YouTube Video

I don't know who produced this YouTube video about Divisia monetary aggregates, but it certainly is interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u267ucGLcTo

British Divisia M4

I just noticed an interesting post on a British blog about the Bank of England's Divisia M4.  It's interesting:

http://wonkery.co.uk/blog/2013/3/30/divisia-money-and-ngdp

The blog is amusingly called "wonkery," maintained by Duncan Brown.

Businessweek Article

An article about my book, Getting It Wrong, just appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek's April 1-7, 2013 issue on pp. 18-19.  The title of the article is The Fed May be Miscounting the Money.  Peter Coy, the author of the article and economics editor of the magazine, unfortunately neglected to mention that interest rates for the past three years have been constant at near zero, so could not possibly have had explanatory value about the extreme volatility of the economy during those years.  Otherwise the article does an excellent job of extracting important matters from a very technical literature and succeeds in making the subject widely accessible.

The article also appears in the magazine's online edition and has been translated into Chinese.

American Publishers Book Award

I have won the American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (the PROSE Award) for the best book published in economics during 2012 for my MIT Press book, Getting It Wrong.

Bank of England Divisia Monetary Aggregates

There have been amendments to the Bank of England's Divisia monetary aggregates.

Modern Macro

There is an interesting article about modern macro in the latest Economist magazine, Jan 19, 2013.

KC Star Op Ed

My op ed on time inconsistency of Fed monetary policy appeared today (Tuesday, Nov 6, 2012)  in the Kansas City Star on p. C10.  The title is "Fed's Current Stance Is Tragically Wrong."  The in-print version looks better, since includes my photo.

WIBW Radio Interview

Interview with me on WIBW radio station in Topeka on Sept 14, 2012, hosted by Deb Albertson.  The topic was QE3.

Forbes Article about Getting It Wrong

A very interesting article about my book, Getting It Wrong, just appeared in Forbes magazine.

Safe Assets, Money, and the Output Gap

There is an excellent post about the current output gap and its connection with CFS Divisia M4 on July 26, 2012.  The post, "Safe Assets, Money, and the Output Gap" is by David Beckworth.  It is on the Wall Street Pit and Beckworth's own blog, called Macro and Other Market Musings.

Press Conference

When the CFS's first press AMFM release occurred last month, there was a recorded press conference.  It is online.

EH.net Book Review

A review of my new book, Getting It Wrong, just appeared on EH.net, maintained by the Economic History Association.

Press Release

Wall Street Journal press release.

It's the Money Supply, Stupid

Steve Hanke's July Globe Asia article is terrific.  The title is "It's the Money Supply, Stupid."  The same article appeared in the Energy Tribune.

Press Release

Press release about press conference in New York City tomorrow regarding the program I direct at the CFS.

Wall Street Pit

There was an interesting post by David Beckworth on the blog, Wall Street Pit, today (June 9, 2012), using CFS Divisia M4 data.  The post also appeared in his own blog, Macro and Other Market Musings.

Bloomberg Best Business Books

More about Best Business Books on Bloomberg.

Best Business Books

There is more about the best business books from Bloomberg.

Bloomberg's Favorite Business Books

The following sentence starts the page for Bloomberg's favorite books list:
"Bank analyst Mike Mayo describes a dust-up with Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase & Co., while a former Federal Reserve Board staffer dissects the central bank’s shoddy monetary data in two of our favorite business books of late."  The second book mentioned in that sentence is my book, Getting It Wrong.

Choice Magazine Review

A review of Getting It Wrong just appeared in the June 2012 issue of Choice magazine, used by librarians to choose books to add to their collections.

Radio Broadcast

On April 24, 2012, I was interviewed on the Kansas City radio program, Power Lunch.

Article in Kansas City Star

This article, "Author to Fed:  Count Money Right," appeared on the front page of the Kansas City Star Business Section on April 21, 2012 (p. A14).

Kansas City Star

This announcement is to appear tomorrow in the Kansas City Star.

Book Review of Getting It Wrong

A book review of Getting It Wrong appeared today in the Denver Post.

