Why were the rating agencies trusted? When they became required for Federal deposit insurance their incentives for upward bias was common knowledge. The requirement was attacked by a Chicago economist, Melchior Palyi, on philosophical grounds (the expertise is excessively secret) and technical...

The 1933 “Mock Trial of the Economists” is occasionally noticed and then interpreted as popular discontent with economists's “crime” of “conspiracy to spread mental fog” at evidenced by the dueling letters from the Oxbridge economists (Keynes, Pigou, et al.) and the LSE economists...

Economists have occasionally noticed the appearance of economists in cartoons produced for public amusement during crises. Yet the message behind such images has been less than fully appreciated. This paper provides evidence of such inattention in the context of the eighteenth century...

Considered the intellectual leader of the new classical school of economic thought and of the rational expectations theory, Robert Lucas, University of Chicago, has guest lectured across the United States and in China, Finland, England, Israel and Canada.>

Lawrence Lindsey, the Federal Reserve Board's youngest governor, shares his views on the Fed, taxation, the 1980s and other matters.

Vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors is the latest in a series of public service positions Alice Rivlin has held over the past 30-plus years. In 1996 she made the shift from fiscal to monetary affairs with ease.