Really good links - Optimism about US recovery - Bailout - What is money? - Mankiw is a New Keynesian

Nick Rowe - Optimism about US recovery - "What matters is the gap between what the market believes will happen and what the market believes the Fed believes will happen. I think we have just such a gap right now. The market believes the Fed is too pessimistic. That creates an upside cumulative process. That's what makes me optimistic."

Tyler Cowen - Bailout and inequality - "In short, there is an unholy dynamic of short-term trading and investing, backed up by bailouts and risk reduction from the government and the Federal Reserve. This is not good. “Going short on volatility” is a dangerous strategy from a social point of view. For one thing, in so-called normal times, the finance sector attracts a big chunk of the smartest, most hard-working and most talented individuals. That represents a huge human capital opportunity cost to society and the economy at large. But more immediate and more important, it means that banks take far too many risks and go way out on a limb, often in correlated fashion. When their bets turn sour, as they did in 2007–09, everyone else pays the price.
        And it’s not just the taxpayer cost of the bailout that stings. The financial disruption ends up throwing a lot of people out of work down the economic food chain, often for long periods. Furthermore, the Federal Reserve System has recapitalized major U.S. banks by paying interest on bank reserves and by keeping an unusually high interest rate spread, which allows banks to borrow short from Treasury at near-zero rates and invest in other higher-yielding assets and earn back lots of money rather quickly. In essence, we’re allowing banks to earn their way back by arbitraging interest rate spreads against the U.S. government. This is rarely called a bailout and it doesn’t count as a normal budget item, but it is a bailout nonetheless. This type of implicit bailout brings high social costs by slowing down economic recovery (the interest rate spreads require tight monetary policy) and by redistributing income from the Treasury to the major banks. <..>
        The upshot of all this for our purposes is that the “going short on volatility” strategy increases income inequality. In normal years the financial sector is flush with cash and high earnings. In implosion years a lot of the losses are borne by other sectors of society. In other words, financial crisis begets income inequality. Despite being conceptually distinct phenomena, the political economy of income inequality is, in part, the political economy of finance<..>
        Another root cause of growing inequality is that the modern world, by so limiting our downside risk, makes extreme risk-taking all too comfortable and easy. More risk-taking will mean more inequality, sooner or later, because winners always emerge from risk-taking. Yet bankers who take bad risks (provided those risks are legal) simply do not end up with bad outcomes in any absolute sense. They still have millions in the bank, lots of human capital and plenty of social status. We’re not going to bring back torture, trial by ordeal or debtors’ prisons, nor should we. Yet the threat of impoverishment and disgrace no longer looms the way it once did, so we no longer can constrain excess financial risk-taking. It’s too soft and cushy a world."

Paul Krugman - What is money? - "Surely we don’t mean to identify money with pieces of green paper bearing portraits of dead presidents. Even Milton Friedman rejected that, more than half a century ago. For one thing, a lot of those pieces of green paper are pretty much inert — sitting outside the United States, in the hoards of drug dealers and such. For another, checking accounts are clearly a close substitute for cash in hand.
        Friedman and Schwartz dealt with this by proposing broader aggregates –M1, which adds checking accounts, and M2, which adds a broader range of deposits. And circa 1960 you could argue that those aggregates were good enough.
        But now we have a large shadow banking system, in which things like repo serve much the same function as deposits; M3 used to capture some of that, but the Fed discontinued it, in part I think because it wasn’t clear which repo belonged there, and data on repo not involving primary dealers is scattered. Whatever.
        The truth is that these days — with credit cards, electronic money, repo, and more all serving the purpose of medium of exchange — it’s not clear that any single number deserves to be called “the” money supply. Intellectually, this isn’t a problem; nor is there necessarily a problem maintaining monetary policy even if there isn’t any single thing you’re willing to call money."

JTapp - Textbook politics - " I had been using the Mankiw Principles of Macro text for the 2 years I’d been at my current position and decided to adopt his Micro this year in order to bring some symmetry and take advantage of his Aplia sets, etc. But I share Micro with other professors who would also be required to adopt it. One lodged a complaint when a Google search revealed Mankiw is a “New Keynesian,” which immediately raised a flag b/c anything with “Keynes” in it is problematic. Nevermind that the department, including this professor, had been using other New Keynesians, including Mishkin, for years in other classes and I’d been using Mankiw’s macro for years and adopted Ball in the M&B class– Micro was a step to far.
        He had our department chair (a marketing professor) take it home to check for subversive material. One of Mankiw’s 10 Principles of Economics being “government can sometimes improve market outcomes” was a red flag. In the end we adopted it b/c they trusted my judgment. In higher education, EVERYTHING is political, maybe worse than proper academia. (I sent the story to Mankiw who found it amusing, he commented that just working at Harvard made him a socialist to many.)"