMC’s Statement on Longer Run Goals and Policy Strategy is almost exclusively aimed at clarifying its longer-run goals…what’s still missing—and what’s desired by the general public as well as academic economists, market investors, and members of Congress—is for the FOMC to explain its policy strategy more clearly.

Janet Yellen visited San Francisco and Stanford last week. She gave two interesting talks about monetary policy, which together, in my view, break new ground, and are worthy of more discussion.
At the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco she briefly described the Fed’s monetary strategy for the policy instruments.  At the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research she compared the Fed’s recent monetary policy with the Taylor rule and closely related monetary policy rules.
If you view these two talks together, I think they resemble what would be required under the Requirements for Policy Rules of the Federal Open Market Committee, Section 2 of the Fed Oversight Reform and Modernization (FORM) Act which has passed the House of Representatives. That legislation requires that the Fed (1) “describe the strategy or rule of the Federal Open Market Committee for the systematic quantitative adjustment” of its policy instruments and (2) compare its strategy or rule with a reference rule. More detail here.
Let me explain why the two talks represent progress in both directions. In the San Francisco talk, Janet Yellen summarized the Fed’s strategy for the policy instruments, saying that
“When the economy is weak and unemployment is on the rise, we encourage spending and investing by pushing short-term interest rates lower.

I enjoy the nexus between the world of ideas and the world of action, probably because I have gone back and forth between those two worlds several times as described here. There is nothing more rewarding then developing ideas and then having the opportunity to bring them into action. The song “The Room Where It Happens” in the musical Hamilton is a wonderful rendition of this nexus where Alexander Hamilton gets his debt ideas into action.
When asked by the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News about by favorite books for 2016, I chose books that fell into this nexus.  For the Wall Street Journal list, I chose The Man Who Knew, Sebastian Mallaby’s excellent biography of Alan Greenspan, and War by Other Means by Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris. Here are the reasons that I gave and that the Journal published:

For Bloomberg News I chose The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by Markus Brunnermeier, Harold James and Jean-Pierre Landau (I also wrote a longer review here) and The Curse of Cash by Ken Rogoff.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed today I addressed claims made by Neel Kashkari in an earlier op-ed about rules-based monetary reforms, showing that his claims that the reforms were mechanical or computer-run were simply false and misleading.
Kashkari mentioned the Taylor rule a lot in his op-ed. For example, he reported that “my staff at the Minneapolis Fed,” found that unemployment after the 2008 financial crisis would have been higher with a Taylor rule. However, he gave no reference to the study, its methodology, or even its authors, unlike many other Fed officials who write or speak on policy. In my response I cited research that got opposite results to those reported by Kashkari. That research is published and publicly available.
So many people have asked me:  What model did Kashkari use, and how did he use it?  I hope that someday the Minneapolis Fed study will see the light of day, but in the meantime we do not know the answers. From the op-ed it sounds like the staff did an old fashioned “alternative path” simulation with some model rather than a more realistic “alternative rule” simulation. (For an historical review of the old and new models and methods, see my recent paper for the Bank of Canada.) Thus the calculation did not take account of expectations or other systems effects normally considered essential when evaluating policy.

This week the Monetary Policy Subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing on “Unconventional Monetary Policy.”  Charles Plosser, Mickey Levy, Simon Johnson and I testified. It was a good hearing with pertinent questions by Members of Congress, led by Chairman Bill Huizenga, and candid answers from the witnesses. In my view the hearing was good because it focused on monetary reform in a practical context where reform is now seen as a real possibility. Here’s a link to a video and written testimonies.
I led off by reviewing how the Fed’s move toward unconventional monetary policy can be traced back to the “too low for too long” period of 2003-2005, and much research shows that the results were not good. (References to research are in my testimony.) Along with a breakdown in the regulatory process, these policies were a cause of the financial crisis and the Great Recession. While the Fed did a good job during the panic in 2008 as lender of last resort, it then moved sharply in an unconventional direction starting in 2009 with large scale asset purchases, erratic forward guidance, and near zero interest rates long after the recession was over. Again the results were not good.  My research and that of others shows that these policies were not effective, and may have been counterproductive.
The policy implication of this experience is clear.

