Month: June 2015

In the long run… when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.

At that time–or, rather, in that logical state to which the economy will converge if values of future shocks are set to zero–expected inflation will be constant at about the 2% per year that the Federal Reserve has announced as its target. At that time the short-term safe nominal rate of interest will be equal to that 2% per year of expected inflation, plus the real profits on marginal investments, minus a rate-of-return discount because short-term government bonds are safe and liquid. At that time the money multiplier will be a reasonable and a reasonably stable value. At that time the velocity of money will be a reasonable and a reasonably stable value. Why? Because of the powerful incentive to economize on cash holdings provided by the the sacrifice of several percent per year incurred by keeping cash in your wallet rather than in bonds. And at that time the price level will be proportional to the monetary base.

That was and is the logic behind so many economists’ beliefs. Their beliefs before 2008 that economies could not get stuck in liquidity traps (because central banks could always create inflation by boosting the monetary base); beliefs in 2008 and 2009 that economies’ stays in liquidity traps would be very short (because central banks were then boosting the monetary base); and beliefs since then that (because central banks had boosted the monetary base) those who believe will not taste death before, but will live to see exit from the liquidity trap and an outburst of inflation as the Federal Reserve tries and fails at the impossible task of shrinking its balance sheet to normal without inflation–all of these beliefs hinged and hinge on a firm and faithful expectation that this long run is at hand, or is near, or will soon draw near (translations from the original koine texts differ). Because the long run will come, increases now in the monetary base of sufficient magnitude that are believed to be permanent will–maybe not now, but soon, and for the rest of our lives, in this long run–produce equal proportional increases in the price level, and thus substantial jumps in the inflation rate as the price level transits from its current to its long-run level.

Moreover, there is more to the argument: The long run is not here. The long run may not be coming soon. But the long run will come. And so there will will a time when the long run is near. At that time, those who are short long-term bonds will be about to make fortunes as interest rates normalize and long bond prices revert to normal valuation ratios. At that time, those who are leveraged and short nominal debt will be about to make fortunes as the real value of their debt is heavily eroded by the forthcoming jump in the price level .

And there is still another step in the argument: When the long run is near but not yet here–call it the late medium run–investors and speculators will smell the coffee. This late medium run will see investors and speculators frantically dumping their long bonds so as not to be caught out as interest rates spike and bond prices collapse. It will see investors and speculators frantically borrowing in nominal terms to buy real assets and currently-produced goods and services so as not to be caught out when the price level jumps. Thus even before the long run is here–even in the late medium run–their will already be very powerful supply-and-demand forces at work. Those forces will be pushing interest-rates up, pushing real spending levels, and pushing price levels and inflation rates up.

The next step in the argument continues the induction unraveling: When it is not yet the late medium run but only the medium run proper, rational investors and speculators must still factor the future coming of the long run into their decisions. The long run may not be near. But it may be that soon markets will conclude the long run is near. Thus in the medium run none will want their portfolios to be so imbalanced that when the late medium run does come and with it the time to end your exposure to long-term bonds and to nominal assets and leverage up, you are on the wrong foot and so last person trying to get through the door in the stampede. There may be some short run logic that keeps real spending low, prices low, inflation quiescent, and interest rates at zero. But that logic’s effects will be severely attenuated when the medium run comes, for then investors and speculators will be planning not yet for the long run or even the at-handness of the long run, but for the approach of the approach of the long run.

And so we get to the final step of the induction-unraveling: Whatever may be going on in the short run must thus be transitory in duration, moderate in their effects, and limited in the distance it can can push the economy away from its proper long run equilibrium. And it certainly cannot keep it there. Not for long.

This is the real critique of Paul Krugman’s “depression economics”. Paul can draw his Hicksian IS-LM diagrams of an economy stuck in a liquidity trap:

He can draw his Wicksellian I=S diagrams of how the zero lower bound forces the market interest rate above the natural interest rate at which planned investment balances savings that would be expected were the economy at full employment:

Paul can show, graphically, that conventional monetary policy is then completely ineffective–swapping two assets that are perfect substitutes for each other. Paul can show, graphically, that expansionary fiscal policy is then immensely powerful and has no downside: it does not generate higher interest rates; it does not crowd out productive private investment; and, because interest rates are zero, it entails no financing burden and thus no required increase in future tax wedges. But all this is constrained and limited by the inescapable and powerful logic of the induction-unraveling propagating itself back through the game tree from the Omega Point that is the long run equilibrium. In the IS-LM diagram, the fact that the long run is out there means that even the contemplation of permanent expansion of the monetary base is rapidly moving the IS curve up and to the right, and thus leading the economy to quickly exist the liquidity trap. In the Wicksellian I=S diagram, the fact that the long run is out there means that even the contemplation of permanent expansion of the monetary base is rapidly moving the I=S curve up so that the zero lower bound will soon no longer constrain the economy away from its full-employment equilibrium.

