How would you like to pay $417.00 per sheet of toilet paper?

Sound crazy? It’s not as crazy as you may think. Here’s a story of how this happened in Zimbabwe.

Around 2000, Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, was in need of cash to bribe his enemies...

We know that there are rich countries, poor countries, and countries somewhere in between. Economically speaking, Japan isn’t Denmark. Denmark isn’t Madagascar, and Madagascar isn’t Argentina. These countries are all different.

But how different are they...

In the last three videos, you learned the basics of GDP: how to compute it, and how to account for inflation and population increases. You also learned how real GDP per capita is useful as a quick measure for standard of living.

This time round, we’ll...

They say what matters most in life are the things money can’t buy.

So far, we’ve been paying attention to a figure that’s intimately linked to the things money can buy. That figure is GDP, both nominal, and real. But before you write off GDP as strictly...

"Are you better off today than you were 4 years ago? What about 40 years ago?" 

These sorts of questions invite a different kind of query: what exactly do we mean, when we say “better off?” And more importantly, how do we know if we’re better off or not...

Picture the economy as a giant supermarket, with billions of goods and services inside. At the checkout line, you watch as the cashier rings up the price for each finished good or service sold. What have you just observed?

The cashier is computing a very...

Effective fiscal policy has to be timely, targeted, and temporary. But how the central bank, businesses, and consumers respond to fiscal policy also plays a role in how effective it is.

When expansionary fiscal policy is enacted, what happens to the...

On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and signaled the start of the Great Recession. One key cause of that recession was a failure of financial intermediaries, or the institutions that link different kinds of savers to borrowers.

We...

Here's a quick growth conundrum, to get you thinking.

Consider two countries at the close of World War II—Germany and Japan. At that point, they've both suffered heavy population losses. Both countries have had their infrastructure devastated. So...

In this video, we explore when and why the government might engage in expansionary fiscal policy. Specifically, we’ll discuss why the government might increase spending, or decrease taxes, to combat a recession.

Think about an economy during a recession...