Word: economisters
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...meeting on June 24, though, it didn't even offer a definite signal on that. "There's clearly a debate going on within the Fed as to what they should do next, and there's no need to make a decision yet," says Marvin Goodfriend, a former chief economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond who now teaches at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business. "The Fed is essentially buying time before it commits to whether the disinflation risk is greater or the inflation risk is greater." (See pictures of the dangers of printing money...
More to the point, Fisher was the country's first great economist, a pioneer of the mathematical approach that came to dominate the discipline after his death. Fisher saw the behavior of the market in rational, mathematical terms. He wasn't completely doctrinaire about this--earlier in his career, he had allowed that investors sometimes behaved like sheep. But in the 1920s, convinced that skilled monetary management at the Federal Reserve and the rise of new, professionally run investment trusts had reduced the riskiness of markets, he lulled himself into believing that the prices prevailing on Wall Street were...
...strands of statistics and pro-market ideology came together in the mid-1960s. It was the great MIT economist Paul Samuelson who made the case mathematically that a rational market would be a random one. But Samuelson didn't share Friedman's political views, and he never claimed that actual markets met this ideal. It was at Chicago that a group of students and young faculty members influenced by Friedman's ideas began to make the case that the U.S. stock market, at least, was what they called "efficient...
...economy." It's certainly better for economic activity to be increasing rather than decreasing, but the focus on whether the economy is in recession or not can miss a lot. "I don't care about what the dating committee says. I'm concerned about longer-term issues," says Yale economist Robert Shiller. "We are in for an extended period of subnormal economic growth." Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer of bond-investing giant Pimco, has popularized a catchier if less informative phrase for what we're in for: "the new normal...
...Insurers have consolidated," says Linda Blumberg, an economist and health-care expert at the Urban Institute. "Similar things have happened in the provider community. In a lot of areas, insurers will tell you they have no negotiating power with providers and they're held over a barrel. [A public plan] would force insurers and providers to negotiate with each other, which they aren't doing today...