The “depression economics” equilibrium Paul plots on his graph is a matter for today–a month or two, or a quarter or two, or at most a year or two.

But it will soon be seven years since the U.S. Treasury Bill rate was more than whispering distance away from zero. And it is now more than two decades since Japan’s short-term bonds sold at less than par.

Paul has a critique of the extremely sharp Marty Feldstein’s latest over at Project Syndicate (parenthetically, I must say it is rather cruel for Project Syndicate to highlight Feldstein’s August 2012 “Is Inflation Returning” in site-searches for “Feldstein”):

Paul Krugman: The Inflationista Puzzle: “Martin Feldstein has a new column on what he calls the ‘inflation puzzle’…

…the failure of inflation to soar despite the Fed’s large asset purchases, which led to a very large rise in the monetary base. As Tony Yates points out, however, there’s nothing puzzling at all about what happened; it’s exactly what you should expect when interest rates are near zero…. This isn’t an ex-post rationale, it’s what many of us were saying from the beginning. Traditional IS-LM analysis said [it]… so did the translation of that analysis into a stripped-down New Keynesian framework that I did back in 1998, starting the modern liquidity-trap literature. We even had solid recent empirical evidence: Japan’s attempt at quantitative easing in the naughties, which looked like this:

I’m still not sure why relatively moderate conservatives like Feldstein didn’t find all this convincing back in 2009. I get, I think, why politics might predispose them to see inflation risks everywhere, but this was as crystal-clear a proposition as I’ve ever seen.

Still, even if you managed to convince yourself that the liquidity-trap analysis was wrong six years ago, by now you should surely have realized that Bernanke, Woodford, Eggertsson, and, yes, me got it right…. Maybe it’s because those tricksy Fed officials started paying all of 25 basis points on reserves[?] ([But] Japan never paid such interest[.]).

Anyway, inflation is just around the corner, the same way it has been all these years.

Unlike Paul, I get why moderate conservatives like Feldstein didn’t find “all this convincing” back in 2009. I get it because I only reluctantly and hesitantly found it convincing. Feldstein got the Hicksian IS-LM and the Wicksellian S=I diagrams: he just did not believe that they were anything but the shortest of short run equilibria. He could feel in his bones and smell in the air the up-and-to-the-right movement of the IS curve and the upward movement of the S=I curve as investors, speculators, and businesses took look at the size of the monetary base and incorporated into their thinking about the near future the backward induction-unraveling from the long run Omega Point. My difference with Marty in 2009 is that he thought then that the liquidity trap was a 3 month-1 year phenomenon–that that was the duration of the short run–while I was much more pessimistic about the equilibrium-restoring forces of the market: I thought it was a 3 year-5 year phenomenon.

And it was not just me. Consider Ben Bernanke. I have no memory any more of who was writing [Free Exchange] back in 2009. But whoever it was was very sharp, and wrote:

????: Person of the next five to ten years: “There are those who blame [Bernanke] for missing all the warning signs…

…those who blame him for managing the crisis in the most Wall Street-friendly way… those who blame him for laying the groundwork for a future asset bubble or inflation crisis…. I think his defining decision… has been to conclude that 10% unemployment is acceptable–that having averted a Depression-style 25% unemployment scenario, his countercyclical work is complete… that the risk of sustained high unemployment is outweighed by the risk of… efforts to boost the economy… by asking for more fiscal stimulus… targeting nominal GDP or… committing… to some [higher] level of inflation….

Bernanke believes most of the increase in unemployment… to be cyclical… does not think that pushing… unemployment… down to… 7% would overextend the economy…. He simply seems to think that leaving his primary job half done is acceptable. That’s a pretty momentous choice, affecting millions of people directly and billions indirectly. It will shape American politics and economics for the next decade, at least…. He deserves… person of the year…. But reappointment? That’s another story entirely.

