Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
22 transcript-backed records
01 / uncertainty
“The 1890s might be interesting for me, because I don’t know as much about it as the Great Depression, which I studied intensively.”
02 / uncertainty
“You and I maybe aren’t in that scene. I don’t know. That’s all I could give you on that one.”
03 / belief
“I think painting didn’t get a lot of momentum again until the 19th century, when there was new innovations, which opened up new possibilities.”
04 / belief
“Again, I think the Fed felt that the crisis was very severe and that they needed to do a lot.”
05 / belief
“My view is that cinema has evolved in a way where the more interesting directors today are ones that have sort of a more weird or edgy style, more unusual style, because the conventional masterpieces like The Godfather have already been done.”
06 / belief
“I think that what happened in the case of COVID and other monetary policy mistakes, it’s more a question of the Fed just getting things wrong, misjudging the situation.”
07 / belief
“First of all, the deflation they’re going through, I would argue, is very similar to the deflation they went through in the late ’90s and early 2000s.”
08 / belief
“See, I believe that the fall in real GDP was mostly due to the fall in nominal GDP.”
09 / belief
“” Then there are some novels where you feel like a whole world has been sort of opened up in front of you. I think My Struggle was like that.”
10 / belief
“I believe the financial crisis was mostly a symptom of rapidly falling nominal GDP expectations.”
11 / belief
“I think the directors coming along now are perhaps as talented as ever or more talented, but it’s my receptivity to what’s being done is maybe not as high as when I was younger.”
12 / belief
“Also, in the field of economics, just seeing how policy shocks were interpreted at the time, as compared to how we think of them today — monetary policy decisions by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal and so on — I found that very enlightening.”
13 / commitment
“For decades, I pursued work on the Great Depression. I think my book on the Great Depression is the one book I’m proud of.”
14 / evaluation
“I think, overall, his actions were widely popular in the United States, partly just because of the difference from what had happened right before.”
15 / evaluation
“When there is a banking crisis that starts in one place and spreads, the initial crisis might have been due to mistakes made by that individual bank, but the spread across the financial system is usually because the policymakers allowed nominal GDP to fall sharply.”
16 / evaluation
“I think that, again and again, when you look at these cases where there’s some sort of monetary policy mistake — America in 1929, Argentina in the late 1990s — you see the monetary policy mistake occurring first, in an otherwise healthy economy; then you see the financial crisis developing as nominal GDP is falling sharply.”
17 / evaluation
“I think monetary policy is one area where mistakes actually do occur fairly often, and you get outcomes that governments actually don’t want because they’re not thinking about the situation in the correct way.”
18 / evaluation
“I think that colored the views of policymakers in the early 1930s, made them reluctant to move away from fiat until the pain was so intense that politics forced them off of gold standard to fiat money.”
19 / prediction
“I don’t know if there’ll be classics like It’s a Wonderful Life and that sort of classic, but I think films by Wes Anderson may hold up well because his style is so distinctive, his visual style especially.”
20 / preference
“I’m a big fan of all the visual arts including painting, but I think painting as an art form was kind of played out by the early 20th century.”
21 / evaluation
“Or there’s simply a cognitive error like you’re not thinking about the problem in the right way, which has also been an enormous problem in monetary economics because of confusion about what low interest rates mean and other things about monetary policy that confuse even policymakers, often, into thinking their policy stance is different from what it actually is.”
22 / evaluation
“When our instincts tell us that there’s something tautological about the correlation between real and nominal GDP in the United States, it’s because our instincts have recognized the fact that, in fact, most of the US business cycle is due to nominal shocks interacting with sticky wages.”