The opportunity for pro-growth tax reform (lower rates with a broader base) and pro-growth regulatory reform (with rigorous cost-benefit tests) is now better than it has been in years, because of similarities between reform ideas put forth by Congress—many in bills that have passed the House—and those put forth by president-elect Trump.
Although less commented on, the opportunity for monetary reform also seems better than it has been in years. And the reason is the same. Goals such as insulating the Fed from political pressures and creating a more predictable-transparent-accountable policy appear to be common to the Congress and the incoming Administration.  To see this, take a look at the often-overlooked monetary passages on pages 44 and 45 of the House economic reform document A Better Way: The Economy. Here’s an excerpt:
“… our economy would be healthier if the Federal Reserve was more predictable in its conduct of monetary policy and more transparent about its decision-making…. Legislation sponsored by Rep. Bill Huizenga and approved by the House – the Fed Oversight Reform and Modernization Act (the FORM Act) does the following:
Protects the Fed’s independence to chart whatever monetary policy course it deems appropriate, but requires the Fed to give the American people a greater accounting of its actions.

In thinking about the future of monetary policy, it’s important to consider legislative reforms and appointments, but it’s also important to consider the economic models that have come to be a key part of policy making in central banks. The Bank of Canada showed a great deal of vision last week when it invited economists and practitioners to discuss “Central Bank Models: The Next Generation.”
We can learn from history here. In my keynote address for the conference I reviewed the 80-year history of macro policy models from Jan Tinbergen’s model of 1936 to the present. I showed how policy making with models began in “path-space” (simulating paths for the policy instruments and seeing the impact on the paths for target variables), but, with a major paradigm shift 40 years ago, moved to “rule-space” (simulating rules for the instruments and seeing the impact of economic stability over time).  Central bank models followed these developments, though with a lag, to the benefit of monetary policy and economic performance.
However, there was a retrogression in parts of the central banking world in the past dozen years, and economic performance has deteriorated with a great recession and a very slow recovery. This history suggests that a pressing problem for central bank research is to get back to a “rule-space” framework.

Markus Brunnermeier, Harold James and Jean-Pierre Landau have just published a fascinating book, The Euro and the Battle of Ideas, in which they bring together their respective skills in economic theory, economic history and economic policy to bear on one of the most important macroeconomic problems of our times—the rules versus discretion debate. Anyone who has studied this debate—and that’s just about anyone who has taken a course in economics—would benefit from reading this book.
The book focuses on the role of government in the economy and how conflicting ideas about this role affect economic policy in Europe and beyond, including at the International Monetary Fund. But most of the economic policy ideas revolve around the rules versus discretion debate, and include policy credibility, accountability, time inconsistency, policy flexibility, moral hazard, and fiscal consolidation versus stimulus.  All of these issues have been extensively researched, and views differ. Many economists (including me) are of the view that rules-based policies are more effective, while others (including Larry Summers) argue against rules.
The fascinating hypothesis—and the organizing principle—of the book is the authors’ view that ideas differ by country.

Dartmouth’s Doug Irwin has been writing about the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that was finalized seventy years ago this month. His tweets includes a link to President Harry Truman’s statement upon the announcement of the completion of the agreement. It is amazing how different attitudes about trade agreements are now compared to then, and how rapidly attitudes have changed in the ten years since Doug wrote an optimistic op-ed “GATT Turns 60.” Doug is, of course, hoping that we can learn from how people addressed these problems seventy years ago, and develop a strategy to meet our current challenges, even though the world and problems are different.
Here it is important to point out that the GATT was part of a flurry of economic institution building in the mid-1940s. In 1945 Truman signed the Bretton Woods Agreements Act, officially creating the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. As Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury, said: the Bretton Woods agreements aimed to “do away with economic evils—competitive currency devaluations and destructive impediments to trade.”
In 1946 Truman signed the Employment Act. It created two more new institutions: The President’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) and the Congress’s Joint Economic Committee (JEC).