What this leaves out is that Bernanke was willing to take his foot off the gas in late 2009 with an unemployment rate of 10% because, like Marty, he could smell the back-propagation of the induction-unraveling of the short run equilibrium. He us expected that, with his foot off the gas, unemployment would be 8.5% by the end of 2010, 7% by the end of 2011, 6% by the end of 2013–and thus that further expansionary policies in 2010-2011 would run some risk of overheating the economy in 2013-2014 that was not worth the potential game. He didn’t see the liquidity trap short run as as brief as Marty did. But he also didn’t see the short run as as long as I did–and I have greatly underestimated its duration.

(Someday I want Christina Romer to write up her memoir of late 2009-late 2010, as she wandered the halls of the White House, the Federal Reserve, the IMF, and the OECD, trying to convince a bunch of economists certain that the short run was a year or two that all the historical evidence we had–the Great Depression and Japan’s Lost Decades, plus what we dimly think we know about 1873-9, and so forth–suggested, rather, that it the short run would, this time, be a five to ten-year phenomenon. Yet even with backing by Rinehart and Rogoff on the short run equilibrium duration (albeit not the proper fiscal policy) front, she made little impression and had next to no influence.)

Ahem. I have gotten off track…

My point:

Back in late 2009 I thought that the liquidity-trap short run was likely to be a three-to-five-year phenomenon. It has now been six. And the Federal Reserve’s proposed interest-rate liftoff now scheduled for the end of 2015 appears to me profoundly unwise as a matter of technocratic optimal control, prudent policy, and recognition of the situation. The duration of the short run thus looks to me to be, this time, not three to five years but more like ten. Or more. The backward-propagation of the induction-unraveling of the short run under pressure of the healing rays of the long run Omega Point is not just not as strong as Marty Feldstein thought, is not just not as strong as I thought, it is nearly non-existent.

Thus I find myself getting somewhat annoyed at Paul Krugman when he writes that:

Paul Krugman: Choose Your Heterodoxy: “A lot of what I use is 1930s economic theory…

…via Hicks. And I should be deeply ashamed…. [But] plenty of physicists who still use Newtonian dynamics, which means that they’re seeing the world through the lens of 17th-century theory. Fools!… Farmer is trying to explain an empirical regularity he thinks he sees, but nobody else does–a complete absence of any tendency of the unemployment rate to come down when it’s historically high. I’m with John Cochrane here: you must be kidding…

Or that:

Paul Krugman: Nonlinearity, Multiple Equilibria, and the Problem of Too Much Fun: “Was the crisis something that requires novel multiple-equilibrium models to understand?…

…That’s far from obvious. The run-up to crisis looks to me more like Shiller-type irrational exuberance. The events of 2008 do have a multiple-equilibrium feel to them, but not in a novel way… pull Diamond-Dybvig…. And since the crisis struck, as I’ve argued many times, simple Hicksian macro–little equilibrium models with some real-world adjustments–has been stunningly successful…

Or:

Paul Krugman: Learned Helplessness: “We knew all about liquidity traps, and had at least thought about balance-sheet crises…

…a decade ago…. The Return of Depression Economics in 1999. The world we’re now in isn’t that different from the world I suspected, back then, we’d find ourselves in. Oh, and about Roger Farmer and Santa Fe and complexity and all that: I was one of the people who got all excited about the possibility of getting somewhere with very detailed agent-based models–but that was 20 years ago. And after all this time, it’s all still manifestos and promises of great things one of these days…

The problem is that the macroeconomics that Paul Krugman learned at Jim Tobin’s knee wasn’t just 1930s-style Hicks-Hansen Keynesianism. It was the 1970s adaptive-expectations Phillips Curve neoclassical synthesis–nearly the same stuff that I first learned at Marty Feldstein and Olivier Blanchard’s knees in the spring of 1980. That is the framework that Marty is using know, and that generates his puzzlement. That framework had a short run of 1-2 years, a medium-run transition-dynamics phase of 2-5 years, and a long run of 5 years or more baked into it. You cannot–or at least I cannot–just throw away the medium run transition dynamics* and the declaration that the long run Omega Point is five years out, and say that mainstream economics does well. You need to explain why the back-propagation induction-unraveling worked at its proper time scale in the 1970s and the 1980s, but is nowhere to be found now.

