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BlogIn 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 [...] -
Blog
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: [...] -
Blog
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 [...] -
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The Real Problem with the $29 Trillion Bailout of Wall Street
I previously summarized research that two of my graduate students, James Felkerson and Nicola Matthews, are conducting on the Fed’s bailout. Using data that the Fed was forced to release, they demonstrated that the cumulative total lent and spent on assets by the Fed was over $29 trillion. (See the first paper here: http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/?docid=1462) Their [...] -
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MMT as Public Policy
First The Economist, now CNBC. CNBC’s Senior Editor John Carney has put together a series of posts on Modern Monetary Theory at his blog. One of Carney’s objections to MMT is this: …my biggest point of departure with the MMTers is they display a political and economic naivete when it comes to the effects of [...] -
Report No. 1
Report January 2012
Papers highlighted in the January issue include a new Strategic Analysis that justifies fears of prolonged stagnation and flat employment, proposals to resolve problems in the eurozone, recommendations for avoiding another global financial crisis, the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty, gender inequalities in work time, and the economic impact of legalizing undocumented […] -
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Heterodoxy and the Mainstream(s)
Over the break an article appeared in The Economist spotlighting three “schools of macroeconomic thought”: Scott Sumner’s market monetarism, Austrian free banking, and neo-chartalism (MMT). In addition to noting the role of the blogosphere in refining and promoting these heterodoxies, the article elects to use Paul Krugman as a stand-in for the “mainstream” opponent. If [...]