U.S. sugar policies are complex. A century ago, there was a joke in Europe that the sharpest graduates of the Imperial German army general staff college, who went into the railroad scheduling bureau, would end up in insane asylums after…
Prolonged low interest rates create topsy-turvy markets
The Federal Reserve’s policy-making Open Market Committee is meeting as I write this. They are not likely to take drastic action at this meeting, but the extraordinary degree to which prices of stocks and bonds respond to actions by the…
Nobel laureate Fogel left legacy of human insights
University of Chicago economist and 1995 Nobel laureate Robert Fogel had a long and productive life before he died Tuesday, so I don’t consider his death to be tragic. But it is a loss to economic scholarship. As an economic…
Complex economy shields us from agriculture shock
It has been an unusually rainy spring, and planting of corn and soybeans is very delayed, particularly in southeast Minnesota. It appears that as many as 3 million acres of Minnesota land that typically would go into corn or soybeans…