Tuesday, February 21, 2012

So long, and thanks for all the comments

My regular readers (if any of you are still out there) will have noticed that I haven't been posting much lately. In fact, the main reason that Rondam Ramblings seems to be alive at all is that Don Geddis has picked up a lot of the slack. Of the last ten or so postings here, Don wrote eight of them.

I have been writing Rondam Ramblings for nearly nine years now. When I started, there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Googleplus. Blogger was its own company, and comments were a third-party add-on. I didn't really know what direction I was headed in terms of my writing when I started, and now nine years later I'm still not sure. But one thing I am sure of is that I don't have time to maintain a blog properly. There are too many other things going on my life right now. So it is with no small sense of regret that I have decided to shut Rondam Ramblings down.

I'm announcing this not because I want to make a big show out of taking my ball and bat and going home, but because I wanted to thank those of you who have read and commented on my posts over the years, and to let you know that the blog will be going away soon in case you have any favorite posts that you want to make copies of for your own use. I would ask you to please not republish any of the content here. If there is something you would like to see made available please contact me and I'll consider it. But one of the reasons I've decided to shut the blog down instead of just letting it linger is that I have come to realize that it is unwise to leave unedited thoughts publicly available on the internet.

If you want to keep in touch, drop me an email, or add me to your GooglePlus circles. I'll be hanging out over there for the time being. And if I decide to start writing regularly again I'll announce it on GooglePlus as well.

Happy trails.

Friday, February 03, 2012

The Great Recession: Structural Problems, or The Fed?

[Guest post by Don Geddis.  Part of the series.]

Ron and I have been debating whether the US Fed "caused" the current Great Recession (a novel claim by Market Monetarists), or instead whether the cause was the conventional story that: a housing bubble collapsed, causing a crisis in the financial sector, leading to a worldwide recession.

I realize that interest is probably waning to continue this discussion, but since neither Ron nor I are economists, I thought it might be useful to wrap up with a similar debate by actual professionals.

Noah Millman puts forth an argument for the conventional view, that the US had structural problems in the economy, and the collapse should be no big surprise (at least in hindsight), and any sustainable recovery requires restructuring the economy first.

Scott Sumner defends the MM view, that without severe missteps by the Fed, there never would have been a Great Recession.

Those of you still interested in this topic, may want to scan the same argument by real economists, and see which you find more convincing.