And so I am much less confident that I have solid theoretical ground under my feet than Paul Krugman does.

Must- and Should-Reads:

• Gavyn Davies: Has the rethinking of macroeconomic policy been successful?
• Chris Mack: The Multiple Lives of Moore’s Law
• Mike Konczal: What’s Left After Higher Education Is Dismantled
• Must-Read: Ah! Here we are: trade, trust, Obama, Warren, Politico, and journamalism
• James Kwak: Geo-Engineering Doesn’t Reduce Long-Term Risk
• Must-Read: Matthew Yglesias: 5 Overhyped Trends that Turned Out to Just Be a Big Recession

Over at Equitable Growth—The Equitablog

• Nick Bunker: Is rising U.S. income inequality due to inequality inside individual firms?

Might Like to Be Aware of:

• James Kwak: Geo-Engineering Doesn’t Reduce Long-Term Risk

• Must-Read: Matthew Yglesias: 5 Overhyped Trends that Turned Out to Just Be a Big Recession
• Timothy Garton Ash: Xi Jinping’s China is the greatest political experiment on Earth
• Jay Rosen: Why does the product (campaign coverage) get made before a majority of users are even in the market…

Barry Eichengreen sees four important sources of new economic thinking:

1. “Big data”–the use of computers to handle more than just a few aggregate indicators.
2. “New data”–the use of communications technologies to free economists from reliance on a near-exclusive government’s-eye view of the economy.
3. “Policy history”–precisely because this time is not (very) different, what policies were used last time and how they worked is valuable information.
4. “Institutional history”–it is no longer John Maynard Keynes’s 1925 but our 2015. We have 90 years to add to the 50 he had to try to assess the performance of global post-agricultural market economies. The longer baseline and more institutional variation allows us to move from theory to empirics in studying institutions and the emergent patterns to which they give rise.

Barry:

Barry Eichengreen: An Economics to Fit the Facts: “The economics profession was arguably the first casualty of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis…

…Its practitioners failed to anticipate the calamity, and many appeared unable to say anything useful when the time came to formulate a response. But… there is reason to hope that the discipline is on the mend. Mainstream economic models were discredited by the crisis because they simply did not admit of its possibility…. Training that prioritized technique… and theoretical elegance… did not prepare economists to provide… practical policy advice…. Some argue that the solution is to return to the simpler economic models of the past, which yielded policy prescriptions that evidently sufficed to prevent comparable crises….

Simple models have their place… [and] are useful for making the straightforward but counterintuitive points that distinguish macroeconomics from other fields…. [But, first,] while older members of the economics establishment continue to debate the merits of competing analytical frameworks, younger economists are bringing to bear important new evidence… ‘big data’… [such as] the Billion Prices Project….

A second approach relies not on big data but on new data… ‘bots’ to scrape bits of novel information about economic decisions….

A third approach… global financial crisis was good for economic history… replete with similar events and with evidence concerning which policy responses work….

The fourth and final focus of the new empirical research: institutions…. Renewed attention to history is thus allowing economists to consider more systematically the role of institutions in macroeconomic outcomes.

These developments amount to a sea change…. Analytical frameworks are still needed…. But now there is reason to hope that… economists… will be shaped not by those frameworks’ elegance, but by their ability to fit the facts.

I wish that I were as optimistic as Barry is, but I cannot be. I do not think he has spent enough time sitting in on first year graduate economics courses around the United States and the world. It imposes intellectual blinders that are, I think, positively harmful if one is then going to conduct useful work in big data, new data, comparative policy history, or institutions and their consequences. Yes, even here at Berkeley. It is true that here at Berkeley the first-year sequence is intended one-third as a tool-building course, one-third as a course allowing our students to communicate in the future with students who have been to other universities, and one-third pointing out things wrong with economics as it is currently practiced that we are going to try to fix.

The problem is that the education we are providing the future economics professors is not the preparation that the economics of the future will require its practitioners to have had. The work will be done, but for the most part it is likely to be done by data scientists, computer modelers, and historians of various stripes. And because they will not be in economics departments, the economies of scope to be potentially gained from talking across these areas are unlikely to be fully realized.

