by Melanie Friedrichs The Icarus Factor: Interpreting Financial Crisis through the Capacity-Output Cross In finance, the “Icarus factor” describes the dangerous over-excitement that leads company managers to take on projects too risky or too ambitious for the company to handle. But can the story of Icarus apply to a bigger picture? Perhaps the economy is…

by Melanie Friedrichs Nearly every economist who has written about money, from David Hume to Milton Friedman, has disagreed about its role in the economy and its influence on real economic growth. Underlying each argument is the same question, asked but never answered: is money causal? Today it seems like everyone’s got a different idea…