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BlogHudson on Debt and Democracy
December 05, 2011 Michael Hudson has an article appearing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on the history of debt and democracy. For those who can’t read German, Hudson has produced an abbreviated English version. An excerpt: The idea of an independent central bank being “the hallmark of democracy” is a euphemism for relinquishing the most important policy decision [...] Blog -
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“An ideologically useful but unrealistic vision of capitalism”
December 02, 2011 A great series of videos at INET collecting clips from Robert Johnson’s interview of Steve Keen, who is among those (few) credited with seeing the financial crisis coming. Hyman Minsky’s work has played a large role in Keen’s own thinking on this. In this particular clip, Keen talks about the ways in which economists have [...] Blog -
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Debating a Eurozone Exit Strategy
December 02, 2011 Yanis Varoufakis has an interesting exchange with Warren Mosler and Philip Pilkington, responding to their thoughts on the ideal path for a nation intending on breaking away from the euro. The Mosler-Pilkington “plan” (clearly gunning for the Wolfson Prize) is basically this: (1) the government in question starts using the new national currency as a [...] Blog -
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Time to Demand Transparency and Accountability at the Fed
December 01, 2011 In its continuing series on the Fed’s bail-out of Wall Street, Bloomberg estimates that the banks got a $13 billion hand-out from the Fed’s easy lending terms. Using the excuse of the crisis, the Fed lent funds at near-zero interest to the banks. This was supposed to encourage them to begin lending to firms and [...] Blog -
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The Austerians’ Secret Plan to Devastate Corporate Profits
November 30, 2011 Speaking of balances, late last week Martin Wolf delivered a helpful column (“Why cutting fiscal deficits is an assault on profits,” FT Nov. 24). Wolf writes that if households are cutting back, a government that attempts to reduce deficits while anticipating no substantial changes in net exports must expect corporate surpluses to shrink. But increased [...] Blog -
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Peeling Back the Veil at the Federal Reserve
November 30, 2011 At Citizen Vox Micah Hauptman uses the recent Bloomberg revelations (regarding the details of the Federal Reserve’s extraordinary efforts to stabilize the financial system) to frame a discussion of Fed transparency and accountability: The Fed has vigorously defended its secrecy, claiming that working behind closed doors is necessary to prevent panic in financial markets. According [...] Blog -
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Austerity for the Austere
November 29, 2011 In a new one-pager C. J. Polychroniou illustrates how dire the situation in Euroland is becoming, running briefly through the outlooks for Greece, Portugal and Ireland, Italy and Spain, Belgium, France, and Germany. From his entry on Italy and Spain (emphasis mine): Both nations are currently engulfed in debt flames (in spite of the fact [...] Blog -
One-Pager No. 21Biopolitics and Neoliberalism
November 29, 2011 With the crisis in the eurozone threatening the integrity of the European Union itself. German Chancellor Angela Merkel continues to brush aside calls to permit the European Central Bank to...more Publication -
One-Pager No. 21
Βιοπολιτική και νεοφιλελευθερισμός
November 29, 2011 Με την κρίση στην ευρωζώνη να απειλεί την ακεραιότητα της ίδιας της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης, η Γερμανίδα καγκελάριος Αγκελα Μέρκελ συνεχίζει να απορρίπτει το κάλεσμα για την μετατροπή της ΕΚΤ σε...more Publication -
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Slow Motion Disaster Speeding Up
November 29, 2011 In a recent interview Dimitri Papadimitriou talked about the EU leadership’s failure to prevent the euro crisis from entering its terminal phase and ran through the likely repercussions for the US financial system. Papadimitriou cites $3 trillion in exposure for US finance, half of which is mutual fund investments in European banks and sovereign debt—and [...] Blog -
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Confusion in Euroland
November 28, 2011 In a new one-pager, Dimitri Papadimitriou and Randall Wray team up to offer their take on the confusion that seems to afflict many approaches to the eurozone crisis. Government spending did not cause this crisis, they argue, and austerity will not solve it. Wray and Papadimitriou include this chart showing both government and private debt [...] Blog -
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End the Fed and Old Hickory
