Perry Mehrling, RIP. According to the History of Economics Society, Perry Mehrling died "Monday night from injury sustained in a fall several days earlier." He was Professor of International Political Economy at Boston University and, previously, longtime Professor of Economics at Barnard College. He was a highly esteemed historian of economics. Here is his homepage: sites.bu.edu/perry/ His last book: "Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System" amzn.to/47RVhJ2 "Charles Kindleberger ranks as one of the twentieth century's best known and most influential international economists. This book traces the evolution of his thinking in the context of a 'key-currency' approach to the rise of the dollar system, here revealed as the indispensable framework for global economic development since World War II. Unlike most of his colleagues, Kindleberger was deeply interested in history, and his economics brimmed with real people and institutional details. His research at the New York Fed and BIS during the Great Depression, his wartime intelligence work, and his role in administering the Marshall Plan gave him deep insight into how the international financial system really operated. A biography of both the dollar and a man, this book is also the story of the development of ideas about how money works. It throws revealing light on the underlying economic forces and political obstacles shaping our globalized world." Charles Goodhart: "The discipline of economics is balanced, somewhat unsteadily, between two legs, with the skill of the historian on one side and of the mathematical modeler on the other. In the second half of the 20th century, the tide flowed strongly to elevate the second leg and to diminish the first. In this delightful biography of Charlie Kindleberger, a charming and loveable man, Perry Mehrling shows how Charlie, in his chosen role, as an international monetary economist, fought against that tide, often unsuccessfully. Perry writes so beautifully that one would only need a smattering of economics to enjoy the tale; while if one is interested in the history of economic thought in international monetary economics, then this book is, of course, a must read.' amzn.to/47RVhJ2

This year's Nobel is "for micro foundations of macro" but ungrad macro is still not taught this way. A problem.

Come to the Sip

BREAKING: US 10-year bond yield just dropped as the US government sold $39 billion of 10-year bonds. Demand was strong, so investors accepted a lower yield than expected. The yield went from 5.365% to 5.271% in under 4 hours.

BREAKING: The U.S. stock market hits an all-time high as expectations rise for companies to keep making more money. apnews.com/article/stocks-ma…

The Voice of God says HOTTY TODDY ‼️ #HottyToddy

One of the things you quickly learn when doing serious work in economics is that seemingly disperate ideas may be strongly related. Local projections and VARs are a good example. Of course, if you know about Dufour's work, you heard of Dufour and Renault (1998) and you were not at all shocked by equivalence results in Plagborg-Moller and Wolf (2021). That isn't all. DSGE models imply a VARMA structure. That's the ABC (and D's) paper of Fernandez-Villaverde et al. (2007). More generally, a DSGE model is a constrained DFM. The empirical tools we use estimate the objects we often care about in theory -- dynamic causal effects of shocks, their share of variance explained, etc. And you can write *all* of this using the treatment effect or potential outcome language most often seen in microeconometrics. Some non-trivial insights on the difficulty to estimate nonlinear effects emerge from that (e.g., Kolesar and Plagborg-Moller, 2025). A lot of people who comment on social media go for political punch lines, engaging in attention farming and limiting themselves to superficial differences. But that's unserious.

Sobre a discussão IS-LM e/ou DSGE na graduação, deixo pra outros. Minha contribuição para o graduando interessado (ou algum professor que busca ideias): leiam este artigo! doi.org/10.1016/j.econ.2018.…

To mock Jimmy V knowing he would go back to his ex in LSU. Shameful.

Macroeconomists

Chris Sims changed macroeconomics at least four times: VARs, Bayesian methods, the fiscal theory of the price level, and rational inattention. I wrote about what he built and why it matters. Link: carloschavezp29.substack.com…