"The Accord" is Dead

If you think "The Accord" between the Fed and the Treasury is still in effect, read today's Wall Street Journal op ed by Larry Goodman, the President of the Center for Financial Stability in NY City.

Best Business Books

Getting It Wrong listed as among the best business books by Business Week.

Book Signing Event at Ewards Campus of KU

Newmark's Door

An interesting post just appeared on the blog, Newmark's Door, about Getting It Wrong.

Turkish Article

A article, "Enflasyon her zaman parasal bir olusumdur ama para nedir," about my Divisia M4 appeared in the Turkish magazine, Hürriyet Daily News, on March 7, 2012. I cannot read Turkish, so I do not know what it says.

Globe Asia February 2012 Article

A very interesting article by Steve Hanke appeared in the February 2012 issue of Globe Asia. The article uses my Divisia M4 data.

HistorySquared Post about Getting It Wrong

A post about my new book just appeared on the blog HistorySquared.

First Book Review of Getting It Wrong

The first book review of my new MIT Press book, Getting It Wrong, just appeared from Bloomberg News. The reviewer, Jim Pressley in Belgium, is not an economist; and some of the jargon is inaccurate, such as the statement about "money actually spent." At the end, he drifted off into the usual stuff about greed and irrationality. Unfortunately his review makes no mention of the Center for Financial Stability, my position there, or the highly relevant data provided there.

But on balance, the review is positive.

Kindle Edition Best Seller

The book, Getting It Wrong, now is available from Amazon as a Kindle Edition, and already is on the Kindle bestsellers lists for both Econometrics and for Money and Monetary Policy.

Short Review of Getting It Wrong

A short one-paragraph commentary on the book, Getting It Wrong, just appeared in The Economist Intelligence Unit, which is associated with the Economist magazine.

A Rant on The Money Illusion Blog

A January 6 rant on The Money Illusion blog referred to "Paul Spindt’s debit weighted money figures." But Paul Spindt's MQ index uses turnover rates (not debits) as prices (not weights). My Divisia monetary aggregates use opportunity costs (foregone interests) to measure prices of monetary assets.  Prices in index numbers are not weights.  Weights normally are expenditure shares, which depend upon all quantities and prices

I am not aware of a current source of MQ data, and they will not be computed or supplied by the CFS. But if you are interested in MQ, you can read about it on pp. 212-213 of my new book, Getting It Wrong.

Prices versus Share Weights

I just posted this on The Money Illusion blog. As you may have noticed in the latest issue of the Economist Magazine, The Money Illusion blog is highly respected.

Glad to see there is interest on this eminent blog about what I’m doing at the Center for Financial Stability (CFS) in NY City. That said, I probably should mention that interpretation of Divisia money is more difficult than it may seem. In index number theory, there are quantities, prices, and weights. With Divisia, the growth rate weights are the expenditure shares, which depend upon all quantities and prices, not just one price. The prices and the weights are not the same thing. With the Divisia monetary aggregates, the prices are foregone interest (opportunity costs). Those prices are not the same as the weights, but often are misinterpreted as weights.

Consider, for example, the case of a Cobb-Douglas aggregator function. The expenditure shares are constants for Cobb-Douglas. Regardless of what happens to the prices, the shares will not change. Hence the Divisia weights will not change.

What about other aggregator functions, not Cobb-Douglas? Suppose the price of a good goes up. Will its share (and thereby its Divisia weight) go up? That’s unpredictable, since it depends upon whether the own price elasticity of demand of the good is greater than or less than 1.0.

The CFS Reports section, which is not yet online, will try to help with accurate interpretation. My new book also does that in Appendix E. Once you get the hang of it, it all becomes clear. It’s all about the microeconomic aggregation theory that we all know from the CPI, the National Accounts, etc.

My Reply

Regarding the insightful commentaries that just appeared on the three blogs, The Money Illusion, The Market Monetarist, and Monetary Freedom, I just posted the following reply on the Monetary Freedom blog.

