A fiscal theory fest at AEI, launch podcast, and official release.

Mark your calendars! February 28th 3:00 PM eastern the AEI’s Michael Strain will host a zoom event on Fiscal Theory of the Price Level. Info and registration here. 

This event will be particularly good because Michael convinced Robert Barro, Tom Sargent, and Eric Leeper to come and discuss. These are the giants on whose shoulders I meekly stand. 

Barro did the modern version of “Ricardian Equivalence.” If people look at government debt and understand that there will be taxes to pay it off, they save and the deficit (with lump sum taxes) has no effect. He also did the modern version of tax smoothing. It is good government policy to borrow in bad times, and repay in good times, with steady low taxes, rather than raise distorting tax rates a lot in bad times. Both underlie fiscal theory,  

Sargent, with Neil Wallace wrote “Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic,” the cornerstone of the modern fiscal theory. They pointed out that if fiscal policy is stuck in deficits, monetary policy can only choose to inflate now or inflate later. Tom went on to write many fantastic papers on the theory of fiscal-monetary interactions, and on their place in economic history. His Nobel speech “United States Then, Europe Now” is a great example. In my view, the Nobel Committee should have given him a prize for this work, which is even better than the econometric work they cited. Maybe he’ll be the first economist to get two.    

Eric Leeper is the original innovator of the modern fiscal theory in his paper “Equilibria under ‘active’ and ‘passive’ monetary and fiscal policies. ” Eric put fiscal theory in the context of interest rate targets, r rather than money supply, which is how all our central bankers operate, and includes nominal rather than real debt. Thus, he integrates fiscal theory with how our monetary policy actually works, creates the essential model of inflation under interest rate targets, and integrates fiscal theory with modern new-Keynesian or general equilibrium models that are 99% of all applied work. 

I’m going to try to be as brief as possible so we can hear from these amazing economists, plus Michael, no slouch himself. This much talent can’t possibly sit still and not say things that are a bit critical, and thought provoking. 

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Vince Gian of the “Let People Prosper” Podcast did a very nice interview on FTPL.  Like many economists, Vince has a good monetarist heart, and explaining the difference between FTPL and monetarism was useful for me. 

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As of January 17, The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level is formally released! Along with this good news, I have some bad news — I have to take down the free version on my website. However, keep that in mind for the (sadly) evolving typo list, sample chapters, online appendix, follow on essays, and revisions as they come. I already have a revised Chapter 5 posted, which does a better job of introducing fiscal theory in standard new-Keynesian models. 

inflation
monetary
policy
money supply
monetarism
monetary policy