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BlogIs the labor market still stuck at its “new normal”?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) noted on its website yesterday that in 2011, “annual totals for [layoff] events and initial claims were at their lowest levels since 2007.” Nonetheless, today’s report that the Fed open-market committee plans to keep short-term interest rates low until late 2014 reminds us of the obvious but unfortunate fact [...] -
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Breaking Up Bank of America?
Speaking of too big to fail, a petition organized by Public Citizen has been sent to the Federal Reserve and Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) calling for the break up of Bank of America. The petition identifies BofA, given its size and fragility, as a threat to the US financial system. It cites a recent [...] -
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Minsky in the News
The Financial Times has been running a series for some time on “Capitalism in Crisis.” In yesterday’s paper Martin Wolf provided a summary of the discussion and proposed “Seven ways to fix the system’s flaws.” The first and most important task, he notes, is to manage macro instability. In this regard, he pays homage to [...] -
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Another view on “policy pragmatism” in mainstream economics
Paul Krugman—orthodox economist? Heterodox economist? Pragmatic economist? New Keynesian economist? Michael Stephens recently commented on an article in the Economist that discussed MMT, as well as two other non-mainstream schools of macroeconomic thought. The article contrasted the three relatively unfamiliar and unorthodox approaches with “[m]ainstream figures such as Paul Krugman and Greg Mankiw[, who] have [...] -
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In What Sense Does Government Debt “Burden”?
Robert Skidelsky runs through and corrects five fallacies about debt that one often hears lazily deployed in the public arena. His third correction: …the national debt is not a net burden on future generations. Even if it gives rise to future tax liabilities (and some of it will), these will be transfers from taxpayers to [...] -
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Laughter: The New Financial Instability Index
Phil Izzo of the Wall Street Journal points us to the invaluable work of the people at The Daily Stag Hunt, who tallied the number of times that laughter appears in the transcripts of the Fed’s FOMC meetings. Peak laughter, as The Daily Stag points out, corresponds nicely with the height of the housing bubble: [...] -
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Deficit Doves and Owls: How to Worry About Healthcare Costs
You may not agree with Alan Blinder when he writes in the Wall Street Journal that the budget deficit should be an issue in the 2012 campaign. But it certainly will be. And Blinder deserves kudos for pointing out that there are no immediate or near-term economic problems stemming from US deficit and debt levels: [...] -
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Who Benefits from Failed Eurozone Policies?
As a counterpoint to the last post on the curious dominance of conservative macro policy ideas in Europe, here is Matías Vernengo getting into the political economy of who benefits from these failed policies and why there seems to be no sense of urgency around the fact that the real economy is broken: (This is [...] -
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How Austerity Could Fail Its Way Into US Hearts and Minds
Marshall Auerback compares the job numbers in the US to those in Europe and asks why the US is doing so much better (or failing less miserably). One of the differences he highlights is the zealous dedication to fiscal austerity in Europe, compared to the relatively half-hearted, passive observance of doctrine in the US. For [...] -
Special Report
Η χρηματοπιστωτική κατάσταση του δημόσιου τομέα της Ελλάδας
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Special Report
Η χρηματοπιστωτική κατάσταση του δημόσιου τομέα της Ελλάδας
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Blog
The Orthodox Economics “Mafia”
Randall Wray passes on this piece by Chris Hayes (of The Nation and MSNBC) on the challenge mounted by heterodox economists to the neoclassical consensus. Reporting from the ASSA, Hayes gets into the ways in which the boundaries of the “mainstream” are policed in economics. It’s really worth reading the whole thing. I particularly liked [...]