Author Archives: John Taylor
Unforgettable Economics Lessons in Tombstone
Last night Yang Jisheng was awarded the 2012 Hayek Prize for his book Tombstone about the Chinese famine of 1958-1962. It’s an amazing book. It starts with Yang Jisheng returning home as a teenager to find a ghost town, trees … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching Economics
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Why Title II of Dodd-Frank Has Not Reduced the Likelihood of Bailouts
Today the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing on whether the Orderly Liquidation Authority (OLA) in Title II of the Dodd Frank Act has reduced the likelihood of bailouts of large financial firms. I was one … Continue reading
Posted in Financial Crisis
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10 Years Doing Business, Measuring Results, and Now Bill Gates
Rumors are flying around that the World Bank will water down or even abandon its ten-year old Doing Business series which measures the extent and quality of pro-growth economic policies in individual countries round the world. A committee has been … Continue reading
Posted in Regulatory Policy
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Another Take on Reinhart-Rogoff Controversy
The updated charts below incorporate last Friday’s release of the first quarter GDP data. They continue to tell the story of a weak recovery which, in my view, is largely due to ineffective government policy interventions. There is, of course, … Continue reading
Posted in Slow Recovery
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A Key Issue In the Monetary Policy Debate
I’ve been speaking a lot about monetary policy recently: – Testifying at the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) last week – Delivering a dinner speech at the Atlanta Fed the week before that – Giving remarks at Mervyn King’s farewell conference on … Continue reading
Posted in Monetary Policy
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Coding Errors, Austerity, and Exploding Debt
The discovery of errors in the Reinhart-Rogoff paper on the growth-debt nexus is already impacting policy. A participant in last Friday’s G20 meetings told me that the error was a factor in the decision to omit specific deficit or debt-to-GDP … Continue reading
Posted in Budget & Debt
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Krugman’s Claims Are Wrong
Paul Krugman commented early this morning on the Wall Street Journal oped by John Cogan and me. Our oped is based on our research paper with Volker Wieland and Maik Wolters which shows that there are beneficial effects on the economy—in … Continue reading
Posted in Fiscal Policy and Reforms
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Economic Freedom For All
In talks about my book First Principles I argue that shifts toward and away from the principles of economic freedom have had profound effects on economic performance. From the mid-1960s through the 1970s, deviations away from economic freedom were large, … Continue reading
Posted in Regulatory Policy
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An Opportunity to Compare and Contrast Budgets
It is good news that we now have both House and Senate budget proposals for FY 2014 to compare and contrast. This is a first step back toward old-fashioned regular budget order which will help get the country off of … Continue reading
Posted in Budget & Debt
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Keep the Sequester Totals But Add Flexibility Within
Scare stories about the automatic reduction in federal spending to start on March 1—commonly called the sequester—fall mainly into two categories. First are the concerns that reducing every discretionary budget account by the same percentage—the “meat-axe” approach—would not allow government … Continue reading
Posted in Fiscal Policy and Reforms
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Economics One 