Any day now President Biden will nominate his choice candidate for the role of Chair of the Federal Reserve. If Jerome Powell doesn’t get reappointed then Biden will likely go with progressive Democrat Lael Brainard. Everyone has a take, some more opinionated than others.

Abstract: The rise of socialism has been one of the more dramatic movements in US politics in the modern era, with recent Gallup polling indicating that 39 percent of Americans (and 65 percent of Democrats) hold a favorable view of the political economic ideology. Upward trends in the popularity of political economic ideologies such as socialism are observed when much of what is known by the public about them is gleaned through heuristic approaches rather than through scientific investigation.

Monetary policy is in turmoil. Ever since the financial crisis erupted eight years ago,* major central banks have fundamentally reformed the way they create and absorb money. Their activism has failed to extinguish the fires.

Abstract: In response to the COVID-19 lockdown policies, Guerrieri et al. (2020) developed a new concept: the Keynesian supply shock. A Keynesian supply shock is an aggregate supply shock that leads to an even larger aggregate demand shock. This paper suggests that Keynesian supply shocks are very similar to the secondary deflations suggested by Hayek (1931), and US data from the 2007–09 financial crisis show that these concepts may help to explain employment dynamics in the midst of a crisis.

The first myth one has to debunk in order to assess the relationship between the provision of law and order and the rise of the (modern) State is that this political institution is merely a natural and organic outgrowth of political power, as old as the history of mankind or of organized society.