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BlogGalbraith on Lehman’s Lessons, Five Years On
September 13, 2013 From a panel discussion yesterday at the George Washington University Law School on what we have(n’t) learned since the 2008 financial collapse (via Matias Vernengo). Galbraith begins by cautioning that these “lessons learned” frameworks often leave unchallenged the premise that the crisis is over and done with, when, as he argues, the events of 2008 [...] Blog -
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Waiting for Export-led Growth in Greece
September 12, 2013 The policy strategy being imposed on Greece by its international lenders depends on the success of something called “internal devaluation”: in the absence of being able to devalue its own currency, Greek wages have been cut in the hopes that this generates an export-led economic recovery. So, how is this going? As Dimitri Papadimitriou, Michalis [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 774Economic Crises and the Added Worker Effect in the Turkish Labor Market
September 12, 2013 Turkish economic growth has been characterized by periodic crises since financial liberalization reforms were enacted in the early 1990s. Given the phenomenally low female labor force participation rate in Turkey...more Publication -
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The Federal Government Is Not a Large Household or Business
September 11, 2013 The Heritage Foundation presents what one hopes it doesn’t believe is a clever critique of US public finances: Brad Plumer has the inevitable takedown here. This pretty much sums up the inanity of these government-as-household analogies: “Anyway, it’s a good analogy. The U.S. federal government really does resemble your typical money-printing family that owns lots [...] Blog -
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The Global Crisis, a Recovery (?), and the Road Ahead
September 11, 2013 I hope that all of you saw the very nice feature on Wynne Godley in the NYTimes. It is about time he’s getting the notice he deserved. I just came across a juicy quote from Wynne: “I want to say of neoclassical macroeconomics what I have sometimes said of certain kinds of fiction; I know [...] Blog -
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Work and Income as Economic Rights
September 10, 2013 In this video, Pavlina Tcherneva and Philip Harvey look at the job guarantee and basic income grant proposals in the context of a discussion of economic rights. Tcherneva begins with the theory behind the job guarantee — a federally-funded (and in Tcherneva’s version, locally-administered) program that would offer a paid job to anyone willing and [...] Blog -
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Barbera on the Case Against Mainstream Economics
September 06, 2013 Robert Barbera, a regular contributor to the Levy Institute’s Minsky conferences, has a great post at Johns Hopkins’ Center for Financial Economics on the cycle of amnesia and remembrance that seems to plague mainstream economic theorists. Here’s a key passage: Perhaps the most indictable offense that mainstream economists committed, from 1988 through 2008, was to [...] Blog -
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The Low Rates that Saved Wall Street
September 05, 2013 In a new One-Pager, Nicola Matthews sums up some of the findings from her analysis of the activities of the Federal Reserve’s special lending facilities set up during the last financial crisis. She contends that the Fed departed from a classical understanding of what central banks should do in liquidity crises but focuses in particular [...] Blog -
One-Pager No. 40The Fed Rates that Resuscitated Wall Street
September 04, 2013 Nicola Matthews, University of Missouri–Kansas City, presents the main findings of her research on the Fed’s lending practices following the global financial crisis of 2008. Applying Walter Bagehot’s principles, she...more Publication -
One-Pager No. 40
Η Ομοσπονδιακή Τράπεζα των ΗΠΑ νεκρανάστησε την Wall Street
September 04, 2013 Η Nicola Matthews, από το Πανεπιστημίο του Μιζούρι στο Κάνσας Σίτι, παρουσιάζει τα ευρήματα της έρευνάς της σχετικά με τις πρακτικές δανεισμού της Ομοσπονδιακής Τράπεζας των ΗΠΑ (Fed) μετά το...more Publication -
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The Long Battle for a Living Wage Goes On
September 02, 2013 (cross-posted from ineteconomics.org) This week workers in fast food restaurants across the country gathered to protest the minimum wage in the United States, which currently is a paltry $7.25, and to fight for a better standard of living. The battle for a living wage for the nation’s poorest workers is set against the backdrop of [...] Blog -
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Modern Money Network
August 29, 2013 The Modern Money Network at Columbia University — heir to the “Modern Money and Public Purpose” seminar series — is starting up in September, with a pair of events that might be interesting to some of our readers: 1. Money as a Hierarchical System Date: Thursday, September 12th, 6.15pm Location: Room 104, Jerome Greene Hall, [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 773
Keynes’s Employment Function and the Gratuitous Phillips Curve Disaster
August 29, 2013 Keynes had many plausible things to say about unemployment and its causes. His “mercurial mind,” though, relied on intuition, which means that he could not strictly prove his hypotheses. This...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 772
Reorienting Fiscal Policy
August 29, 2013 The present paper offers a fundamental critique of fiscal policy as it is understood in theory and exercised in practice. Two specific demand-side stabilization methods are examined here: conventional pump...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 772
Ο επαναπροσανατολισμός της δημοσιονομικής πολιτικής
August 29, 2013 Στην παρούσα εργασία επιχειρείται η κριτική της δημοσιονομικής πολιτικής όπως εμφανίζεται στη θεωρία και εφαρμόζεται στην πράξη. Συγκεκριμένα, εξετάζονται δύο μέθοδοι σταθεροποίησης από την πλευρά της ζήτησης: η συμβατική δαπάνη...more Publication -
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One More Reason to Stop Panicking About the Long-term Deficit
August 27, 2013 The case for being alarmed about the US budget deficit — more specifically, for being worried that it’s too high, or will be too high in the next decade or two — continues to weaken, and this is so even if we limit ourselves to the deficit hawks’ own theoretical turf. These days, you don’t [...] Blog -
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What Do You Want in a New Fed Chair?
