Monthly Archives: October 2015
Fiscal offset of silly QE
This is (primarily) for Brits. 1. Suppose I normally buy 10 apples at $1 each. Then the government taxes me $3, buys 3 apples, and gives me those 3 apples. I will now buy 7 apples instead of 10. The net result on my consumption of apples, and everything else, is zero. The only difference […]
The equivalence between national debt and transferable monopoly rights
I got this idea from reading a Matt Rognlie comment on a previous post. (But Matt may or may not agree with what I say here). A. Suppose the government sells bonds, and finances those bonds by imposing a 10% sales tax on (say) milk. B. Suppose the government sells transferable milk quotas, and sells […]
Twitter and the Federal Election: A Last Update
Well, there is just over a week to go until Canada’s federal election and I finally managed to put together another update of the leader Twitter follower numbers I first began looking at with my August 13th post and then August 29th and September 19th. It has been a long election campaign and the final […]
Inflation in Lake Wobegone
In Lake Wobegone there are 1+n firms. The first firm raises or lowers its price by a mean-zero random amount, e. The remaining n identical firms wait to see what the first firm has done, then raise their prices by B times the average expected inflation rate, or lower their prices by B times the […]
Could increasing monopoly power explain declining interest rates?
Suppose that monopoly power (as measured by the markup of price over marginal cost) has been increasing over time. What effect would that increase in monopoly power have on the equilibrium (real) rate of interest? TL:DR the sign is right, but the magnitude looks far too small.
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