Must-Read: Matthew Yglesias: 5 Overhyped Trends that Turned Out to Just Be a Big Recession: “From New York Times columns to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner…

…dismissing stimulative policies as a ‘sugar high,’ the structural view has dominated both the media and the practical policy debate. But… the real story of the past seven years is that the Great Recession was just really, really big. As the recovery continues, the shifts are melting away… [and] things are going right back to normal. 1) College graduates are getting white-collar jobs…. 2) People are moving out of their parents’ basements…. 3) Millennials are buying cars…. 4) Retailers are raising wages…. 5) Everyone is moving to the suburbs…. Of course, there are still a lot of problems. To say the recession is a passing phenomenon that the country is recovering from is sometimes taken as a full-pollyanna sign or a denial of one’s right to complain about broad social problems in the United States. Do not make this mistake! Think back to 2007, before the recession started. America had a lot of problems back then, ranging from high child poverty to mass incarceration to a shockingly inefficient health-care system…. But pretty much everything that made 2011 seem significantly different from 2007 now looks to be a consequence of the ups and downs of the business cycle.”

Must-Read: Felix Salmon mourns the coming journalistic future. But it has seemed to me for a long time that most reporters worth reading would produce better work if they could find their audience without all the intermediary armamentarium of “editors and fact-checkers and clear ethical guidelines”. Why do I think this? Because those come with additional very heavy organizational, rhetorical, and moral baggage. Because most reporters worth reading at all are much more interesting and teach me more via email and in person than when they are placed behind the screen of the media organization. Why is this so? Because most reporters want to be trusted information intermediaries, while rather fewer people who run or set up media organizations care much about being so.

Felix Salmon: Facebook Could Kill the News Brand: “It seems my prediction is coming true: Facebook wants news stories to live within its own app…

…That’s better for Facebook’s readers… and… Facebook, which gets to keep those readers within its own ecosystem and collect more data on exactly what kind of stories they like to read. It’s also good for companies like BuzzFeed… [seeking] to reach a large, young, mobile, social audience in a multitude of different ways. The ability to reach those people is something of a holy grail for advertisers…. The key here is reach — which, in an app-based world, is a very different animal from traffic. So it’s no surprise that BuzzFeed looks set to be one of the first publishers to sign on to Facebook’s new native-news platform.

It’s more surprising, however, that the New York Times is going to be one of the others…. The NYT… has a different business model, which is to build a loyal readership of people who trust the brand to deliver top-flight news, and then to monetize that readership…. The downside [of partnering with Facebook] is potentially enormous…. Losing website traffic… losing control over… how your content is presented and delivered… the things which make your news brand memorable and unique….

Talented individuals, rather than brands, [will make a good living by producing the kind of news content which ‘works really well’ on Facebook…. The result could be an existential crisis for news organizations with old-fashioned things like editors and fact-checkers and clear ethical guidelines. Those things are expensive, and it’s far from clear that Facebook’s readers particularly value them. The risk is that they’ll just get disintermediated away.

Must-Read: Mark Thoma: Restoring the Public’s Trust in Economists: “The belief that economics has become politicized is a big reason…

…the general public has lost faith in… economists to give advice on important policy questions. For most issues, like raising the minimum wage, the effects of government spending, international trade, whether CEOs deserve their high compensation, etc., etc., it seems as though economists who also happen to be Republicans will mostly line up on one side of the issue, while economists who are Democrats mostly take the other. Members of the general public, not knowing who to believe and unable to rely upon the press to sort it out, either throw up their hands in frustration or follow the side that agrees with their preconceived notions and ideological beliefs. But why is it so hard to sort out? Why can’t the press do a better job of avoiding ‘he said – she said’ reporting and give the public direct and specific answers to these important policy questions?…

Physicists cannot assume whatever they want in order to produce an interesting or counterintuitive result, the assumptions must be consistent with the experimental evidence. Why isn’t the same true in economics? Why doesn’t the data tell us about key assumptions? Why is there so much debate about whether prices and wages are sticky, whether government spending multipliers are big or small, whether markets should be modeled as competitive, and so on?… When the data do not fully determine the appropriate modeling assumptions – when there is evidence on both sides of an issue – we ought to be open to models that make both types of assumptions…. In many other cases, the data do point in a particular direction but this is ignored or denied because it gives results that disagree with someone’s previous work, goes against their political leanings, or contradicts their preconceived conclusions…. We must find a way to make it clear what the preponderance of evidence says about important policy decisions… restoring the trust of the public that our policy recommendations are based upon solid evidence rather than ideology, pre-conceived beliefs, or cliquish political infighting.

