James Grant on Irving Fisher and the Great Depression
In the past weekend edition (January 4-5, 2014) of the Wall Street Journal, James Grant, financial journalist, reviewed (“Great Minds, Failed Prophets”) Fortune Tellers by Walter A. Friedman, a new...
View ArticleMilton Friedman, Monetarism, and the Great and Little Depressions
Brad Delong has a nice little piece bashing Milton Friedman, an activity that, within reasonable limits, I consider altogether commendable and like to engage in myself from time to time (see here,...
View ArticleKeynes and Accounting Identities
In a post earlier this week, Michael Pettis was kind enough to refer to a passage from Ralph Hawtrey’s review of Keynes’s General Theory, which I had quoted in an earlier post, criticizing Keynes’s...
View ArticleCompetitive Devaluation Plus Monetary Expansion Does Create a Free Lunch
I want to begin this post by saying that I’m flattered by, and grateful to, Frances Coppola for the first line of her blog post yesterday. But – and I note that imitation is the sincerest form of...
View ArticleWhat’s Wrong with the Price-Specie-Flow Mechanism? Part I
The tortured intellectual history of the price-specie-flow mechanism (PSFM), which received its classic exposition in an essay (“Of the Balance of Trade”) by David Hume about 275 years ago is not a...
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