Look Who Opposes Obamacare, by Fat Margins

Share Button

     The Supreme Court today upheld the Affordable Care Act of 2010, otherwise known as Obamacare.  Judging from the polls, American public opinion appears to be very sharply divided over the legislation.  Some view it as socialism, others as the first success in a half-century of efforts to achieve a sensible national policy on health care.

       What explains the wide divergence of views?   An economists’ approach – cynical or naïve depending on how you look at it – would be to assume that citizens vote according to their own personal interests.   Getting the uninsured onto paid insurance through the individual mandate is very much in some people’s interest, but not necessarily as strongly in others’ interests.  Let’s take a look. read more

Share Button

Could Eurobonds Help Solve the Euro Crisis?

Share Button

Any solution to the euro crisis must meet two objectives.  One is short run and the other is long run.  Unfortunately they tend to conflict.

The first necessary objective is to put Greece, Portugal, and other troubled countries back on a sustainable debt path, defined as a long-term trajectory where the ratio of debt to GDP is declining rather than rising.  Austerity won’t restore debt sustainability.  It has raised debt/GDP ratios, not lowered them.   A write-down would do it.  New bigger bail-outs might too, or might not.  But either write-downs or bailouts would then create moral hazard and thus make even it even harder to satisfy the second necessary objective. read more

Share Button

Nominal GDP Targeting Could Take the Place of Inflation Targeting

Share Button

In my preceding blogpost, I argued that the developments of the last five years have sharply pointed up the limitations of Inflation Targeting (IT), much as the currency crises of the 1990s dramatized the vulnerability of exchange rate targeting and the velocity shocks of the 1980s killed money supply targeting.   But if IT is dead, what is to take its place as an intermediate target that central banks can use to anchor expectations?

The leading candidate to take the position of preferred nominal anchor is probably Nominal GDP Targeting.  It has gained popularity rather suddenly, over the last year.  But the idea is not new.  It had been a candidate to succeed money targeting in the 1980s, because it did not share the latter’s vulnerability to shifts in money demand.  Under certain conditions, it dominates not only a money target (due to velocity shocks) but also an exchange rate target  (if exchange rate shocks are large) and a price level target (if supply shocks are large).   First proposed by James Meade (1978), it attracted the interest in the 1980s of such eminent economists as Jim Tobin (1983), Charlie Bean (1983), Bob Gordon (1985), Ken West (1986), Martin Feldstein & Jim Stock (1994), Bob Hall & Greg Mankiw (1994), Ben McCallum (1987, 1999), and others. read more

Share Button