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BlogThe Most Subversive Sign Seen at the “Occupy Wall Street” Protest
October 04, 2011 (continued at EconoMonitor) Blog -
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Tabula Rasa
October 04, 2011 “We’ve put this off for too long. We need debt relief and jobs and until we get these two things, I think recovery is impossible”—Randall Wray, quoted in a Reuters article examining the possibility of negotiating massive consumer debt relief. Although household borrowing has been declining, debt burdens remain sky high: (from the latest Levy [...] Blog -
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Flirting with MMT in the Financial Times
October 03, 2011 Martin Wolf, in the Financial Times last week, “thinks the unthinkable” and inches toward what sounds distinctly like a Modern Money Theory approach: “Alternatively, the government could fund itself from the central bank, directly. Better still, the government could increase its deficits, perhaps by slashing taxes, and taking needed funds from the central bank. Under [...] Blog -
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Ponzi Encore
October 03, 2011 “It may come as a surprise to some, but the original scheme by Charles Ponzi did not make its money by providing seven decades of benefits to retirees before folding up shop and leaving town with a suitcase full of cash,” writes Benjy Sarlin. In a new One-Pager Greg Hannsgen and Dimitri Papadimitriou display just [...] Blog -
One-Pager No. 13Τα στοιχεία για την κοινωνική ασφάλιση διαψεύδουν τους παλαβούς ισχυρισμούς περί απάτης
September 30, 2011 Ο ερευνητής Greg Hannsgen και ο πρόεδρος Δημήτρης Β. Παπαδημητρίου διαψεύδουν τους ισχυρισμούς από τους σκεπτικιστές της Κοινωνικής Ασφάλισης ότι το πρόγραμμα δεν είναι τίποτα περισσότερο από ένα «σχέδιο Πόνζι». Publication -
One-Pager No. 13
Social Security Data Belie Loopy Claims of a Fraud
September 30, 2011 Research Scholar Greg Hannsgen and President Dimitri B. Papadimitriou disprove claims made by Social Security skeptics that the program is nothing more than a “Ponzi scheme.” Publication -
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Wray on the Commodities Bubble and the Coming Crash
September 30, 2011 “The problem is that we have way too much money chasing way too few good assets. The total amount of financial bets out there is way over $600 trillion around the world. There just aren’t enough good investments to absorb that amount of money. So, what happens is they blow up–one asset after another. Then, [...] Blog -
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Hudson on Privatized Credit Creation
September 29, 2011 Michael Hudson on the ECB and eurozone national central banks’ restricted abilities to purchase government debt: Their banks have perpetuated the “road to serfdom” myth that a central bank runs the danger of fueling inflation if it creates money – in contrast to commercial banks, which supposedly run no such danger if they create money [...] Blog -
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Euro Toast, Anyone?
September 29, 2011 (Cross posted from EconoMonitor) Greece’s Finance Minister reportedly said that his nation cannot continue to service its debt and hinted that a fifty percent write-down is likely. Greece’s sovereign debt is 350 billion euros—so losses to holders would be 175 billion euros. That would just be the beginning, however. Nouriel Roubini has argued that the [...] Blog -
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Operation Twist Has a Twist
September 28, 2011 According to Alan Blinder, writing in the Wall Street Journal, the Fed’s latest operation includes a detail (“the sleeper in the package”) that is aimed at boosting the housing market: For more than a year now, the Fed has been allowing its portfolio of agency debt (e.g., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and mortgage-backed securities [...] Blog -
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How to Put More J in the AJA
September 28, 2011 Rania Antonopoulos, director of the Gender Equality and the Economy program at the Levy Institute, has a blog post up at Direct Care Alliance making the case for adding social care investments to the American Jobs Act, citing the large employment effects of direct job creation programs in early childhood education and long-term care for [...] Blog -
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Forbes: The Smart Money Is Insane
September 28, 2011 Money quote from a recent Forbes article: “with the right parenting [psychopaths] can become successful stockbrokers instead of serial killers.” Also, a reminder that when we talk about how “the markets” are reacting to this or that, we’re talking about this guy: (hat tip to Thorvald Grung Moe, our visiting Norwegian central banker) Blog -
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Where the Action Is on Financial Reform
