In a recent paper, Glick and Rose (2016) suggest that the Euro led to a staggering 50% increase in trade. To me, this sounded a bit dubious, particularly given my [ … ]

These are comments I gave on “Inflating away the public debt? An empirical assessment” by Jens Hilscher, Alon Aviv, and Ricardo Reis at the Becker-Friedman Institute Government Debt: Constraints and [ … ]

Time-travel thriller about a man living in 2013 tweeting desperate warnings to his 2017 self who has become President

Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers recently took exception to current US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s views on artificial intelligence (AI) and related topics. The difference between the two seems [ … ]

Òscar Jordà, Björn Richter, Moritz Schularick, and Alan Taylor wrote a provocative What has bank capital ever done for us? at VoxEu, advertising the underlying paper Bank Capital Redux  (NBER, CEPR link here, [ … ]

…BUT if you watch this commercial + give us your email we’ll give you 7 more days of light. Then darkness again

Following a Twitter debate involving myself, Gabe Mathy, Pseudoerasmus, and Anton Howes on the theory that high wages in England induced labor-saving technologies and led to the Industrial Revolution, I thought [ … ]

In my last post I described the ‘type’ characteristics of Trump political legitimacy, he has popular appeal, a form of charisma, a power that will giveth and taketh away. It’s [ … ]

There are three types of legitimacy for political leadership: Hereditary power based on family. Son of the king becomes king. If the son of a great king is a loser, [ … ]

As a society crumbles, as bitter divisions grow and disorder spreads and nothing seems to work, anger comes and people begin to want a man who will say “Enough!” and [ … ]