Crossposted from New Deal 2.0 By L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Budget deficits and government spending are necessary to end today’s crisis. In recent months, a form of mass hysteria has swept the country as fear of “unsustainable” budget deficits replaced the earlier concern about the financial crisis, […]
Read more...Der Spiegel (hat tip reader Richard Smith) presents a detailed sketch of German thinking, specifically that of chancellor Angela Merkel and finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, regarding how countries who fail an initial round of restructuring within the eurozone would be treated. This piece is very much worth reading, but the German proposal has all the […]
Read more...The New York Review of Books has an article by George Soros with his take on the challenges facing the Eurozone. It includes a good, high level recitation of the structural deficiencies in the Eurozone (in particular, its lack of a treasury), the evolution of recent stresses, and suggested remedies. While the initial discussion covers […]
Read more...Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ esteemed economics editor, launches another salvo against misguided austerity measures today. It’s also noteworthy that he argues from a Modern Monetary Theory perspective. Wolf first stresses that yields on government bonds show that inflationsitas are all wet: I have a question: do we believe that markets are unable to price […]
Read more...Rob Parenteau and I have an op-ed at the New York Times today. Rob’s last post here argued energetically that the now-established trend of the corporate sector to save, as opposed to invest in growth, in advanced economies, and even most emerging economies, was tantamount to capitalists abandoning their traditional role. It reminded me of […]
Read more...For those who did not catch wind of it, the Peterson Foundation, which has long had Social Security and Medicare in its crosshairs, held a bizarre set of 19 faux town hall meetings over the previous weekend to scare participants into compliance and then collect the resulting distorted survey data, presumably to use in a […]
Read more...I had the pleasure of finally meeting Steve Keen (he and his wife Melina are in New York) and it turns out he is adventuresome eater as well as thinker (he ordered maguro and natto even though I warned him, although I must say this restaurant’s version was actually gaijin friendly). Steve told me about […]
Read more...This is a wonderful short video by RSAnimate based on a talk by radical, as in Marxist, sociologist David Walker. For those who recoil, Marx was the first to take note of the propensity of capitalism towards instability. By contrast, neoclassical economics, which has dominated policymaking in advanced economies, posits that economies have a propensity […]
Read more...By Rob Parenteau, CFA, sole proprietor of MacroStrategy Edge, editor of The Richebacher Letter, and a research associate of The Levy Economics Institute Richard Alford has correctly identified the need to address global imbalances – rather than simply slouch our way back to some milder version of status quo before the pre- Lehman meltdown arrangement, […]
Read more...We noted a bit more than a week ago that we expect the European banks stress tests to backfire. The US version was a successful con game because the officialdom provided adequate disclosure about the process and stayed firmly on message, the banks were allowed to “manufacture” as analyst Meredith Whitney put it, impressive earnings, […]
Read more...The first section of this post is by Warren Mosler, the President of Valance Co. who writes for New Deal 2.0 Deficit doves are doing more harm than the hawks — here’s what they need to know. The deficit hawks are prevailing. The economy remains an economic and social disaster. Medicare has already been cut […]
Read more...By Wallace C. Turbrville, the former CEO of VMAC LLC who writes at New Deal 2.0 In the 1930s, a great many Southerners had no access to electricity. The Roosevelt administration perceived an enormous opportunity to restructure the region’s economy. By building facilities to bring power to the rural South, jobs would be created from […]
Read more...George Magnus, senior economic advisor at UBS, provided a reading of the Chinese central bank’s announcement on its currency policy over the past weekend. He sees it as political, “symbolic rather than substantive.” He also contends that China needs to make significant policy changes. From the Financial Times: It would be churlish not to acknowledge […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. Calls for global rebalancing are back in vogue, while the debate about the appropriate stance of domestic policy heats […]
Read more...Tonight brings an odd pairing: Lord Skidelksy, the highly respected biographer of Keynes, and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who is generally of the Austrian persuasion, both continuing, as each has, to object to the extreme measures in the process of being implemented in the eurozone. Now before you say that they are both Brits, and therefore suspect […]
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