Must-Read: Josh Barro: But What Does the Trade Deal Mean if You’re Not a Cheesemaker?: “Much of the controversy is because the T.P.P. isn’t really (just) a trade agreement….

…A lot of it is about labor, environmental standards, intellectual property and access to markets for services like banking and accounting. And in contrast with the tariff cuts, there’s a lot more reason to worry that some of the agreement’s non-trade provisions would hurt the world economy…. In particular, strengthening already overly strong protections for intellectual property could harm consumers and shrink the world economy over all…. Well-designed patent and copyright laws encourage innovation and expand the economy. But protections that are too strong just transfer wealth from consumers to owners…. All that said, not all these non-tariff rules are a negative…. takeaway, that’s not an accident. Congress is essentially debating Schrödinger’s trade deal: The partnership’s broad outlines are known, but its specific provisions remain unknown for the valid reason that multilateral deals can’t be effectively negotiated with every member of Congress in the room. Even if we knew exactly what was in the deal, the actual economic effects of its provisions wouldn’t necessarily be known until after implementation…

Must-Read: Ah! Here we are: trade, trust, Obama, Warren, Politico, and journamalism. Paul Krugman sees the Obama administration engaged in something it does rarely: trying to depress the substantive level of discussion in the public sphere. And he sees Politico do something that it does sufficiently often that it seems to me to do so more often than not in those of its pieces that cross my screen: work not to inform its readers but rather to misinform them in order to please that subset of its sources it believes it really works for.

I confess I do not know how to improve the public sphere–short of taking note of when the bosses of organizations like Politico make moves to degrade it:

Paul Krugman: Trade and Trust, Obama, Warren, Politico, Journamalism: “One of the Obama administration’s underrated virtues is its intellectual honesty…

…[in] every area, that is, except one: international trade and investment. I don’t know why the president has chosen to make the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership such a policy priority…. There is an argument to be made… some reasonable, well-intentioned people are supporting the initiative…. But other reasonable, well-intentioned people have serious questions about what’s going on. And I would have expected a good-faith effort to answer those questions. Unfortunately, that’s not at all what has been happening….

Some already low tariffs would come down, but the main thrust of the proposed deal involves strengthening intellectual property rights–things like drug patents and movie copyrights–and changing the way companies and countries settle disputes…. International economic agreements are, inevitably, complex, and you don’t want to find out at the last minute… that a lot of bad stuff has been incorporated…. So you want reassurance that the people negotiating the deal are listening to valid concerns…. Instead… the Obama administration has been… trying to portray skeptics as uninformed hacks who don’t understand the virtues of trade. But they’re not…. It’s really disappointing and disheartening to see this kind of thing from a White House that has, as I said, been quite forthright on other issues…

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Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Hypocritical Sloth: “Yesterday [Edward-Isaac Dovere and Doug Palmer of John Harris, Jim VandeHei, and Mike Allen’s] Politico posted a hit piece on Elizabeth Warren…

…alleging that she’s being hypocritical…. It was clearly based on information supplied by someone close to or inside the Obama administration–another illustration of the poisonous effect the determination to sell TPP is having on the Obama team’s intellectual ethics. Second, the charge of hypocrisy was ludicrous nonsense–‘You say you’re against allowing corporations to sue governments, yet you were a paid witness against a corporations suing the government!’ Um, what? And more generally, the whole affair is an illustration of the key role of sheer laziness in bad journalism.

Think about it: when is the charge of hypocrisy relevant?… Someone can declare that inequality is a problem while being personally rich; they’re calling for policy changes, not mass self-abnegation. Someone can declare our judicial system flawed while fighting cases as best they can within that system–until policy change happens, you have to live in the world as it is. Oh, and it’s very definitely OK to advocate policies that would hurt one’s own financial interests–it’s just bizarre when the press suggests that there’s something insincere and suspect when high earners propose tax increases. So why are charges of hypocrisy so popular [especially among journalists who work for John Harris, Jim VandeHei, and Mike Allen? Mainly, I think, as a way to avoid taking on policy substance…. The same motives drive the preoccupation with flip-flopping…. So maybe this head-scratchingly weird hit on Warren will serve as a teachable moment, a reminder that journalism about policy should be, you know, journalism about policy.

The pace of real GDP growth in the first half of 2015 may be 0.5%/year.

That is all.