One potential problem with the Fed’s vote to raise interest rates: The Fed might not know how the economy works
The Fed bases its decision on one theory of the relationship between unemployment and inflation. But that theory may be wrong.
Louis Johnston writes Macro, Micro, Minnesota for MinnPost, reporting on economic developments in the news and what those developments mean to Minnesota. He is Professor of Economics at College of Saint Benedict | Saint John’s University.
The Fed bases its decision on one theory of the relationship between unemployment and inflation. But that theory may be wrong.
Reads on economic misunderstandings, the sources of Western prosperity, and slavery in the modern world.
Advocates for tariffs need to answer two important questions.
With better employment growth and a slightly lower decline in wages, Minnesota outperformed its neighbors in the upper Midwest.
Minnesota’s slower growth has an explanation in economic theory — and it’s got nothing to do with taxes or regulation.
We should require from all of our candidates: specific goals with mainstream, realistic economic policies to meet them.
Market failures aren’t just limited to things like national defense.
The UK votes in a week on whether or not to remain in the European Union.
Minnesota’s budget outlook is cloudy. More legislating won’t help.
The airline is spending money to help solve a problem largely of the industry’s own creation.
The exponential rise in economic growth over the past 500–800 years had everything to do with spread of ideas in philosophy, politics, natural science, and social science.
The Minneapolis Fed president issued a direct challenge to the rules-based approach — pioneered by Minneapolis economists — that has dominated monetary policy for the last three decades.
Here’s what’s behind Russia’s ruble crisis and why Vladimir Putin is offering no change in his unstable policies.
Kocherlakota faced the same problem faced by Gene Bartow when he succeeded John Wooden as UCLA’s basketball coach: you will always be compared with your predecessor.
These books can help anyone understand what economics is really about.
Will the trajectory of economic growth started two hundred years ago continue unabated, or has it already tapered off?
Brandl’s starting point for public policy was that “only competition and community can dependably channel the efforts of free people to public purposes.”
The situation is better for women without a college degree than for men. But that just raises some larger questions about the labor market as a whole.
The data clearly shows something policy makers must come to terms with: that the labor market for men with less than a college education is not working.
Fifty-seven years later, the moon landing is only the most conspicuous result of Sputnik’s launch.
By Louis D. Johnston | Columnist
Oct. 9, 2014