The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Berkeley’s David Card, MIT’s Josh Angrist, and Stanford’s Guido Imbens for their work on “natural experiments,” a currently fashionable approach to estimating the causal impact of one economic variable on another. Card, of course, became famous in and outside the profession for his 1994 paper with the late Alan Krueger on the minimum wage.

The Federal Reserve has been increasing the money supply at an explosive rate. The federal budget, deficits, and the trade deficit are record levels. Governments, both foreign and domestic, have locked down people, restricting production and consumption. How should this be viewed by an economist?

Money supply growth slowed again in August, falling for the sixth month in a row, and to an eighteen-month low. That is, money supply growth in the US has come down from its unprecedented levels and has now returned to more “normal” levels. This comes after thirteen months of unprecedented YOY growth in the money supply, coming in at over 20 percent in each month between April 2020 and April 2021. 

Last week, the media again tried to ratchet up the public’s fear over covid-19 by labeling it more deadly than the 1918 flu epidemic. “COVID-19 Is Now the Deadliest Disease in U.S. History,” reads one headline from an NBC TV affiliate. Considering the realities of cancer and heart disease, that headline is absurdly false.

Could a $1 trillion platinum coin be the answer to our problems? Or is this just another bad idea on the never-ending list of bad economic takes?

If history is any indication of the past, then everyone knows how the debt ceiling debate ends. As the deadline approaches, government officials will come together, extend the ceiling, more money will be printed, and, as we’ve been told, calamity will be averted.

Though a rarity in most places, polygamy is pervasive in a batch of countries situated in West and Central Africa, including Burkino Faso (36 percent), Mali (34 percent), and Nigeria (38 percent).

Though the effective federal funds rate remains less than 0.1 percent, the reaction of the markets and financial press as the ten-year Treasury yield crossed the 1.5 percent threshold near the start of the month reminds us just how fragile our economy’s underlying monetary framework has become over the past two decades.

What asset price bubbles are is fairly uncontroversial, even if a fast and hard definition is elusive. At their most basic, bubbles are said to exist when a sharp upward departure in the price of an asset, from its historic or otherwise reasonably expected value, occurs over a relatively brief period of time, however defined. These dramatic, often parabolic, rises can be driven by rushes into new sectors, like dotcoms, new tech, or cryptocurrencies—while some economists consider their occurrence completely random.

They can start with as little as a rumor; whether fact or fiction, some new information emerges that spooks depositors or investors, or otherwise convinces them that the institution to which they have entrusted their money isn’t going to be able to cover its debts or obligations. Predictably, those who had deposited or invested their money at the institution in question lose confidence, and this loss of confidence sparks a run on the bank.