September 27, 2011 In the case of a major reform like the Dodd-Frank Act, the attention spans of most journalists and opinion-mongers inevitably peak around the legislative battle, pronouncements are made in the aftermath, and then everyone moves on. But as articles like this remind us, so much of the action still remains to be played out, in [...] Blog -
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Adam Smith Doesn’t Agree with You: Regulation Edition
September 27, 2011 It’s a time-honored tradition, and something of a mug’s game, to pick quotations from Adam Smith that clash with contemporary free market doctrine. But uses and misuses of Smith aside, this one happens to hit the conceptual nail on the head. Jared Bernstein, who is evidently working on a longer piece on debt, pulls this [...] Blog -
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History of the Think Tank (or, Your Fish)
September 23, 2011 “A rollicking saga that involves all sorts of things not normally associated with think tanks – chickens, pirate radio, retired colonels, Jean Paul Sartre, Screaming Lord Sutch, and at its heart is a dramatic and brutal killing committed by one of the very men who helped bring about the resurgence of the free market in [...] Blog -
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Commodities Bubble Reax
September 23, 2011 Wray responds to critics of yesterday’s post, and includes an excerpt from his policy brief on the topic (for a more condensed version, highlights of the brief are here). Blog -
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The Biggest Speculative Bubble of All
September 22, 2011 (Cross posted from EconoMonitor) Back in fall of 2008 I wrote a piece examining what was then the biggest bubble in human history: http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/ppb_96.pdf. Say what? You thought that was tulip bulb mania? Or, maybe the NASDAQ hi-tech hysteria? No, folks, those were child’s play. From 2004 to 2008 we experienced the biggest commodities bubble [...] Blog -
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Irving Fisher would have supported QE
September 21, 2011 If you haven’t already read Fisher’s 1933 article “The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions,” read it today. It contains his theory of booms and busts that later inspired Hyman Minsky to develop the Financial Instability Hypothesis (HM duly acknowledged his debt to Fisher in his 1986 book). Fisher’s article is unfortunately becoming more relevant by [...] Blog -
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Not Just a Greek Problem
September 21, 2011 Dimitri Papadimitriou was interviewed for Ian Masters’ “Background Briefing” segment regarding Greece’s place in the eurozone debt crisis, the inevitability of default (“… it’s going to happen much sooner than we think”), and other issues. Listen here. Blog -
Working Paper No. 687Access to Markets and Farm Efficiency
September 21, 2011 This paper presents an empirical investigation of the relationship between the spread, spatially and temporally, of market institutions and improvements in the productivity and efficiency of farmers. The data used...more Publication -
Working Paper No. 686
Estimating the Impact of the Recent Economic Crisis on Work Time in Turkey
September 21, 2011 This paper provides estimates of the impact of the recent economic crisis on paid and unpaid work time in Turkey. The data used in this study come from the first...more Publication -
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The End (of the Euro) Is Near
September 19, 2011 Dimitri Papadimitriou writes in the Huffington Post about two different “endgame” scenarios for the euro: The collapse of the euro project will break in one of two ways. Most likely, and least desirable, is that nations will leave the euro in a coordinated dissolution which might ideally resemble an amicable divorce. As with most divorces, [...] Blog -
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Conventional approach to central banking needs revision
September 16, 2011 Brookings issued a report yesterday, called Rethinking Central Banking, by a group of high-profile economists including Eichengreen, Rajan, Reinhart, Rogoff and Shin. The group – called the Committee on International Economic Policy and Reforms – argues that the conventional approach to central banking needs to be rethought. The neat separation between price stability and other [...] Blog -
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A Graphical Play in Three Acts
September 15, 2011 Since graphical information manages to fail less spectacularly at getting people to change their minds, here are three graphs; one addressing what we ought (not) to do, one addressing what we are doing, and the other what we can do. The first comes from the IMF, compiling 30 years of evidence showing that fiscal contraction [...] Blog