Category Nick Rowe
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 […]
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 […]
Synchronisation and the Gross Money Supply
You decide to make a new monetary system from scratch. You give everyone a chequing account on your computer, with an initial balance of 0 units. If Andy buys bananas from Betty and pays her 100 units, Betty now has a positive balance and Andy now has a negative balance. The Net money supply remains […]
Monetary Science Fiction
Chris Dillow says that economics is like literature. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. But if it is literature, economics needs more science fiction. Paradoxically, imagining radically different worlds can help us understand better how the actual world works, as well as helping us consider policy alternatives. Imagine a world where all borrowing and […]
The Brexit-News Boom?
Start with a bog-standard second-year textbook Mundell-Fleming ISLMBP model. Start in equilibrium at Y*, then hit it with a negative shock to Net eXports. The IS curve shifts left initially, at the previous equilibrium exchange rate. But the central bank is sensible, and allows the exchange rate to depreciate sufficiently to shift the IS curve […]
Front vs Rear Wheel Steering for Monetary Policy
You are driving a car with rear-wheel steering and no reverse gear. You are driving alongside a wall. If you drive too close to the wall you are trapped, because you would need to steer your rear wheels into the wall in order to get your front wheels to move away from the wall. If […]
Cheshire Cats and New Keynesian Central Banks
How can the Cheshire Cat disappear, but its smile remain? How can money disappear from a New Keynesian model, but the Central Bank still set a nominal rate of interest and create a recession by setting it too high? Ignore what New Keynesians say about their own New Keynesian models and listen to me instead. […]
Do “Monetary Shocks” matter much?
The central bank is on the Gold Standard. The discovery of new gold increases the supply of gold, which causes an inflationary boom. People blame the inflationary boom on the gold discoveries. It can't have been a monetary shock, because the central bank wasn't doing anything different from what it always does. The central bank […]
Private vs Public Nominalism, and Interest on Money
Suppose I want to borrow money. So I issue a financial asset I call "NRUnits". You can buy NRUnits from me at $1 each. I consider two different policies to give people sufficient incentive to want to hold NRUnits: I promise to peg the exchange rate between NRUnits and the dollar, so they are always […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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