November 27, 2011 Randall Wray kicks off a discussion of the movement to reform or eliminate the Federal Reserve with a look at Andrew Jackson’s 1832 refusal to extend the charter of the Second Bank of the United States (effectively forestalling the creation of a central bank in the US): The basis of his objection to the US [...] Blog -
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Solvency First: A Workable Solution
November 23, 2011 In a new policy note Marshall Auerback argues that discussions of how to solve the euro crisis often conflate two distinct issues: solvency and insufficient demand. “Policymakers want the ECB to do both,” he writes, “but in fact, the ECB is only required to deal with the solvency issue. When you do that in a [...] Blog -
Policy Note No. 6Toward a Workable Solution for the Eurozone
November 22, 2011 Although it didn’t originate with an economist, the malaprop “It’s déjà vu all over again” is invariably what springs to mind in the aftermath of virtually any euro summit of...more Publication -
Policy Note No. 6
Προς μια εφαρμόσιμη λύση για την ευρωζώνη
November 22, 2011 Αν και δεν προήλθε από οικονομολόγο, η άκαιρη έκφραση «déjà vu ξανά από την αρχή» έρχεται πάντα στο μυαλό με το τέλος σχεδόν κάθε Συνόδου Κορυφής της ΕΕ τα τελευταία...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 697Distribution and Growth
November 22, 2011 This paper studies the effects of an (exogenous) increase of nominal wages on profits, output, and growth. Inspired by an article by Michał Kalecki (1991), who concentrated on the effects...more Publication -
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1967 Census of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: Digitized
November 22, 2011 [The following is from Joel Perlmann, Senior Scholar and Director of the Immigration, Ethnicity, and Social Structure program at the Levy Institute] In the summer of 1967, just after the Six-Day War brought the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Israel’s control, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics conducted a census of the occupied territories. [...] Blog -
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A Public Option for Banking?
November 21, 2011 In the course of an interview by Alan Minsky from a couple of weeks ago, Michael Hudson discussed a proposal for setting up a public option for banking (following the “Chicago Plan” of the 1930s and, says Hudson, Dennis Kucinich’s recent NEED Act): Instead of relying on Bank of America or Citibank for credit cards, [...] Blog -
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A Miserable but Revealing Online Game
November 18, 2011 The European Central Bank has finally responded to overwhelming public demand and created an online game, €conomia, in which you get to direct monetary policy for the eurozone. The game appears to reward achievement in a distressingly instructive manner. According to Matt Yglesias: …they grade you on the basis of a pure inflation targeting regime [...] Blog -
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Is the ECB Really Powerless? (Part III)
November 18, 2011 (Update added below) In our last post on this topic, we found the head of the Bundesbank citing legal obstacles (Article 123 of the EU treaty) as the reason why the European Central Bank cannot step up as lender of last resort. Can the ECB work around that Article 123 restriction? In the last couple [...] Blog -
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The Future of the Eurozone
November 18, 2011 It has become a cliché that the survival of the European Union (EU) depends on its ability to reform, either through enlargement—greater economic and fiscal coordination in the direction of some sort of federal state—or by getting smaller, with the eurozone becoming a true optimum currency area. Surprisingly enough, most analysts, including leading EU officials, [...] Blog -
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Financial Fraud Prosecutions Down 60% Over Last Decade
November 17, 2011 (Down 57.7 percent to be exact.) Sure, Wall Street has returned to claiming its 40 percent share, or so, of all corporate profits, while receiving little more than a regulatory slap on the wrist (which lobbyists are currently working to bring down to a light effleurage), but at the very least, at the end of [...] Blog -
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The Italian Solution: A Dissent
November 17, 2011 Yesterday a group of economists issued a petition to the (new, Berlusconi-free) Italian government. You can read it here. They set out what is mostly good advice based on the premise that Italy should remain in the EMU. Many of my friends signed the petition, but I had to decline. Here is the text of [...] Blog -
One-Pager No. 19
The Future of the Eurozone Does Not Lie with Enlargement
November 16, 2011 The European Union’s survival depends on its ability to reform, either through enlargement—greater economic and fiscal coordination in the direction of some sort of federal state—or by getting smaller, with...more Publication