03 July 2009

and you thought I was dense

That's hardcore.


A blog on the qualitative easing/tightening features of the federal reserve is something I've been aware of in my discussions with various versions of economic proposals. But actually writing about the management of the money supply in its esoteric forms, even I've not descended that far.



In a related story, I discovered that Pandora is very useful for finding good old jazz and classical composers that I'd heard of but hadn't developed an extensive following of. Not so much for discovering modern music that I have a taste for that I hadn't already.

2 comments:

Bazarov said...

Glad you like Pandora. I'm hooked.

Economics. I clearly see the importance of it, but it's just one of those subjects I cannot force myself into, no matter how hard I try. My eyes just glaze over. Plus, a lot of it seems to me to just be psychology with a focus on buying habits, as opposed to behavior in general. I'm glad people follow this stuff and study it, because if it were up to me it'd be a dark, dark world in the land of economics.

Sun Tzu said...

Behavioral economics is definitely like a complex study involving numbers and people that looks a lot like dressed up psychology or social psychology, yes.

That sort of stuff though (QE/QT), is just high level theory with very rare practical applications. On the plus side it's a pretty well worked out theory because people have been trying to tear down the Fed or other central banking systems for decades. Whereas the stimulus stuff they ran earlier has almost no proven theory behind it. It was entirely an exercise in psychology when there isn't any sound theory of "emergency" fiscal policies. You have to have emergencies in order to study it and it's not always clear what got us out at the time. There's at least 4 or 5 plausible different explanations for the resolution of the Great Depression (most of which end up with some version of "and then a miracle/war happened").