I just discovered your own blog and I’d say it’s quite good: critical but fair and balanced opinions. Which is way more than one finds in many an economic blog.

And I couldn’t agree more on the subject of ideology and economics. What you may have missed is a detail: it is on the political arena that decisions are made; those who have more political clout, often get their ideological goals satisfied (and often, too, to the loss of other less-represented players).

Anyway, a suggestion to your own list: Dean Baker’s Beat the Press. He is an American economist and his comments are based on American media.

This in itself should not disqualify Beat the Press to Australian readers, though, as I believe the US and Australian policy debates are strikingly parallel.

Not very strong on data, though.

I think the same focus on fixed rate borrowing and lending is a big factor in the widespread assumption that steep yield curves are good for banks (who lend long and borrow short) and flat yield curves bad. In fact, since so much lending is either variable rate or hedged, I would argue that this is not really true anymore.

‘Inflation is good for borrowers and bad for lenders.’ Less obviously this is only true for fixed rate borrowers and lenders. For variable rate borrowers the inflationary benefit of a real value reduction in notional being closely offset by the increase in nominal interest rates due to inflation. I accept there are some timing and measurement issues here but this truism gets quoted so often without any qualification I wondered why. I think it could be that until relatively recently US borrowers and investors did so mostly at fixed rates, particularly in the residential mortgage market.

Thanks for the welcome. You may find basic ideas of the book in Money, finance and national income determination: An integrated approach by Godley at http://www.levy.org/pubs/wp167.pdf – The book has the advantage of being very pedagogical and has the expertise of Marc Lavoie as well and is a great improvement. Also, it considers economy in parts, closed with no private sector, economy with no government and then everything together and in the end – open economies. This is great since one can learn economies in part instead of trying to solve everything at one go.

This is Ramanan, a frequent commenter on Billy Blog.

Firstly thanks for your comment on reserve requirements and many more comments. I too didn’t have any background in Economics and my education is in Theoretical Physics. In the last 6 months or so, I have become increasingly interested in Economics and fortunately reached Billy Blog as soon as I started, thanks to Google and discomfort in my stomach.

I am waiting for his book with Randy Wray and will ship it to India as soon as Amazon releases it. I have been reading a book by Wynne Godley and Marc Lavoie who use the Stock-Flow consistent approach Bill talks of in his blog. http://www.amazon.com/Monetary-Economics-Integrated-Approach-Production/dp/0230500552. Have you seen it ? I got it shipped by express courier as soon as I came to know of this book :). It is really an amazing book. It has given me a framework on how to think about the issues – judge for myself – who is speaking sense and who is speaking garbage etc.

Coming back to blogs, Bill’s blog is really amazing – he keeps exposing myths one by one with so much patience.