David Dayen: Productivity Rose 7.7% Post-Great Recession; Workers Have Seen None of It
I’ve said this before in other venues, but this really is the chart that explains modern America:
Category Archives: Macroeconomic policy
Why Progressives Are Lame
Yesterday, we ran a post by Bill McKibben on leadership in social change movements. McKibben argued for a “small l” leader model versus a “big L” leader, which readers debated. Some argued that the Leader model was really code for “Great Man” that was a less viable approach than it once was due to assassinations. Others were struck by the emphasis on distributed leadership, which is an obvious analogy to modern computer and communications networks, and how political commentators to frame their ideas of social order in terms of the technology of the day. Some pointed out that the idea of minimal oversight and control of communities was a long-stading Utopian line of thought, often espoused by people who wound up implementing the exact opposite.
However, I was particularly struck by Dan Kervick’s remark, which came late in the thread:
Read more...Wolf Richter: Cisco CEO Reports Record Sales And “Lumpy” Demand, Just Like In November 2007, A Month Before Stocks Began To Crash
As Wolf Richter argues, Cisco has been a harbinger of market turns, and he describes an earnings call which struck him as eerily similar to another inflection point, that of fall 2007.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Three Tales of Greeks Coping With Breakdown
By Yanis Varoufakis, a professor of economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his blog
As a child, I was fascinated by my mother’s, and her mother’s, tales from the 1940s, and in particular their stories about life under the Nazi occupation. Greece is in the grip of a calamity that those who lived through the 1940s had thought they would never have to live through again. But I must desist. For this is not the place for analysis and argumentation about our contemporary Greek catastrophe. This is a piece of brief summer tales. So, allow me to relate three such stories.
Read more...Bill Black: Rajan Calls Krugman “Paranoid” for Criticizing Reinhart’s and Rogoff’s Research
By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posed from New Economic Perspectives
This article discusses a simmering feud among five of the most prominent economists in the world (two of them Nobel Laureates).
Read more...“Profitless” Stocks, Underinvestment, the Cannibalization of Labor, and Levitating Stock Prices
our humble blogger generally refrains from writing about stocks for a host of reasons. But several interesting news bits have prompted me to depart from my usual practice.
Read more...Stephanie Kelton: Reading Between the Lines – A Memo from Fed Chairman Marriner Eccles
Stephanie Kelton does an important service in discussing a memo from the Fed chairman during the Roosevelt Administration, Marriner Eccles. I was reminded of Eccles’ a fine appreciation for how the real economy worked and how government actions affected business. This keen eye for the fundamentals is sorely absent among most macroeconomists and policy experts today.
Read more...To End the Eurozone Crisis, Bury the Debt Forever
The Eurozone’s debt crisis is getting worse despite appearances to the contrary. How can we end it? This column presents five major options for reducing crisis countries’ debt. Looking into the details, it seems the only option that is both realistic and effective is for countries to default by selling monetised debt to the ECB. Moral hazard aside, burying the debt seems to be the only way we can end the crisis.
Read more...European Pundits Starting to Give Up on the Eurozone
We’ve been pointing out for some time that Germany has refused to budge from wanting contradictory things relative to the Eurozone. Now something still has to break, but some of my correspondents who’ve just been in Europe now think that we will see a political crisis in Europe before we see an economic one, and that, like objects in your rear view mirror, may be closer than it appears.
Read more...James Galbraith on Social Breakdown and Financial Stress in Europe and Why the Word “Stimulus” Needs to be Banned
Yanis Varoufakis provided the English translation of a new interview with James Galbraith published in Suddeutsche Zeitung. Galbraith focuses on institutional arrangements, the need for restructuring and reform, and constraints on growth.
Read more...Chicago CEO Club, With Rahm and Pritzkers on Board, Pushed for Chicago Bond Downgrade, Whacking Local Investors and Pension-Holders
Even more so than most cities, Chicago has had the best government money can buy. In this case, the money is willing to engage in a scorched-earth policy of crushing local investors and wrecking the city budget to achieve its end of taming unions and making Chicago even easier pickings for looting via infrastructure sales.
Read more...Nathan Tankus: Marx on Ireland, Then and Now
There are many seminal thinkers who are so well known they’re never read. This category includes Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, Immanuel Kant, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Fredrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes and many, many others.
One thinker I’d like to focus on is Karl Marx.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: The Annotated Wolfgang Schäuble (PR Versus Reality, European Periphery Edition)
Yves here. Varoufakis performs the important service of translating what is effectively a formal communication from Germany on its stance towards subject states, meaning the Eurozone periphery.
Read more...Beyond Debt and Growth: An Interview with Robert Pollin
Yves here. As readers likely recall, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst wrote a paper, “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,” which revealed serious methodological problems with one of the linchpin papers used to justify cutting government spending even in times of recession. Robert Pollin here discusses some of the bigger issues in the political and economic debates on austerity and the aftermath of the financial crisis.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Europe Resorts to Authoritarianism to Paper Over Banking and Austerity Failures
Yves here. Because the European slow-motion train wreck is turning out to be particularly slow, it’s almost become background noise in the US, almost a lesser version of the now two lost decades in Japan. But what is happing in Europe is less benign and less likely to be able to continue anywhere near that long.
Read more...