In class today I mentioned a few news items relevant to the topics we discussed:
1) The debt forgiveness plan announced by President Biden last week comes with a reform of Income Based Repayment (IBR) plans. These plans open the door for universities to game the federal student loan programs to their advantage. I first read about this in Marginal Revolution. This linked to an excellent article by Matt Bruenig. This article itself linked to a 2013 post in a law blog that goes through the example of Georgetown Law School, which I mentioned in class. So you have to dig a bit to get all the details. I want to be totally clear that I do not favor this behavior. In fact, I think the steep rise in tuition that institutions of higher learning have imposed in recent decades is a big problem - one major theme of Global Trends is that a lot of the world's problems problems would be alleviated if we increased access to education. But people and institutions respond to incentives, and the debt forgiveness plan does nothing to address the fundamental problem of college affordability. On the contrary it is likely to exacerbate these problems, by making students more price insensitive.
2) Senator Warren said today that Fed policies (raising interest rates) could tip the US into a recession. She is correct. As I mentioned in class, that is the point of these policies - to tamp down demand so that price increases moderate. More precisely, it would be nice if we could tame 9% inflation without throwing the economy into recession, but the lessons of history suggest that would not be possible, because the slowdown in demand that would be required to reduce inflation from 9% to (say) 3% is likely to be big enough to imply a recession. When Paul Volcker took a similar policy decision in 1979-1980, the US experienced a very severe (though short-lived) recession. To this day we refer to it as "the Volcker Recession". The alternative might be sustained inflation for a period of time - choose your poison.
3) Relatedly, I mentioned an academic article presented at the Jackson Hole central bankers' symposium, pointing to the fact that a successful taming of inflation would likely require action on both the monetary and fiscal fronts. Here is Bloomberg's coverage of this paper. Here is the paper itself. Here is broader coverage of the Jackson Hole symposium.