Michael Perelman: The Rise of Free-Trade Imperialism and Military Keynesianism
On the economic and political origins of America’s stealth imperialism and military Keynesianism, as opposed to Keynes’ original version.
Read more...Category Archives: Free markets and their discontents
The Chronic Exporters’ Curse?
Why the much-envied position of being a chronic exporter isn’t quite a bed of roses.
Read more...New Zealand: the Shell Company Incorporation Franchises (II) (and Ukraine)
The nuts-and bolts view of these looting mechanisms shows how corruption actually works.
Read more...Abigail Field: Privatization Is Driven By Private Greed and Public Cowardice (and Public Greed, Too)
“Privatization” and “public-private-partnerships” for infrastructure and other public assets are scams driven by private greed and public cowardice.
Read more...Is the Strong Dollar the Real Cause of the Collapse of US Manufacturing and Secular Stagnation?
Yves here. I managed to miss this VoxEU post from last month, and it is still timely. It argues that economists have generally been using the wrong measure of relative dollar strength to assess how the level of the currency played into the loss of manufacturing jobs and insufficient internal demand, now better known as “secular stagnation”.
Read more...Wolf Richter: Hidden Leverage Threatens To Blow Up the Markets
Leverage-on-leverage vehicles were the big driver of the global financial crisis. Some investors are going back to their overly-risky ways.
Read more...Bill Black: GAO and Wall Street Journal Whitewash Huge Criminal Bank Frauds
Every day brings multiple new scandals. At least they used to be scandals. Now they’re simply news items strained of ethical content by business journalists who see no evil, hear no evil, and speak not about evil.
Read more...Did Canada’s Middle Class Just Get More Affluent Than the US’s, or Did that Happen Long Ago?
The media understates how much the prosperity of the US middle class has fallen on a relative basis.
Read more...The Stealthy, Ugly Growth of Corporatized Medicine
If you think medical care in the US is already suffering from crapification, the Brave New World of corporatized medicine will take it to a new level.
Read more...Corrupting Piketty in the 21st Century
Like all reformation efforts in the discipline, Piketty (and fellow students of inequality) will be met by fierce internal opposition, the ultimate outcome of which is to twist his work into something it is not in order to pretend that it supports the status quo.
Read more...Philip Pilkington: Unemployment and Wages in the US – A Tale of Institutional Change
A fresh look at historical data shows how the relationship between unemployment and wage growth changed radically starting in 1981.
Read more...Why Are We Still Working So Hard?
Why are long hours and more focus on work the new normal?
Read more...Satyajit Das: Flash Boys’ HFT Mumbo Jumbo
Satyajit Das reviews Michael Lewis’ book Flash Boys. Das finds it to be deeply flawed,: deficient in its understanding of HFT and not very well written.
Read more...Joan Robinson’s “Introduction to Modern Economics”
One of the more shocking things about Robinson’s textbook is the way many core features of neoclassical economics are brushed away in a sentence or paragraph as mere metaphysical reasoning. She defines such reasoning as being “applied to a use of language that conveys no factual information, describes no logical relations nor gives precise instructions and yet is calculated to affect conduct.”
Read more...Matt Stoller: How Uber Creates an Algorithmic Monopoly to Extract Rents
We are not setting the price. The market is setting the price. We have algorithms to determine what that market is.<
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