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BlogOn Sectoral Balances, Power Imbalances, and More
November 03, 2011 [The following is the text of Senior Scholar Randall Wray’s presentation, delivered October 28, 2011, at the annual conference of the Research Network Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies (IMK) in Berlin. This year’s conference was titled “From crisis to growth? The challenge of imbalances, debt, and limited resources.”] It is commonplace to link Neoclassical economics to [...] Blog -
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Is the Union Unraveling?
November 02, 2011 In the LA Times today, Dimitri Papadimitriou writes about the very real danger of seeing the end of economic union in Europe; a union Papadimitriou insists is ultimately worth saving. He quickly sketches out what a serious first step toward a solution might look like (rather than this patchwork of half-measures that is sure to [...] Blog -
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Haircut Failure
November 02, 2011 C. J. Polychroniou delivers his verdict on the recent eurozone “haircut” deal for Greece (that already looks likely to fall apart given yesterday’s news that Papandreou will submit the plan to a sure-to-be-defeated referendum). In this new one-pager, he highlights a number of elements that make the deal destined for failure—even if the referendum were [...] Blog -
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GDP growth and U.S. exports
November 01, 2011 This post provides our latest update of the quarterly figures for the real and nominal GDP of U.S. trading partners (1970q1-2016q4), which were presented a few years ago in a Levy Institute working paper and have now been updated to the second quarter of 2011, with predictions up to 2016 based on the latest IMF [...] Blog -
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Austerity Still Not Expansionary
October 31, 2011 At Eurointelligence, Rob Parenteau digs into a recently-leaked “Troika” (the IMF, European Central Bank, and European Commission) document that discusses the outlines of a Greek debt restructuring deal. Among the revelations Parenteau extracts from the document is evidence of a growing willingness to concede that fiscal consolidation is not expansionary. As Parenteau comments: In 2009 [...] Blog -
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Get the Levy News
October 28, 2011 Sign up here to get the latest updates on new publications at the Levy Economics Institute, including Institute news, featured scholars, and media appearances, sent directly to your inbox. Blog -
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Money and the Public Purpose: The Modern Money Theory Approach
October 27, 2011 [The following is the text of my keynote presentation delivered October 20th at “The Capitalist Mode of Power: Past, Present, Future,” a conference that took place at York University in Toronto.] Back in 1997 I was finishing up my book titled Understanding Modern Money and I sent the manuscript to Robert Heilbroner to see if [...] Blog -
Working Paper No. 694Reducing Economic Imbalances in the Euro Area
October 27, 2011 This paper evaluates whether the 2011 national stability programs (SPs) of the euro area countries are instrumental in achieving economic stability in the European Monetary Union (EMU). In particular, we...more Publication -
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The Status Quo: Fiscal Contraction
October 27, 2011 Ryan Avent digs into the latest GDP numbers at Free Exchange and lays out a set of facts that ought to be drilled into the heads of the public and every opinion-maker: fiscal policy, particularly when you factor in state and local governments, has basically been either null or contractionary for almost two years now. [...] Blog -
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Galbraith: Short-Term Stimulus Not Good Enough
October 26, 2011 James Galbraith, interviewed by Henry Blodget, suggests that more “stimulus,” if this means a program that will run out in a couple of years, is not sufficient. What we need, he insists, is something more like a “strategic plan” for the next 10-15 years, investing in growth and dealing with problems like energy, climate change, [...] Blog -
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Finance Matters
October 26, 2011 Today in the New Yorker John Cassidy asks “where is the new Keynes”? Where, in other words, are the new ideas that have emerged from this historic economic crisis? While there is nothing, he insists, comparable to a new Keynesianism, there has been a rediscovery of some “important ideas.” The first: 1. Finance matters. This [...] Blog -
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Eurozone Myth Busting
October 25, 2011 Research Associates Marshall Auerback and Rob Parenteau have a long piece up at Naked Capitalism taking on the lazy anthropology that poses as economic analysis regarding Greece and the euro zone crisis. With respect to the image of Greeks lolling about living off an absurdly generous dole at the expense of frugal Germans, they provide [...] Blog -
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The Limits of Pump Priming
