Category Archives: Macroeconomic policy

Paul Ryan’s “New” Austerity Budget

Paul Ryan’s austerity budget is demonstrably failed economic policy in a new bottle.

IMF Imposing Even Tougher Austerity Conditions on New Loans

How the IMF has been devising even nastier versions of its austerity hairshirt in recent years.

Bill Black: Deflation Dementia

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.

Philip Pilkington: How Krugman’s Addiction to the ISLM Model Has Led to Repeated Bad Forecasts

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….

Joe Firestone: Progressives Need to Up Their Game Against Social Security’s Enemies

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

Joe Firestone: Progressives Re-Arrange the Deck Chairs for Obama’s Austerity Budget

With friends like the austerity-loving Congressional Progressive Caucus, who needs enemies?

Joe Firestone: No, Virginia, the Austerity Era Is Not Over

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?

Randy Wray: When Will They Ever Learn – Uncle Sam is not Robin Hood

Why Obama’s budget is yet another economic policy failure.

Jeff Madrick: Why the CBO Can’t Be Trusted

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.

Wage Shares Fall in the US, Germany and Many Other Countries While Financial Shocks Hit Emerging Economies

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.

Joe Firestone: Dear Dr. Krugman – Please Let Me Explain

Paul Krugman can’t explain why the deficit issue has suddenly dropped off the agenda. Perhaps I can help.

Philip Pilkington: Paul Krugman Pushes Factually Inaccurate Arguments About Argentina to Support Discredited Monetarist Ideas

Yves here. With Argentina one of the emerging markets economies whose currency has taken a huge tumble, its aggressive pro-labor, redistribution-oriented policies have come under attack (as an aside, one has to note that Turkey, which was touted as a model emerging economy a few years back, is also fighting a currency downspiral). And a predictable by-product is that some of Argentina’s policies have been misrepresented. For instance, it’s widely accused of “living beyond its means”. Yet as this post shows, the government ran surpluses in eight of the past ten years.

Danger of Global Recession After 30 Years of Neoliberal Counterrevolution

Heiner Flassbeck is one of the few economists to get into positions of influence despite being firmly opposed to the prevailing doctrine of neoliberalism. He’s also direct and articulate.

Ignacio Portes: How the Left Underestimates Chile’s Right-Wing Keynesians

Yves here. Please welcome Igancio Portes to NC. He’s a sophisticated young writer who has a sharp eye for power dynamics and is keenly interested in why the left (the genuine left as opposed to the fake version we have in the US) so often fails to achieve its intended results when it gets control of a government. He’ll be providing posts from time to time on Latin America, which is too often covered in a cursory and propagandized manner in the mainstream English language press.

Ann Pettifor on Combatting the Despotic Power of Finance

Economist Ann Pettifor discusses how economies around the world moved from using borrowing to support productive investments to fueling speculation and consumption, and how that led to the financial crisis. She also describes how the post-crisis response to the debt overhang isn’t merely ineffective but in fact counterproductive.