I wrote about Rogoff last year (#1087308), as well as a review of his book in one of the BM Prints -- probs in the Finance Issue, @realBitcoinDog can confirm.

I liked it a lot, it was a good book: Here's Perry Merhling, an econ professor at BU I admire a lot (#1419510) reviewing Our Dollar, Your Problem for INET. (I had forgotten they were still around!)

This book is basically an autobiography, focused on the years of Rogoff’s academic sojourn which began at the Board of Governors and led eventually to Harvard, via Wisconsin, Berkeley and Princeton, as well as the Fed and IMF.

Through adversity and crises, the dollar has strengthened. That may not continue forever (#1428312, #1428324)

"the US has been lucky, but may not be lucky forever.""the US has been lucky, but may not be lucky forever."

And yes, Rogoff is an old chess GM (only about 2,100 of those out there!) #1306859, #1357967

As a sometime intellectual biographer myself, I note the repeated chess analogies sprinkled throughout the book, and take them more seriously than Rogoff himself does. Indeed I would suggest that his early chess career, starting in high school, is the important intellectual formation we need to have in mind as the lens for understanding the moves in his second career as an economist.

Though he gives lip service to the ever-present innovation in the actual world of finance, it is apparently not innovation that requires any response in the world of theory. He knows about the offshore Eurodollar (119) and central bank liquidity swaps (231), but does not appreciate their significance—i.e. the dollar system is a global system.

For Rogoff, the ideal monetary policy is an inflation-targeting regime run by an independent central bank, with a flexible exchange rate to absorb volatility, and this is true whether you are the United States or Argentina.

...and that only goes poorly when there's political interference (can't be that economists, as technocrats, messed up...)

The main reason for political interference, in Rogoff’s mind, is fiscal irresponsibility. Governments want to run deficits, which means they need to issue debt, and they want the central bank to help by monetizing the new debt. In his mind, the eventual result of such monetization is inflation. The whole point of inflation targeting is to prevent the Treasury from using the central bank as its piggy bank. It’s not a very strong constraint however, as he realizes, which explains the idee fixe of the entire book.

Hashtag, the MMTers come creeping in:

For Kindleberger therefore the Fed is fundamentally a bank, a banker’s bank, whereas for Rogoff it is fundamentally a government bank, and in his mind the Fed’s balance sheet is just an extension of the Treasury’s. Just so, he argues that paying interest on reserves makes them “a lot more like interest-bearing short-term Treasury bills than paper currency, which pays no interest.” (258) The central banker’s notion of a corridor system, creating an outside spread by offering both a deposit rate and a lending rate in order to control the market rate which bounces around inside that spread, is nowhere to be found in Rogoff’s account.

Good read, Mehrling has a keen eye and the right specialization to opine.