October 25, 2011 Here’s one fairly standard reading of our economic policy challenge: the economy needs more pump priming, the federal government has more than enough fiscal space to provide it, but for political reasons it won’t be forthcoming. (If you needed further evidence of that last proposition, take a look at the latest House Republican job creation [...] Blog -
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Levy President on the Eurozone Contagion
October 24, 2011 “You cannot solve the problem with this level of financing. It’s not possible.” Dimitri Papadimitriou, interviewed yesterday for Ian Masters’ “Background Briefing,” gets to the heart of the matter on the shortcomings of the proposals for resolving the eurozone crisis that are currently on the table. Papadimitriou argues that we’re likely looking at a default [...] Blog -
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Levy Scholars to Advise on Fed Reform
October 24, 2011 The office of Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent – Vermont) has announced the formation of a panel tasked with drafting legislation to reform the Federal Reserve. Levy Senior Scholars Randall Wray and James Galbraith and Research Associate Stephanie Kelton have been named to the team. Wray’s recent brief on the Federal Reserve, co-authored with Scott Fullwiler [...] Blog -
One-Pager No. 16Beyond Pump Priming
October 21, 2011 The American Jobs Act now before Congress relies largely on a policy of aggregate demand management, or “pump priming”: injecting demand into a frail economy in hopes of boosting growth...more Publication -
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Taxing the wealthy will not kill jobs
October 21, 2011 I study the distribution of wealth and income here at the Levy Institute, so I read the first five hundred words of Robert Samuelson’s Washington Post column on inequality (“The backlash against the rich,” Oct. 9th) with interest and approval. But I knew it couldn’t last. Once Samuelson gets beyond description and attempts explanation and [...] Blog -
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40 Million Pennies for Your Thoughts
October 20, 2011 Are you a reclusive economist-savant who happens to know how a member state might be able to exit the European Monetary Union in an orderly fashion? Would your idea appeal to a center-right British think tank? If so, you need to shave your beard and put in for the Wolfson Prize (don’t worry, with the [...] Blog -
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The Vampire Squid of Wall Street Is Hemorrhaging
October 19, 2011 (cross posted at EconoMonitor) Government Sachs posted its second quarterly loss since it went public in 1999. No doubt that has sent Washington scrambling to try to plug the leak. (Wouldn’t it be fun to listen in on Timothy Geithner’s incoming phone calls from 200 West Street, NYC, today?) Lloyd “doing God’s work” Blankfein blamed [...] Blog -
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Tcherneva on the Radio
October 19, 2011 Pavlina Tcherneva was interviewed recently on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “At Issue” with Ben Merens and took questions from listeners. She argues that while there are plenty of good job creation ideas available, it is ultimately the toxic political environment that is holding us back. Beginning at the 33:54 mark, responding to a question about payroll [...] Blog -
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How Much Food Will a Week’s Earnings Buy? (Fall Edition)
October 18, 2011 (Click to enlarge.) Signs of serious inflation in broad price indices such as the consumer price index (CPI) have been rare over the past few years, confounding many critics of the stimulus bill and the Fed’s efforts to reduce interest rates. However, as I reported in a blog entry last spring, most food-commodity prices were [...] Blog -
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Modern Money Links
October 18, 2011 1. John Quiggin offers a critique of what he calls a “misreading of MMT.” 2. Bill Mitchell, interviewed by the Harvard International Review, waxes functional (emphasis added): Particular budget outcomes should never be a policy target. What the government should be targeting is real goals, by which I mean a sustainable growth rate buoyed by [...] Blog -
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Polychroniou on Merkel-Sarkozy
October 18, 2011 In his latest one-pager (“Dawn of a New Day for Europe?“) C. J. Polychroniou anticipates the outlines of a Merkel-Sarkozy agreement on policies designed to address the eurozone debt crisis, and comes away skeptical. Polychroniou suggests that a massive infusion of emergency funding, somewhere on the order of 2 to 3 trillion euros, would be [...] Blog -
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Great White Northern Class Traitor
October 17, 2011 Add central banker Mark Carney (governor of the Bank of Canada—and former vampire squidite) to the list of class traitors unlikely supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement, calling it “entirely constructive“: In a television interview, Mr. Carney acknowledged that the movement is an understandable product of the “increase in inequality” – particularly in the [...] Blog