Policymakers should not have been caught off guard by surging prices and shortages of goods and labor. Practically the entire post-pandemic agenda is built around policies that stoke demand and discourage work, making supply-side constraints entirely predictable. Surging inflation, skyrocketing energy prices, production bottlenecks, shortages, plumbers who won’t return your calls – economic orthodoxy has just run smack into a wall of reality called “supply.” Demand matters too, of course. If people wanted to buy half as much as they do, today’s bottlenecks and shortages would not be happening. But the US Federal Reserve and Treasury have printed trillions of…

My pen has never failed me as an intellectual asset, but writing a tribute to Ibrahim Agboola Gambari, a retired professor, is definitely a challenging task considering the multi-sided and multi-level perspectives that his personality and unique leadership present to us. I shall therefore delicately navigate my thoughts savoring the flavor from this mercurial man of machismo, a blue-blooded academic cum diplomat colossus who now coordinates activities of government from the center, where leadership is subjected to the heat of our multiplicity and diversity as a people. A popular coach, Vince Lombardi once said, leaders are made not born. Earlier,…

The rains come too late these days and leave before their time withering fields foretell the coming of furious famines Spring swallows summer summer stumbles into a sweltering fall while winter joins the fray with snowy deluge and blinding ice Unstoppable fires consume the skies from Kangaroo Island** to Paradise*** Pause A melting Arctic chokes the oceans which claim the coasts and bury the cities just one whittling whistle from the catacombs of coral reefs bleached and buffeted by a plague of acid and plastic debris Once-in-a-century hurricanes proliferate into ten-in-a-year while countless typhoons pummel the peace of once Pacific…

The problem with quantitative easing (QE), quipped then-US Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke in 2014 about the Fed’s bond-buying program, “is it works in practice but it doesn’t work in theory.” One could say the same about macroeconomic policy in general, in the sense that there is no robust theory behind it. Governments routinely “stimulate” the economy to “fight” unemployment, but with a theory that denies there is any unemployment to fight. Mathematical refinement aside, economics has returned to what it was a century ago: the study of the allocation of given resources, plus the quantity theory of money. Macroeconomics…