Christmas 2017

I thought I might give us all a break this week. No macro today! 

Mostly, I want to say thank you for tolerating me for another year. I started this blog in 2010 right after I retired from Indiana University. I think I have now posted 441 times. What fun!

I started this blog for two reasons. First, I wanted to keep up with what was going on with global macro. Second, I wanted a way to keep up with friends. It worked. I think about macro a lot and the issues show no signs of easing. And it turns out that since I see some of you in the flesh now and then, I often get the chance to talk shop with you at parties and other venues.  

But even better than all that is that I continue to hear from so many of you. The blog distribution list started very small and was built one person at a time over these years. Some of you are friends from long ago in public school in Miami. Others went to Georgia Tech, Arizona, or UNC with me. The remainder includes family, friends, and neighbors. And I love that I continue to harass my former colleagues and students from Foster, Kelley, SKKU, and those I had the pleasure of teaching in places such as Helsinki, Hanover, Budapest, Hanoi, Budapest, Big Arts, and more.

You cannot imagine how much pleasure I get when I hear from you. Some of you post a comment on the blog site but most of you send me emails. Sometimes you like a post. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you don’t even read the post but you reply just to say hello or to tell me how you are doing. What an incredible blessing!

Finally, let me say that while I love the macro and the chance to write and argue about contemporaneous issues, I personally find too much angst among my friends. I see people who are very bothered if not highly stressed about the future of our country and the world. All I can say is that now is not the first time nor will it be the last time we think the world is going to Hell. I remember all too well walking around Miami in the early 1960s wondering when the missiles from Cuba were going to rain on me and my friends and family. You should have seen all the people trying to build nuclear bomb shelters in the coral rock of Miami!

I say this because too much worry diverts us from the truly important and possible things we can do with our lives. Having a political opinion is fine and important. But taking care of our loved ones and helping our friends and neighbors navigate life hold more chances for personal growth and true satisfaction.  

I hope you have a wonderful Christmas and New Year and that we find productive and fun ways to work together and muddle through the best we can. Stay in touch!

Happy New Year: macronotesmba.com and other Blog Facts Updates

New for 2017 --  http://macronotesmba.com/

My followers include people with and without much education or experience with macroeconomics. I have heard from many of you that you like to read parts of my postings but often you get lost in the vocabulary and the details. 

So I decided to adapt a reader I use in courses for blog purposes. It is called MacroNotesMBA and can be found at the above address. 

Once you find the location you will see four main blocks: Home, About, Blog, and Contact. Below all that are the main topics for international macro. Place your cursor over any of those topics and you will see a number of sub-topics. Cool! 

If you find it useful please use it for background to the blog. Feel free to share it. 

MacroNotes was developed for my past MBA courses -- it attempts to be a very practical and useful guide to the main topics of international macroeconomics. 

Other Stuff

Because I have been traveling and partying excessively (code words for an extra JD or two), I didn’t have enough grey matter or energy to begin the year with a power-packed analysis of the President-elect’s policies or potty habits.

But I did decide to share some blog facts with you.

·       I mounted this pony in 2010 and since then, I have more or less posted each week for a total 390 posts. As a result the A and the S on my keyboard are worn off.

·       I am especially pleased that nearly all posts have comments from colleagues and friends. They are often the best part of the blog.

·       I am told you must have a Gmail account to post comments but I have been told more than one thing about that. Sometimes people send me their comments and I post them. Blogspot help is absolutely no help for anything. They seem to ignore all my requests.

·       If you look on the right-hand-side of the blog homepage, you will see two different listings of all the posts – one by date and one by topic (Label). Click on a label and you will see all the posts about that topic. Look for the label Kardashian under K.

·       I have posted 22 times on Economic Growth, for example, and only one time on Bernie Sanders.

·       Blogspot shows me some facts about the readers. Each week I send an email to approximately 500 old friends, neighbors, and creditors. I also post on Facebook, Linked-In, and Twitter.

·       Until about three months ago, readership had grown from about 1,000 page views to about 2,000 per month. But strangely, in the last few months I am getting more like 8,000 page views per month. I don’t know how or why – but for the last three months the numbers have gotten high and stayed there.

·       I am shown information about page views by country. In the last month, the great majority of page views were from the USA (8,000). Behind the USA was Russia (1,100), Germany (50), France (40), followed by China, Ukraine, Canada, South Korea and India. Since the blog began it has had about 130,000 page views.

·       I have thought about getting a sponsor and making money from the blog but I also thought about being a pole dancer in Budapest.

Blogging Trivia

Since I am traveling and getting a bit lazy in my old age I thought I would give you a change of pace this week with some facts about this blog space.

I started blogging right after retiring from the Kelley School of Business in March of 2010. So the blog is about 4.5 years old.

The blog activity has accomplished what I had hoped. It gives me an excuse to hide in my home office and pretend to be working. It is also a way to keep up communications with friends, relatives, neighbors, former students, pole dancers, and other colleagues. 

During the last 4.5 years, with help from guest bloggers, we posted 267 articles that have received approximately 65,000 page views. We accomplished that without nudity or free drug distribution. 

People often respond to the blog with comments – we have posted approximately 2,100 comments. I have rejected very few comments – rejections come mostly because they feature advertisements.

Some people prefer to respond to my posts privately via email, threats of violence,  or gifts of JD. Either way is appreciated. 

While we can rightly support or not support various politicians, economists, ideas, policies, etc -- my blogging experience has taught me that nothing is simple in the real world and there is plenty of room for adults to hold on to their cherished beliefs. I am always amazed at how many ways there is to look at any fact or issue. Someone once said something like -- the more you  know the more you realize you don't know. That statement seems pretty true to me. Of course, there is always the problem of finding yourself in the garage and not knowing why you are there. That gets even trickier if you don't have a garage. 

None of that, however, keeps me from thinking that either side of the debate has to give up strong beliefs. Taking sides and arguing hard is the best way to learn. As such I enjoy my blogging and feel that I have benefited from our interactions. I hope you have too. 

Yes, I do enjoy Jack Daniels but will accept donations of any sort of brown liquor.

While the great majority of the viewers are from the USA, the remaining top destinations are South Korea, Ukraine, Russia, the UK, France, Germany, and China. 

I try to organize the blog posts by subject. On the right-hand-side of the blog is a list of those topics. I didn’t count them but I am guessing the number of topics is just under 100. For each blog post I usually assign two or three topics.

The top 6 posts in terms of number of page views are:

The G20 Blame Game, September 10, 2013

Negative Real Interest Rates Cannot Exist, June 3, 2012

Inflation History Lesson: From the Frying Pan to the Fire and Back Again, May 21, 2013

Why We are Lousy Investors by Guest Blogger Robert Klemkosky, April 23, 2013

Let the Money Weaning Begin, November 12, 2013

Don’t Stop Believein’ by Guest Blogger Jerry Lynch, September 3, 2013             

Cartoons

Dear friends,

I want to thank my college buddy Jim Gibson for adding a cartoon to this week’s blog post. Jim played defensive tackle for Bobby Dodd at Georgia Tech in the 1960s but was even more well known for the cartoons he posted on the football bulletin board. The coaches loved being lampooned by Jim. Jim also was recently given credit for the Georgia Tech logo he designed almost 50 years ago that is still in use today. Go Tech! Hopefully Jim will draw more cartoons for us in the future.