Saturday, July 18, 2009

 

Potpourri

* Here's Bryan Caplan's reply to Krugman and Drum.

* An interesting analysis of a paper (on boundary layer clouds and the effect on global warming) that clearly went into the IPCC summary, and yet had key words changed to match with the spirit of the IPCC report. (HT2 Rob Bradley)

* I have gotten a lot of negative feedback about my Mish article. Folks, before you confidently tell me that "in our system, money is debt and that's why the money supply is shrinking," please look at the below graph. M1 consists of checkable deposits, travelers checks, and currency in circulation; it is the money supply "held by the public." I don't see it crashing because of losses by lenders. That's why, in my Mish article, I dealt with credit cards; I thought people couldn't be talking about the money supply fostered by the fractional reserve banking system, since that clearly started exploding in late 2008.




Comments:
I'm banned from EconLog, so I had to send the following as an email to spencer:
Scott wrote about industrial output rather than employment because there were restrictions on the number of hours a person could work. Shrink the number of hours per worker per week and a business would have to hire more workers to get the same number of man-hours. Average wages per hour increased, so we might expect the total number of hours worked to drop even though unemployment dropped as well. I don't know if that was actually the case, but if it was we would expect output to drop.
 
How did you get banned from EconLog?
 
Hey Bob, maybe you'll revise your opinion on whether my current permanent ban from EconLog is deserved after hearing from TGGP...
 
Silas, I don't remember saying you deserved to be banned from EconLog, I think all I said was that it's not a coincidence that you keep getting banned from places. I.e. it's you, not them.
 
I suggest you employ a blogoeffect -- e.g. "Um", as popularized by Krugman and DeLong -- except make yours a bit more zany, and maybe even flamboyant, like "excuuuuse me!" or "helloooo!". This is clearly the way to having a popular econ blog.

For added effect, change the name of the blog to "Romu's News and Austro-Libertarian Views".
 
I've been banned from a number of places. I discussed that here.
 
And why do you think M1 matters much? M2 as reported by the Fed increased only slightly more than trend over the same period. In fact, M1 jumping so much might indicate that losses from lenders are showing up as people moving to safer investments, such as M1 or the clear move to Treasuries and gold that we've seen recently. As for how precisely a drop in money supply caused by losses from lenders would manifest today, that's an extremely hard question that assumes we even know all the forms of "money" today and could somehow count them up. For example, it could be argued that equities are a form of money now, considering how liquid they are, and we've certainly seen a big drop in equity market capitalizations. The truth is that in this modern, highly connected world, the money supply genie is out of the bottle. All you can do is counsel people to use better forms of money, ie commodity/investment-backed, full-reserve tokens, so that they're not hit by volatility as much, but that's not going to matter much in the middle of a giant correction like this, where larger "non-money" savings/investments were hit big. Obsessing over the money supply is an outmoded remnant of the 20th century command-and-control mindset, we've entered a brave new world where the money supply is giant and nebulous, though I do think commodity-backed currencies and full-reserve banking still have value for the base of daily transactions.
 
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