The St Louis branch of the Federal Reserve Bank offers – FRED2 – which is an excellent repository of US statistics as well as a nifty graphical analysis tool. I use it regularly and even though it is just a collection of data available elsewhere it is very convenient. The same organisation also publishes what it calls its – PAGE ONE Economics Newsletter – (the so-called “back story on front page economics”) which is designed to be used by students as a means of educating them in economics. Any reasonable assessment of the material presented in these newsletter is that they are unadulterated nonsense. The most recent edition (published January 13, 2012) – “Choices Are Everywhere: Why Can’t We Just Have It All? – exemplifies how these major institutions choose to mislead those they seek to elucidate.
This jewel of indoctrination claims to be “(a)n informative and accessible economic essay with a classroom application”. In reality, it is a mish-mash of mainstream textbook notions that have very little if any application to the task of understanding how the system really works. In fact, it is really an ideological treatise, seeking to perpetuate the errant framework that mainstream undergraduate students are bombarded with daily by professors who are to set in their ways to see the folly of their enterprise.Bill Mitchell — billy blog
Lies and deception – a central banker’s view of the world
Bill Mitchell
