Thursday, June 18, 2009

Interview with Samuelson

Waiting for part 2. In the meantime:
And this brings us to Alan Greenspan, whom I've known for over 50 years and who I regarded as one of the best young business economists. Townsend-Greenspan was his company. But the trouble is that he had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can't take the cult out of the boy. He actually had instruction, probably pinned on the wall: 'Nothing from this office should go forth which discredits the capitalist system. Greed is good.'

However, unlike someone like Milton, Greenspan was quite streetwise. But he was overconfident that he could handle anything that arose. I can remember when some of us -- and I remember there were a lot of us in the late 90s -- said you should do something about the stock bubble. And he kind of said, 'look, reasonable men are putting their money into these things -- who are we to second guess them?' Well, reasonable men are not reasonable when you're in the bubbles which have characterized capitalism since the beginning of time.
By the way, I don't want you to think that I think that everything for the next 15 years will be cozy. I think it's almost inevitable that, with a billion people in China wide awake for the first time, and a billion people in India, there's going to be some kind of a terrible run against the dollar. And I doubt it can stay orderly, because all of our own hedge funds will be right in the vanguard of the operation. And it will be hard to imagine that that wouldn't create different kind of meltdown.

Last thing. Mea culpa, mea culpa. MIT and Wharton and University of Chicago created the financial engineering instruments, which, like Samson and Delilah, blinded every CEO -- they didn't realize the kind of leverage they were doing and they didn't understand when they were really creating a real profit or a fictitious one. There 's a lot of causality in economics, even though it's very far from an exact science.
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Sunday, June 14, 2009

Krugman interview

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Monday, June 8, 2009

Forecasters

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Thursday, June 4, 2009

Cipolla applied to Italy

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Wednesday, June 3, 2009

From today's FT

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Museums (economics and modern art)

Rigotnomics has a post about the economics museum in Mexico City. I know that the University of Buenos Aires has a museum dedicated to external debt crises but I've neve seen it. I will try to go when I go to LACEA this October.

Talking about muesums, last week I was in London and went to Tate Modern. It's amazing. I got goosebumps from this Cattelan piece.
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Paul Krugman likes one of my favorite movies

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Brad DeLong on Posner and the Chicago School

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