My assignment is to survey the main questions swirling around monetary policy today. I emphasize three words in this sentence, each for a different reason. “Main” is because one person’s side issue is another’s main issue. So I had to be both selective and judgmental in compiling my...

Research on central banking is a growth industry. A computer search on the phrase central banking conducted on econlit, turned up 980 references in the 1970s, 1929 in the 1980s and a staggering 4921 in the 1900s. Performance like that does not quite match the stock market, but it is close. I...

The role of the dollar as an international currency is explored factually, with emphasis on a frequently asked question: Is the dollar's dominance declining? The suggested answer is yes, but quite gradually. Implications of this slow decline are briefly explored.

One thing you should never predict is the future. That is generally sage advice, which I try to live by. Futurology is a loser’s game. Nonetheless, I am going to ignore this wise canon in this essay and throw caution to the wind. Why? Because one aspect of our economic future seems to me so...

Using detailed information on the nature of work done in over 800 BLS occupational codes, this paper ranks those occupations according to how easy/hard it is to offshore the work— either physically or electronically. Using that ranking, I estimate that somewhere between 22% and 29% of all U.S....

Alan Greenspan was sworn in as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System almost exactly 18 years ago. At the time, the Reagan administration was being rocked by the Iran-contra scandal. The Berlin Wall was standing tall while, in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev had...

A long tradition in economic theory models economic policy decisions as solutions to optimization problems solved by rational and well-informed agents: A single policymaker minimizes a loss function subject to some constraints. Another body of literature models policy decisions as if they were...