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BlogPaul McCulley Has Had It with Orthodox Macroeconomists
June 13, 2016 Writing in The Hill, Paul McCulley argues that his profession’s fussy obsession with the Fed’s zero-point-whatever monetary policy is leading us into a dead end: “after a financial crisis, itself spawned by bursting of a bubble in private-sector debt creation, the power of monetary policy to generate robust aggregate spending growth is severely truncated.” The policy problem we need desperately to [...] Blog -
Blog
Basic Income and the Job Guarantee
June 08, 2016 Pavlina Tcherneva was interviewed by Joe Weisenthal yesterday to present the case against a universal basic income policy (a proposed version of which was just voted down in Switzerland). Watch: Tcherneva has written about the UBI versus Job Guarantee debate, including this contribution (pdf) to a special issue of the journal Basic Income Studies (paywall). She also spoke about this last [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 868From Antigrowth Bias to Quantitative Easing
June 06, 2016 This paper investigates the European Central Bank’s (ECB) monetary policies. It identifies an antigrowth bias in the bank’s monetary policy approach: the ECB is quick to hike, but slow to...more Publication -
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Of Voices in the Air and Never-Ending Dreams of Helicopter Drops
May 31, 2016 Confusions about so-called helicopter money (HM) continue unabated. My recent letter to the editor of The Financial Times, titled “’Helicopter money’ is a muddled fiscal policy by another name,” has not met with universal approval. In fact, it seems to have ruffled some feathers and caused some annoyance. Simon Wren-Lewis is a case in point. In a [...] Blog -
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Bibow on Helicopter Money in the FT
May 19, 2016 In the Financial Times, Jörg Bibow writes in reaction to an article by Stephanie Flanders on “helicopter money” — the idea of having the central bank directly credit citizens’ bank accounts (or, in the thought experiment, to print bank notes and drop them from helicopters) with the aim of generating increases in consumer spending. Bibow observes that helicopter money is really [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 867
The Greek Public Debt Problem
May 18, 2016 This paper examines the issue of the Greek public debt from different perspectives. We provide a historical discussion of the accumulation of Greece’s public debt since the 1960s and the...more Publication -
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Gexit: The Case for Germany Leaving the Euro
May 18, 2016 The case for or against a British exit from the EU – #Brexit – is headline news. For the moment the earlier quarrel about a possible Greek exit from the Eurozone – #Grexit – seems to have taken the back seat – with one or two exceptions such as Christian Lindner, leader of Germany’s liberal [...] Blog -
Blog
Donald Trump’s Printing Press Sends the Media to the Fainting Couch
May 18, 2016 Donald Trump generated some breathless commentary last week (perhaps, for once, unjustified) for suggesting, in response in part to those who have pointed out that some of the policies he has pseudo-proposed would enlarge the deficit, that the US government can always pay its bills: “This is the United States government. First of all, you never have to [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 866
Going Forward from B to A?
May 16, 2016 After reviewing the main determinants of the current eurozone crisis, this paper discusses the feasibility of introducing fiscal currencies as a way to restore fiscal space in peripheral countries, like...more Publication -
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A Global Marshall Plan for Joblessness?
May 12, 2016 The corrosive social and economic effects of what have now become ‘normal’ unemployment levels require new solutions, and trade without full employment exacerbates the problem. Global unemployment is expected to surpass 200 million people for the first time on record by the end of 2017, according a recent ILO study, and limitations of official statistics [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 865
Measuring Poverty in the Case of Buenos Aires
May 05, 2016 We describe the production of estimates of the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty (LIMTIP) for Buenos Aires, Argentina, and use it to analyze the incidence of time...more Publication -
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Dear Time Magazine Readers, the United States Is Not Insolvent
April 25, 2016 This is apparently the latest cover of Time magazine: The idea that the US government or the nation as a whole is “insolvent” has an undying appeal. The fear of (or yearning for) some manner of budget crisis has waned somewhat over the last couple of years (one hopes this is due to the fact that most people alive today have never [...] Blog -
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The Crisis in Brazil and the “Narrow Path” for Economic Policy
April 22, 2016 The big political story in Brazil is the potential impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff (Brazil’s lower house of congress voted in favor of impeachment; the motion now moves to the senate for consideration). To get an idea of how messy this situation is, note that the man leading the impeachment attempt, Speaker of the House Eduardo Cunha, is facing 184 years in [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 864
Maximizing Price Stability in a Monetary Economy
April 18, 2016 In this paper we analyze options for the European Central Bank (ECB) to achieve its single mandate of price stability. Viable options for price stability are described, analyzed, and tabulated...more Publication -
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Listen in on the Minsky Conference
April 11, 2016 Audio from the 25th Annual Minsky Conference will be broadcast live. Listen here beginning tomorrow at 9am. Tuesday, April 12 9:00−9:15 a.m. Welcome and Introduction Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, President, Levy Institute 9:15−10:30 a.m. Session 1. GLOBAL FRAGILITY AND EMERGING MARKETS OUTLOOK MODERATOR: Theo Francis, Special Writer, The Wall Street Journal SPEAKER: Jan Kregel, Director of Research, Levy [...] Blog -
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Is There a Solution to Brazil’s Crises?
April 05, 2016 This is the first of a series of blog posts on the Brazilian crisis by Felipe Rezende. There are two major crises Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff is facing: one is a political crisis and the other is Brazil’s sharpest recession in 25 years. Brazil’s Political Crisis The political crisis has two main pillars: a) [...] Blog -
Policy Note No. 2The Narrow Path for Brazil
April 04, 2016 Brazil is mired in a joint economic and political crisis, and the way out is unclear. In 2015 the country experienced a steep contraction of output alongside elevated inflation, all...more Publication -
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Tcherneva on the “Growth Lobby” and the Sanders Plan
April 04, 2016 [iframe width=”427″ height=”240″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/0kzdGdMFYo8?;start=519″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe] Blog -
Working Paper No. 863
The Empirics of Long-Term US Interest Rates
March 31, 2016 US government indebtedness and fiscal deficits increased notably following the global financial crisis. Yet long-term interest rates and US Treasury yields have remained remarkably low. Why have long-term interest rates...more Publication -
Public Policy Brief No. 141What We Could Have Learned from the New Deal in Confronting the Recent Global Recession
March 25, 2016 To the extent that policymakers have learned anything at all from the Great Depression and the policy responses of the 1930s, the lessons appear to have been the wrong ones....more Publication -
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Preliminary Program for the 25th Minsky Conference
March 24, 2016 The preliminary program has been posted for the 25th Annual Hyman Minsky Conference, being held April 12-13 here at Blithewood on the Bard College campus. The deadline for registration is April 1st. Tuesday, April 12 8:30−9:00 a.m. Registration 9:00−9:15 a.m. Welcome and Introduction Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, President, Levy Institute 9:15−10:30 a.m. Session 1. GLOBAL FRAGILITY AND EMERGING MARKETS [...] Blog