Piketty’s Wikipedia page says that he’s a Keynesian. Well, I don’t see it at all. His book contains a section on the public debt in historical perspective and it is desperately misinformed.
Read more...Randy Wray clears up some of the “bizarre” claims that have been made about Modern Monetary Theory
Read more...Yves here. The RT show Boom/Bust has an informative conversation with Yanis Varoufakis on the conundrum of the recent successful Greece bond offering.
Read more...Some of the favored children of the economic elite who have a public presence, work hard in their writing and speaking to divert attention from inequality and oligarchy issues by raising the issue of competition between seniors and millennials for “scarce” Federal funds.
Read more...Paul Ryan’s austerity budget is demonstrably failed economic policy in a new bottle.
Read more...How the IMF has been devising even nastier versions of its austerity hairshirt in recent years.
Read more...Yves here. This piece by Bill Black not only does a great job of kneecapping some typically poor MSM reporting, but it’s also valuable as a high-level overview of the insanity of European economic policies.
Read more...Some people often ask why I complain about Krugman. “Hey Phil, Krugman is a good guy. He likes government spending. You like government spending. Therefore you must like Krugman,” says our budding young Socrates. Well, I’ll tell you why….
Read more...Yves here. I must confess I find it difficult to counter the simple-minded and inaccurate arguments of the deficit scaremongers. Joe Firestone offers some pointers
Read more...With friends like the austerity-loving Congressional Progressive Caucus, who needs enemies?
Read more...If the President’s budget were enacted by Congress, and OMB’s projections over the next decade hold, it would almost certainly mean economic stagnation punctuated by recession over the next decade. Would it also mean austerity?
Read more...Why Obama’s budget is yet another economic policy failure.
Read more...Yves here. I’ve written from time to time how openly partisan the Congressional Budget Office is, not in the traditional sense of favoring one party over the other, but as serving as an key enforcer of neoliberal ideology. For instance, its projections of government debt to GDP ratios were highly misleading by virtue of failing to net out financial assets. And after being called out for that error in paper, what did the CBO do? Make it even harder to find the data to prove the magnitude of their misdirection.
Read more...ves here. This Real News Network interview with Yilmaz Akyuz, formerly the Director of the Division on Globalization and Development Strategies at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), describes how the problems that produced the financial crisis have morphed into new, no less troubling problems. One key part of this discussion focuses on how China has adapted to its considerably smaller trade surplus, and why having Germany as the new excessive exporter poses new perils to the global economy.
Read more...Paul Krugman can’t explain why the deficit issue has suddenly dropped off the agenda. Perhaps I can help.
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