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BlogGreece Forced to Cut Private Sector Salaries?
February 14, 2012 C. J. Polychroniou refers here to the fact that private sector salary cuts are part of the “rescue package” recently approved by the Greek Parliament. Asked to comment at the Foreign Policy blog, Dimitri Papadimitriou explains why this attempt at internal devaluation won’t work. In an interview for Bloomberg Radio Papadimitriou also stresses that these [...] Blog -
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Farce Turns Into Tragedy
February 14, 2012 C. J. Polychroniou has a new one-pager that starts off by noting the asymmetries in the approaches taken by governments in the US and Europe to the 2007-08 crash and its aftermath: featuring bold public interventions to save the banking and financial systems but relatively limited measures for the millions of unemployed. He then turns [...] Blog -
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Employment in Greece
February 13, 2012 From a peak of 4.5 million workers in 2008, Greece has already lost 500,000 jobs. Our first chart shows that the country is already in its worst condition since the beginning of the century in terms of the share of the working age population who have a job (our projections are based on the last [...] Blog -
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A Job Creation Strategy for Greece
February 10, 2012 No matter what happens on Sunday, when the Greek parliament is scheduled to vote on the latest bailout package, on Monday Greece will wake up in the grip of an employment crisis (20 percent unemployment, with a near 40 percent youth unemployment rate). In the Huffington Post Dimitri Papadimitriou tells us what we can (and [...] Blog -
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The Sources of Personal Income Since 1947
February 10, 2012 (Click to enlarge.) See the blue line in the upper half of the figure above? That line shows the portion of personal income made up of wage and salary disbursements, as a percentage of total personal income. (As the figure notes, I’ve subtracted social insurance contributions such as Social Security taxes. Also, employer contributions to [...] Blog -
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State AGs Cave to Banksters
February 09, 2012 (cross posted at EconoMonitor) Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has long been skeptical of the negotiations by the State Attorneys General and the banksters over the foreclosure frauds (see here). And while I had held out some hope that California and New York would either refuse to join, or would insist on good terms, today’s [...] Blog -
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Pessimism on Greek Bailout Deal (If You Need Some)
February 09, 2012 To provide a little more perspective on the news of the just-announced Greek bailout agreement, I point you to this CNN Money piece from yesterday in which Dimitri Papadimitriou notes how abysmal the underlying economic growth trends remain (Greek employment depends a lot on shipping, which is faring poorly) and reminds us that the package, [...] Blog -
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Bernanke Visits Alternate Universe
February 09, 2012 Well then. Apparently not everyone agrees that the Federal Reserve is having trouble balancing its dual mandate. Rather, I should say that not everyone agrees about the nature of the imbalance. From the Boston Globe‘s reporting of Ben Bernanke’s appearance in front of the Senate Budget Committee, we find this: “It seems to me that [...] Blog -
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The “Shovel Ready” Excuse and a Fed for Public Works?
February 08, 2012 The latest chapter in the “why was the original stimulus so small?” story is a memo from December 2008 that reveals Larry Summers’ assessment as to why the stimulus (ARRA) had to be limited to around $800 billion—about half of what was necessary, in Summers’ estimation. There are various conclusions you can draw from this [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 706Inflationary and Distributional Effects of Alternative Fiscal Policies
February 08, 2012 This paper augments the basic Post-Keynesian markup model to examine the effects of different fiscal policies on prices and income distribution. This is an approach à la Hyman P. Minsky,...more Publication -
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Europe’s “Bankers First” Approach
February 07, 2012 “…while Europe’s leaders haven’t hit upon a way to forestall a years-long span of catastrophically high unemployment and falling living standards, they do appear to be really really really really committed to saving banks.” That’s Slate‘s Matthew Yglesias, who notes that this (seemingly exclusive) focus among European elites on saving their banks likely ends up [...] Blog -
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How to Delay the Next Financial Meltdown
February 03, 2012 Dimitri Papadimitriou and Randall Wray deliver a second installment of their joint assessment of the risks that a renewed global financial crisis might be triggered by events in Europe or the United States. In their latest one-pager they move past disputes over etiology and lay out their solutions for both sides of the pond: addressing [...] Blog -
One-Pager No. 24Τα σημερινά μέτρα απλά καθυστερούν την επόμενη παγκόσμια κατάρρευση
February 03, 2012 Είναι λανθασμένη η ερμηνεία της εξελισσόμενης καταστροφής στην Ευρώπη ως μια κρίση κρατικού χρέους. Το βασικό πρόβλημα δεν είναι η ασωτία των περιφερειακών λαών, αλλά η ίδια η αρχιτεκτονική της...more Publication -
One-Pager No. 24
Delaying the Next Global Meltdown
February 03, 2012 It’s a mistake to interpret the unfolding disaster in Europe as primarily a “sovereign debt crisis.” The underlying problem is not periphery profligacy, but rather the very setup of the...more Publication -
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State Taxes Are Wildly Regressive
February 03, 2012 Some indigestible food for thought: there is not a single state in the Union—not one—in which the top 1% of income earners pay a higher rate of state taxes than the bottom 20%. For the majority of states, it’s not even close: the poorest 20% pay somewhere between double and six times the tax rate [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 705
What Do Poor Women Want? Public Employment or Cash Transfers?
February 03, 2012 The literature on public employment policies such as the job guarantee (JG) and the employer of last resort (ELR) often emphasizes their macroeconomic stabilization effects. But carefully designed and implemented...more Publication -
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Auerback on the Latest Eurodrama
February 01, 2012 Marshall Auerback appeared on the Business News Network to give his take on the latest developments in the eurozone crisis; specifically with respect to the ongoing negotiations over the proposed (now 70 percent) haircut on Greek debt. Auerback also addressed the LTRO (noting the rather dramatic increase in the ECB’s balance sheet) and the credit [...] Blog -
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Hudson: The Neo-Rentier Economy
January 31, 2012 Michael Hudson is giving a talk titled “The Road to Debt Deflation, Debt Peonage, and Neofeudalism” at the Levy Institute on Friday, February 10 at 2:00 p.m. Hudson is a research associate at the Levy Institute and a financial analyst and president of the Institute for the Study of Long Term Economic Trends. He is [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 704
Ανισορροπίες; Ποιές ανισορροπίες;
January 27, 2012 Είναι κοινός τόπος να συνδέει κανείς τα νεοκλασικά οικονομικά με τη φυσική του 18ου ή του 19ου και την έννοια της ισορροπίας, με την ιδέα της συμπεριφοράς του εκκρεμούς, που...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 704
Imbalances? What Imbalances?
January 27, 2012 It is commonplace to link neoclassical economics to 18th- or 19th-century physics and its notion of equilibrium, of a pendulum once disturbed eventually coming to rest. Likewise, an economy subjected...more Publication -
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The Fetish for Liquidity (and Reform of the Financial System)
January 27, 2012 In his General Theory, J.M. Keynes argued that substandard growth, financial instability, and unemployment are caused by the fetish for liquidity. The desire for a liquid position is anti-social because there is no such thing as liquidity in the aggregate. The stock market makes ownership liquid for the individual “investor” but since all the equities [...] Blog -
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Is the labor market still stuck at its “new normal”?
January 26, 2012 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 [...] Blog -
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Breaking Up Bank of America?
January 25, 2012 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 [...] Blog