Macroeconomic Monitor
Начало / 2015 / март

2015.03

What will the ECB's monetary socialism lead to?

On March 9, the European Central Bank (ECB) launched its expanded asset purchase program, which was officially announced at the end of January at the central bank’s first board meeting of the year. With the expansion of the program’s scope and volume, the ECB will aim to buy 44 …

More »

Piketty backs down on his inequality thesis

When the French economist Thomas Piketty published his massive paper arguing that the steady rise in economic inequality was inevitable under capitalism, his thesis and its supposed and empirical basis quickly gained support among leftists, who echoed Piketty’s call for greater redistributive taxation. Other economists spent a lot of time …

More »

When the state knocks on the door

In public choice theory (which became particularly popular after the Nobel Prize for one of its founders, James Buchanan), there is talk of the so-called "rational ignorance". It is a situation in which the expenditure of resources (time, attention, effort, etc.) required for a person to become informed on a given issue exceeds the potential benefit of learning ...

More »

Let's legalize ecstasy

Edward Hess In early January, four people in the UK died[i] as a result of using something that looked like ecstasy (MDMA). Before we understand why the war on drugs contributed to, rather than prevented, the deaths of these four people, let’s look at ecstasy itself. MDMA is …

More »

Should we expect a tightening of monetary policy in the US soon?

Several years after the start of the financial crisis and the subsequent launch of the quantitative easing program, politicians and central bankers reported a positive change in the values of some economic indicators, reading this as a signal of an improvement in the general situation of the economy and the labor market. In order to achieve some of the desired …

More »