Monthly Archives: November 2016
Red/green money, Bank of Canada settlement balances, and TARGET2
This post is about something I don't understand. Let's start out simple. There are two parallel imaginary worlds: the green world and the red world. In the green world people use positively-valued green money as the medium of exchange. If I buy something I give the seller my green money in exchange. Green money flows […]
Help! The senior guy in my field acts like a total jerk sometimes. What should I do?
I wrote myself a letter, and answered it: Dear WCI, The senior guy in my field acts like a total jerk sometimes. He's working in an area I care deeply about – gender and taxation. But he trivializes and sensationalizes critically important issues. For example, I just heard him give a talk about the optimal tax treatment of […]
Why the USA Has A Trump and We Don’t (Yet…)
In the wake of the US presidential election and Donald Trump’s ascension to the mantle of “leader of the free world”, one is left pondering the factors that differentiate Canada from the United States. When I was a young boy and visited relatives in Italy, much to my confusion we were invariably referred to as, […]
My Cunning Plan to reform New Keynesian Macro
Brad DeLong calls it my "self-imposed Sisyphean task". He's probably right. But it seems worth a try, as long as there's a small chance he's wrong. I have a Cunning Plan. Like it or not (and there is much to like as well as dislike), New Keynesian macro has become the […]
Assignment of targets to instruments, stability, and Functional Finance
J.W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev have a paper making a new (to me) point about the assignment of targets to instruments. First I'm going to present an (over-?) simplified version of their model, to explain the gist of it. [I think I've got the gist of it, but I'm not 100% sure, and I know […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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