Month: February 2014

From the London School of Economics’s excellent Politics and Policy weblog:

And misleadingly titled–it’s not five, but more like forty:

Five minutes with Angus Deaton:

Joel Suss: Your new book is titled “The Great Escape: Health, Wealth and the Origins of Inequality”. What is the great escape? What are the origins of inequality?

Angus Deaton: The great escape is two things: First, it is one of the basic movies that everybody knew and everybody watched in which some people break out of a German prisoner of war camp in World War II and, you know, they are very sophisticated and they dig tunnels and they make passports and fake documents and all this. And then more than 200 people get out through these tunnels and head for home. Not very many of them make it, which is something we might come back to but it was the great escape. So I use that as a sort of running analogy for the real great escape of the book which is people escaping from a sort of prison of early death, destitution, having very little – living as slaves, no democracy, no education. All the things we take for granted today, at least in some of the world, people didn’t have and so they’re escaping to freedom from the sort of “unfreedoms” of those things…

Go read the whole thing now!

And if the link to the LSE website breaks…

David Beckworth: The Two Big Failures of the Bernanke Fed: “The Bernanke Fed never tried Abenomics. That is, for all the Fed has done over the past five years it never tried to do the kind of monetary regime change now being done by the Bank of Japan….

So for all the praise the Bernanke Fed gets for preventing the second Great Depression, it should be equally noted that it allowed the long slump… effectively kept monetary policy tight for the past five years… failed to meaningfully address the endogenous fall in the money supply and the decrease in money velocity…. In my view, this is the biggest failure…. But it was not the only serious failure…. In the second half of 2008, housing prices, many commodity prices, inflation expectations and stocks all suggested deflation was coming. Fed officials, though, kept talking about backward-looking measures of inflation that made it look high. Their hawkish pronouncements effectively tightened monetary policy by shaping market expectations about its future direction…. Looking back, the Fed’s response from about mid-to-late 2008 was amazingly bad…. Though this Bernanke failure was big, I do view it as less heinous than the failure to do an Abenomics-like program.