Marshall Auerback on Why Quantitative Easing Won’t Fix the Economy
Via Bloomberg: View the segment here.
Read more...Category Archives: Macroeconomic policy
Guest Post: Modern Monetary Theory — A Primer on the Operational Realities of the Monetary System
By Scott Fullwiler, Associate Professor of Economics at Wartburg College At its core, there are two parts to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). The first is a description of how the monetary system actually works, mostly focusing upon interactions between the central bank, the treasury, and the financial system, though this part also requires a very […]
Read more...Why Germany’s Rebound Is Not Such Good News
Wolfgang Munchau has an intriguing piece at the Financial Times debunking the idea the Germany’s recent peppy growth numbers are as salutary as Mr. Market seems to believe. Part of his message isn’t necessarily all that surprising, and comes towards the end of the article: ….it is important to keep some perspective and not draw […]
Read more...Fears of Regime Change in New York
Normally, I don’t report on anecdotes from my immediate circle, but a set of conversations in less than a 24 hour period suggests that even those comparatively unaffected by the crisis are bracing themselves for the possibility of sudden, large-scale, adverse changes. And that sort of gnawing worry seems to be growing in New York […]
Read more...Why Treasury Bonds Do Not Fund Our Federal Deficit
This is a particularly clear and succinct explanation of the role of Treasury auctions in monetary operations at Pragmatic Capitalism (hat tip BondSquawk), in a post I urge you to read in its entirety, “The Myth of the Great Bond “Bubble.” The government bond market is merely a monetary tool that the central bank utilizes […]
Read more...Auerback: Which Party Poses the Real Risk to Social Security’s Future?
By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and fund manager who writes at New Deal 2.0 Hint: it’s not Republicans. Social Security remains one of the greatest achievements of the Democratic Party since its creation 75 years ago. Although Republicans have historically fulminated against the program (Ronald Reagan once likened it as something akin to “socialism”), […]
Read more...Alford: What Kind of Science Should Economics Be When It Grows Up?
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. As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they […]
Read more...The Fed’s Fallacious “QE Lite” Logic
The Fed seems to be exhibiting a pretty bad case of “if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” syndrome, particularly when it has (or perhaps more accurately, had) other tools at its disposal. In case you somehow missed it, global markets got a bad case of deflation heebie jeebies […]
Read more...Steve Keen: Bank Profits a sign of economic sickness, not health
By Steve Keen, Associate Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney, and author of the book Debunking Economics, cross posted from Steve Keen’s Debt Deflation. The record $6 billion profit that the Commonwealth Bank is expected to announce today is a sign of an economy that has been taken over by […]
Read more...Summer Rerun: Has the Credit Contraction Finally Begun?
This post first appeared on July 11, 2007 Readers of this blog know that I have been concerned about the state of the credit markets for some time. We’ve had (until the last month or so), rampant liquidity feeding asset bubbles in virtually every asset class except the dollar and the yen, tight risk spreads […]
Read more...Medicare Trustees: Fund Now Viable till 2029
Don’t expect this updated assessment, that Medicare now is expected to be viable till 2029, to stem the expected push to gut Social Security and Medicare. From Bloomberg: Medicare will gain an extra 12 years of fiscal life as a result of the health law signed in March by President Barack Obama, a government report […]
Read more...Guest Post: Equilibrium Analysis
→ Rajiv Sethi In a recent post on his (consistently interesting) blog, David Murphy questions the value of equilibrium analysis in economics and finance, and points to two earlier posts of his in which the same point is made. Here he is in July 2007: An interesting post on the Street Light Blog, on currency […]
Read more...China and bust?
From Ed …the private sector in the west is in a higher savings and slower growth mode. The only way that the government can net save at the same time is via an increase in net exports to the emerging economies. The FT’s Geoff Dyer is right when he writes the “G20 looks to Beijing […]
Read more...Something has to give
Cross-posted from The price of everything By Tim Price, Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management, a London-based fund manager “More than half of all workers have experienced a spell of unemployment, taken a cut in pay or hours or been forced to go part-time. The typical unemployed worker has been jobless for nearly six […]
Read more...Austerity and Empire
Economists really do seem to struggle with history – and sometimes geography, too. Brad DeLong needs to remember that the Financial Times is published in London. As far as most combatants were concerned, the second world war broke out in September 1939. Niall Ferguson, FT, 20th July 2010. Goodish point. On the other hand, Ferguson […]
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