August 26, 2013 I was recently asked by an interviewer who’s going to replace Chairman Bernanke. I declined to predict because I don’t do horseraces. You’d have to be inside the beltway to understand which way President Obama is leaning. There’s not much doubt that Wall Street is pulling for one of its own, Larry Summers, and Wall [...] Blog -
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Gross Government Expenditures Categorized
August 22, 2013 This figure shows how government spending as a percentage of GDP has evolved since 2000Q1. The numbers reflect the recent 5-year revision of the National Income and Product Accounts (the so-called “NIPA revisions”) and preliminary Q2 numbers, which are due for an update about a week from now. The figure shows that government consumption (at [...] Blog -
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The Euro Has Yet to Produce Any Real Winner
August 22, 2013 It is almost conventional wisdom today to view Germany as the winner of the euro crisis. Reisenbichler and Morgan recently argued this case in Foreign Affairs, although cautiously adding that Germany’s supposed gains may not last. The miserable truth is, however, that the euro has yet to produce any real winner, while Germany’s apparent gains [...] Blog -
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Financing Innovation and Innovative Finance
August 14, 2013 L. Randall Wray and Mariana Mazzucato explain some of the motivation behind their joint project that brings together the insights of Schumpeter and Minsky (note that Schumpeter was Minsky’s dissertation adviser) to explore the relationship between finance and innovation, the changing nature of each, and how the financial system might be restructured to better support [...] Blog -
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Shifting Troika Forecasts and a Marshall Plan for Greece
August 12, 2013 Dimitri Papadimitriou in Bloomberg View yesterday: In December 2010, the so-called troika of lenders — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund — predicted that their measures would move Greece’s unemployment rate to just under 15 percent by 2014. A year later, it changed the forecast to almost 20 percent. [...] Blog -
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Greece: More Competitive, Closer to Collapse
August 08, 2013 One of the theories that motivates the policies the troika (EC/IMF/ECB) is imposing on Greece is that reducing Greek wages will make Greek exports more attractive, helping to contribute, so the theory goes, to growth in GDP and employment. And in an interview that appeared yesterday at Truthout, Dimitri Papadimitriou points out that Greek competitiveness, [...] Blog -
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Money Creation for Main Street: Staking Out a Progressive Fed Policy
August 02, 2013 When it comes to the Federal Reserve and Fed policy, the bulk of today’s progressives can be sorted into two broad groups. There are those who, in the face of congressional sabotage of fiscal policy, shrug their shoulders and conclude that we might as well get behind QE because it’s the only game in town [...] Blog -
Policy Note No. 8«Ασυνήθιστες και επείγουσες συνθήκες»: Τρόποι με τους οποίους μπορεί η Fed να τονώσει την πραγματική οικονομία
August 01, 2013 Αν και δεν είναι ευρέως κατανοητό, η Ομοσπονδιακή Τράπεζα των ΗΠΑ (Fed) διαθέτει τεράστια ανεκμετάλλευτη δύναμη για να τονώσει άμεσα την οικονομία ή να επηρεάσει τις ροές του δανεισμού και...more Publication