1. Peter Gordon praises Book 1. Tim Harford reports on Partha Dasgupta’s lecture on the gap between the income of developed and underdeveloped countries, which is one of the main topics in Book 1.

2. Goldman Sachs and AIG.

3. Greg Mankiw makes a futile effort to inject empirical evidence into the debate over using spending or tax cuts to stimulate the economy.

4. Scott Sumner, take hope.

Columbia professor Robert Mundell, who won a Nobel Prize in 1999, called a 30% appreciation in the U.S. dollar against the euro over a three-month period last year one of the causes of the deeper crisis and recession. “This was a story of Federal Reserve policy,” Mundell said. “In a world of flexible exchange rates, low interest rates don’t mean loose policy.”

Thus, we have another voice for Scott’s position that monetary tightening worsened the recession.