Full disclosure: I’ve known Amar Bhide for roughly 25 years (we both worked on the Citibank account at McKinsey, albeit never on the same project) and although we correspond only occasionally, I continue to regard his as a particularly keen observer and original thinker. He was briefly a proprietary trader, then an associate professor at […]
Read more...It is truly astonishing to watch how determined the economics orthodoxy is to defend its inexcusable, economy-wrecking performance in the runup to the financial crisis. Most people who preside over disasters, say from a boating accident or the failure of a venture, spend considerable amounts of time in review of what happened and self-recrimination. Yet […]
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. As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they […]
Read more...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...Economists have been rewarded all too well for fetishing numbers and mathematics. The self-conscious effort within the discipline to turn it into a science (a goal most real scientists would deem to be impossible, given the fickle nature of human behavior), which meant making it more mathematical, has resulted in economists being better paid than […]
Read more...By Max Bruche. Assistant Professor of Economics, CEMFI and Gerard Llobet i Codina, Associate Professor of Economics, CEMFI. Originally posted at VoxEU Bank bailouts have been controversial from the outset, with some commentators saying that they reward banks for making risky loans. This column investigates the idea of an asset buyback in which a special […]
Read more...This post first appeared on June 23, 2007 A neat little analysis by Ross Eisenbrey at the Economic Policy Institute may be difficult for union foes to explain away. It shows the proportion of workers covered by collective bargaining agreements in major European countries and the US and then shows productivity growth country by country […]
Read more...This post first appeared on May 8, 2007 The debate among Serious Economists about the benefits of free trade continues, and Dani Rodrik continues to take a dispassionate look at the data and the models. This post, although a bit geeky, is intriguing because Rodrik dissects an analysis cited by Bernanke in a recent speech, […]
Read more...This post first appeared on May 1, 2007 Due to Paul Volcker’s having broken the back of inflation in the early 1980s, and Alan Greenspan performing what appears to be adequately on the substance of his job and masterfully at the showmanship, the Fed’s reputation is at an all time high. And that in and […]
Read more...This post first appeared on February 5, 2007 We have to admit to being a little slow on the uptake from time to time. We reported on the FT’s February 2 editorial, which commented on the publication of the first of four reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (Media watch item: still no […]
Read more...By Kati Suominen, Trans-Atlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, cross posted from VoxEU The global crisis has led some to question the dollar’s place as the dominant currency. This column discusses three camps in the literature: those advocating a new synthetic global currency, those arguing that a new reserve currency will emerge, […]
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...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...