In his Saturday Wall Street Journal essay “Why the Economy Doesn’t Roar Anymore”—illustrated with a big lion with its mouth shut—Marc Levinson offers the answer that the “U.S. economy isn’t behaving badly. It is just being ordinary.”  But there is nothing ordinary (or secular) about the current stagnation of  barely 2 percent growth. The economy is not roaring because it’s muzzled by government policy, and if we take off that muzzle—like Lucy and Susan did in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”—the economy will indeed roar.
It is of course true, as Levinson states, that “faster productivity growth” is “the key to faster economic growth.” But it’s false, as he also states,  that it has all been downhill since the “long boom after World War II” and “there is no going back.” The following chart of productivity growth drawn from my article in the American Economic Review shows why Levinson misinterprets recent history. Whether you look at 5 year averages, statistically filtered trends, or simple directional arrows, you can see huge swings in productivity growth in recent years.  These movements—the productivity slump of the 1970s, the rebound of the 1980s and 1990s, and the recent slump—are closely related to shifts in economic policy, and economic theory indicates that the relationship is causal, as I explain here and here and in blogs and opeds.

“Did the crisis reveal that the previous consensus framework for monetary policy was inadequate and should be fundamentally reconsidered?”  “Did economic relationships fundamentally change after the crisis and if so how?” These important questions set the theme for an excellent conference at the De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) in Amsterdam this past week. In a talk at the conference I tried to answer the questions. Here’s a brief summary.
Eighty Years Ago
To understand the policy framework that existed before the financial crisis, it’s useful and fitting at this conference to trace the framework’s development back to its beginning exactly eighty years ago. It was in 1936 that Jan Tinbergen built “the first macroeconomic model ever.” It “was developed to answer the question of whether the government should leave the Gold standard and devaluate the Dutch guilder” as described on the DNB web site.
“Tinbergen built his model to give advice on policy,” as Geert Dhaene and Anton Barten explain in When It All Began. “Under certain assumptions about exogenous variables and alternative values for policy instrument he generated a set of time paths for the endogenous variables, one for each policy alternative. These were compared with the no change case and the best one was selected.

My teacher, colleague, and good friend Ted Anderson died this week at the age of 98.  Ted was my Ph.D. thesis adviser at Stanford in the early 1970s, and later a colleague when I returned to teach at Stanford in the 1980s. He was a most important influence on me and my research. He taught me an enormous amount about time series analysis, and about how to prove formal theorems in mathematics.  I am grateful to him for sharing his wisdom and for endeavoring to instill his rigorous approach to econometric research. His lectures were clear and insightful, but it was from interacting with him in his office or in the Econometrics Seminar that one really learned time series analysis.
The Stanford Econometrics Seminar in the early 1970s was an amazingly fertile place for developing new ideas.  Fortunately for me, the seminar focused on several new books which explored formally the problem of optimal economic policy formulation in statistical or probabilistic settings.  We read and each presented chapters from Peter Whittle’s Prediction and Regulation, Masanao Aoki’s Optimization of Stochastic Systems, and Box and Jenkins’ Time Series Analysis: Forecasting and Control. It was a terrific way to learn about the latest opportunities for pushing research frontiers.  We each presented and critiqued chapters from these books and freely discussed possible extensions and implications.

Economist John Eatwell of Cambridge and I published a joint letter in the Financial Times today. We argue that monetary policy is off track and that other policies are sorely needed. I said the same in a CNBC interview from Miami this morning. To be sure, the headline that the FT editors chose for our letter “Monetarist tools have failed to lift economies” should not be taken to mean that rules-based monetary policies of the kind that monetarists like Milton Friedman advocated have failed. Recent policies have been anything but rules-based. Here’s the letter.
Sir, You report that Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, told MPs that the BoE is prepared to cut interest rates further from their historic low of 0.25 per cent (“Carney leaves open chance of more UK rate cuts”, September 8).
This is unfortunate. In the face of overwhelming evidence that the exclusive reliance on monetary policy, both orthodox and unorthodox, has not only failed to secure a significant recovery of economic activity in the US, the UK or the eurozone, but is producing major distortions in financial markets, Mr Carney is promising yet more of the same.
The distortions created by policy include excessive asset price inflation, severe pressures on pension funds and a weakened banking system. The fundamental error derives from the exclusive role given to monetary policy.