Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. Andre Gide

Monday, March 26, 2012

Bloggers in St. Louis

Another eventful week at work (last week). Two coauthors in town (Fabrizio Mattesini and Randy Wright) and three seminars (Nicolas Trachter, Mario Crucini, and Fatih Guvenen). Well, four seminars, I guess. Narayana Kocherlokota was in town to deliver the Hyman P. Minsky lecture at Washington University. Oh, and Mark Thoma also gave an interesting seminar on how bloggers have helped (or possibly harmed) the nature of economic discussions/debates (see here). Fascinating stuff all around.

Mark was visiting the St. Louis Fed all last week (at my invitation). Of course, I knew that keeping him away from Steve Williamson was going to be a problem. And I was right. Here they are at the Kocherlakota event, with me trying to break up their fight:

My two favorite bloggers coming to blows

Things calmed down after I agreed to buy them both a beer; see here:

Best Buds

Ah, good times. But now...back to work! 

7 comments:

  1. Wow David. You need to take those peace negotiating skills and head to the Middle East!

    I would love to hear more about the feedback from Thoma's talk. I am sure you were a big part of the conversation since you are one of the few bloggers in the Federal Reserve system.

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  2. Haha...ya, maybe David! See above...I just added a link to Mark's presentation slides. He gave a great talk...lot's of lively discussion from the audience too (many of whom were our PR people).

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  3. While we are making requests, can you elaborate on the other seminars?

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  4. Josh,

    Nicolas gave a theoretical paper trying to characterize the optimal supply of liquidity in a Levine (1990) type of model, but with aggregate uncertainty. The link is here:
    https://sites.google.com/site/trachter/extra/lt_bc.pdf?attredirects=0

    I can't find Mario's paper, but here is his website: https://my.vanderbilt.edu/mariocrucini/

    I provided a link to Fatih's paper above. This is an amazing data set that I think we will all be hearing a lot about in the future.

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  5. IS there a video link to Kocherlakotta talking about Minsky?

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  6. Narayana did not talk about Minsky (though he said a few nice words about him prior to delivering his lecture). I'm not sure whether a video will be made available. I think there might be, since I saw people filming. You might want to contact somebody here:

    http://wc.wustl.edu/KocherlakotaForum3-20-2012

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  7. Nice to see the lighter side of the blogosphere.

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