All very interesting. The relevant theory is in the appendixes to my new book, Getting It Wrong. The source of the new Divisia data is the program I now direct at the Center for Financial Stability in NY City. The program is called Advances in Monetary and Financial Measurement (AMFM).

AMFM will include a Reports section discussing monetary conditions. Although not yet online, that section will address many of the concerns rightfully appearing in the excellent blogs, The Money Illusion, The Market Monetarist, and Monetary Freedom. The distinction between the AMFM Reports section and the AMFM Library, which is already online, is that the AMFM Library only relates to articles published in peer-reviewed journals and books, while the AMFM Reports section will relate to the public media and online blogs.

There will be a press release when the full AMFM site is ready to go online.

Blog Posts About Getting It Wrong

Blog posts and discussion of my new book, Getting It Wrong, just appeared in three widely read economics blogs: The Money Illusion, The Market Monetarist, and Monetary Freedom.

Marginal Revolution Recommendation

My book, Getting It Wrong, is on the Marginal Revolution blog's list of recommended books.

Endorsements for Getting It Wrong

Endorsement quotations for the new book, Getting It Wrong, are online at the Center for Financial Stability.

Globe Asia Review, December 2011

A very interesting article by Steve Hanke appeared in the December issue of Globe Asia and highlighted recent behavior of Divisia M4.

Complete Front and Back Cover of New Book, Getting It Wrong

Here is the full front and back covers of the new book, Getting It Wrong, from MIT Press. Click on it to expand the view.

Front Cover, Getting It Wrong

Here is the front cover of the new book, Getting It Wrong, from MIT Press. Click on it to expand the view.

Book Can Be Ordered Now

My new book, Getting It Wrong, is available for advance orders at Amazon. Although not expected to be in bookstores until late December, both the paperback and hardcover editions can be preordered now from Amazon.

The book also is available for preorder directly from MIT Press. The MIT listings for the paperback and hardcover say that they are to appear in February 2012, but that is wrong. The book is to appear in December, but may not be widely available on bookstore shelves until February.

Review of Getting It Wrong

An article about Getting It Wrong just appeared in the Energy Tribune. The review is by Steve Hanke at Johns Hopkins University. The same article also is online at the Cato Institute and appeared in the November 2011 issue of Globe Asia.

Getting It Wrong

My book, Getting It Wrong, will be published by MIT Press in December. The book's promotional material from MIT Press is online at the Center for Financial Stability.

Center for Financial Stability

The program I direct at the Center for Financial Stability (CFS) has just gone online. The full program will be live by the end of this year. The CFS is located on the Avenue of the Americas in New York City about three blocks from Rockefeller Center.

Valor Economico

I did not get to the Rio conference. Flight canceled at DFW airport, because of tornado. But I got written up anyway by Valor Economico, which is the Wall Street Journal of Brazil. I've put online the pdf of the newspaper's article from both the online edition and in-print edition.

New Book

A related newer book has just been published. It is:

William A. Barnett and Marcelle Chauvet (eds.), Financial Aggregation and Index Number Theory, World Scientific, Singapore, ISBN 9814293091, 2011.

Golden Book

An excellent book review of ITEM appeared in the Journal of Economic Literature in the June 2008, vol 46, no 2, issue on pp. 418-421. It starts as follows:

"We economists have long been inured to the fact that anything touched by Paul Samuelson at once turns to gold. And, unlike the ancient legend, this bit of alchemy is a benefit to us all. As far as I am aware, this book is a new line of enterprise for him, since I do not know of any other collection of interviews that he has overseen. In any event, this book makes for reading that is both interesting and illuminating. In short, it is literally a volume of edited interviews with a well chosen set of leaders in our field, conducted from the mid 1990s onward, and a number of which have previously appeared in the journal Macroeconomic Dynamics."

The review ends as follows:

"I must end as I began—this is a book well worth reading. It has considerable information of substance, valuable insights and just enough gossip to ensure that it is rewarding and enjoyable to the reader."

Between the first and last paragraphs are many insightful comments on the interviews in the book.