by Roger Koppl
At the Cobden Centre‘s website (and here), Steve Baker discusses recent Fed signals in the context of Big Players theory. The more active the Fed (or other central bank), the greater the fraction of entrepreneurial attention devoted to Fed watching rather than productive activity. As Baker says, “traders must pay attention to the Big Player and not the fundamentals.” Continue reading
by Jerry O’Driscoll
In a previous post, Mario Rizzo reminds us that Keynes was concerned with the volatility of investment. Keynes was not alone. By the dawn of the 20th century, virtually every significant business cycle theorist viewed the volatility of investment as the central theoretical problem.
In the General Theory, Keynes (p. 149) posed the problem as follows: “The outstanding fact is the extreme precariousness of the basis of knowledge on which our estimates of prospective yield have to be made.” It quickly becomes clear that Keynes means “expectations,” not knowledge. And investment is not governed by “the genuine expectations of the professional entrepreneur” (p.151). Continue reading
by Mario Rizzo
No, I haven’t gone crazy. John Maynard Keynes’s economics is not Austrian economics. He and Friedrich Hayek had serious disagreements over economic theory and policy. I believe that Hayek was largely right in these disagreements. Nevertheless, Keynes was personally kind to Hayek. He found him a place to stay in Cambridge during the Nazi bombing of London. He also had some good things to say about Hayek’s controversial and, at the time, underappreciated book, The Road to Serfdom.
But, of course, this is not all. They shared a deep appreciation of the humanistic (for lack of a better word) aspect of economics. In effect, they looked at it as a “philosophical science” – a term that today might be considered a contradiction in terms. Continue reading
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