Category Archives: John Cochrane

A Must-Read: Editors’ Introduction to CWL 15, Sections 5 and 6

Serious readers – especially graduate students in economics – must do themselves a huge favor.  They owe it to themselves to read carefully two sections of Frederick G. Lawrence’s Editors’ Introduction of CWL 15,

[CWL 15] Lonergan, Bernard (1999), Macroeconomic Dynamics: An Essay in Circulation Analysis, ed. Frederick G. Lawrence, Patrick H. Byrne, and Charles Hefling, Jr., vol 15 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press) [CWL 15]

Section 5: Macroeconomic Dynamic Analysis as a New Paradigm of Economic Theory

Section 6: The Systematic Significance of the Fundamental Distinction Between Basic and Surplus Production and Exchange: A Normative Theory of the Pure Cycle

6.1 Profit

6.2 Interest

6.3 Lonergan’s Critique of ‘Supply-Side’ and Demand-Side’ Economics

Eventual mastery by serious readers of these sections plus the main text will help them secure influential professorships, research grants, board seats and other important advisory positions.  They will have the satisfaction of influencing beneficially those with whom they interact professionally and casually.

Two other key works:

[CWL 21] Lonergan, Bernard (1998), For a New Political Economy, ed. Philip McShane, vol 21 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press) [CWL 21]

[CWL 3] Lonergan, Bernard J. F. (1957 ) InsightA Study of Human Understanding, Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., London; and (1997) Toronto: University of Toronto Press [CWL 3, 1957/1997] 

 

The Great Interest-Rate Delusion and Hoax; The Circulation of Principal and Interest Payments

Readers of this post – especially economists in academe, the Federal Reserve, the Department of the Treasury and the National Bureau of Economic Research – should also read the following posts:

The entities actively constituting the current economic process are still contesting among themselves to restore the normative relations among Outlays-Incomes and Expenditures-Receipts distorted by the government’s recent inflationary flooding of free money into the various channels and pools of the system.   Also, keep in mind that the underlying  context of the excerpts selected below assumes a money supply and interest rates properly calibrated to support the correlation of the magnitudes and frequencies of flows of products with payments.  Unfortunately, the money supply has been bollixed and the monetary flows have been tortured by the government’s recent free-money flood.  The fair absorption of the recent flood is still in process.

We begin with seven brief excerpts extracted from, thus pointing to, our subsequent treatment, Continue reading

Wouldn’t It Be Good If There Were A Scientific, Functional, Macroeconomic Dynamics On Which All Could Agree?

Wouldn’t it be good if there were a scientific Functional Macroeconomic Dynamics on which all could agree?

See on this website under Five Images : Sublation of “Schools” of Macroeconomics.

Also see Subsumption and Sublation of Keynes, Kalecki, Solow and others:

 

Alan S. Blinder’s Reply to John H. Cochrane

δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης.” (Heraclitus)

“No man ever steps in the same river twice.”  (translation of Heraclitus)

Each of the 1970’s, 1980s and current 2020s has featured its own unique and nuanced combinations of circulating flows of products and money in phases of normative expansion, divergent boom; and corrective contraction. The flows of these decades are not all identical flows which anyone can simply reference to justify a present shallow opinion.

The Wall Street Journal of Monday, August 7, 2023 included Alan S. Blinder’s reply to John H. Cochrane.  (See the two posts below on this Home Page.) Continue reading

John H. Cochrane’s Article in The Wall Street Journal, Thursday 8/25/2022

The Wall Street Journal of Thursday, 8/25/2022 featured John H. Cochrane’s commentary entitled  “Nobody Knows How Interest Rates Affect Inflation.”  We would say, “In order to understand how interest payments from Smith to Jones should circulate in order to achieve price stability, continuity, equilibrium and realization of the economy’s potential, one must have a unified theory explaining the whole, organic, dynamic, pretio-quantital,economic process.  Then, within that theory one can know How Interest Rates Might Affect Inflation.”  (Click here, and here)  We would also assert that manipulation by the Fed of the rental price of money – the interest cost – can be counterproductive. (Continue reading)

 

Alberto Bisin Re Modern Monetary Theory

On Saturday, 12/19/ 2020, John Cochrane‘s blog “Bisin on MMT Rhetoric” cited Alberto Bisin’s review of Stephanie Kelton’s Book “The Deficit Myth. “  Alberto Bisin contends, as do we, that So-Called Modern Monetary Theory, as espoused by Kelton and others,  does not qualify as a theory.  Cochrane quotes Bisin:

The book should be seen as a rhetorical exercise. Indeed, it is the core of MMT that appears as merely a rhetorical exercise. As such it is interesting, but not a theory in any meaningful sense I can make of the word. The T in MMT is more like a collection of interrelated statements floating in fluid arguments. Never is its logical structure expressed in a direct, clear way, from head to toe.

Continue reading