The other day, a reporter asked me three questions about the current state of Spanish and European banking. Among all the areas of economic analysis, I find monetary economics and banking most interesting. In 1992, together with three coauthors, I published one of the first articles about general equilibrium economics that had the word “banking” […]
Economic Policies Move in Cycles
To say that the economy moves in cycles doesn’t seem like a great discovery at this point. But here I am referring to the cycles that occur in economic policies. They are not new. In the 70s it seemed that inflation was inevitable and necessary to reduce unemployment, but then we had the worst of […]
Golden Workers
Amid a general concern – and rightly so – about youth unemployment, there is another reality that is going almost unnoticed: the share of those over 55 that are not working. Some of them are unemployed, others are retired or out of the labor market. The first thing worth noticing when looking at this data […]
Economics should not be mechanistic
We shouldn’t be mechanistic, but sometimes we become a bit like that. Sometimes we talk about “envy” that economists feel toward physics, a science without shocks, without exceptions. We often wish economics were like that. Or at least this is what the public, politicians and the media want from us. What will happen, they ask […]
The euro under construction
The crisis in the euro area is long and painful, and progress towards its resolution is not proceeding in a linear way. The problem by now has been well-diagnosed. The euro was put in place without the proper institutions to support it. A monetary union needs a fiscal union pillar, a financial stability pillar and […]
