Double Whammy: Implicit Subsidies and the Great Financial Crisis
Follow the subsidies, and you will understand why we had the crisis and why not enough has been done to prevent a recurrence.
Read more...Category Archives: The dismal science
Jumping the Abyss: Marriner S. Eccles and the New Deal, 1933-1940
An in-depth look at Marriner Eccles’ ideas and policies, and how well they have withstood the test of time.
Read more...Victorian Central Banks and the Myth of Independence
Central banks have not always been independent, inflation targeting bodies, and to treat them as such is to obscure their complex histories and alternative institutional constellations.
Read more...Marshall Auerback: Central Bankers as ‘Dealers of Last Resort’
In their 21st-century role as counterparty/dealer/insurer of last resort, central bankers must not simply use their balance sheets indiscriminately to provide a liquidity backstop during the downturns. They must embrace this counterparty role as an umpire, rather than an enabler.
Read more...Why We Should Worry About Monopsony
Why the Fed is, rather late in the game, concerned about monopsony power.
Read more...The “Petrodollar” Has No Bearing on Any Country’s Ability to Employ Its People Fully
Debunking the petrodollar myth.
Read more...Market Power, Low Productivity, and Lagging Wages: The Real Drivers
To understand labor productivity—and growing inequality—you have to look at the “dual economy”
Read more...Lump-of-Labor Fallacy: The Nastiest Motives of Nasty People
Why the lump-of-labor fallacy is bad for workers and for economics.
Read more...How to Calculate the Costs of #MedicareForAll Properly
A takedown of the Mercatus #MedicareForAll debacle from MMT’s macro-economic bookkeeping perspective.
Read more...Rethinking Social Progress in the 21st Century
A new report examines the path to global social progress. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers.
Read more...Empires, Past and Present
Which countries fit criteria that would lead them to be classified as empires?
Read more...Richard Murphy: Writers of Labour’s “Fiscal Rule” Lash Themselves to the Austerity Mast
Labour’s economists show their Third Way colors and advocate austerity-generating policy rules that might as well have been penned by former Treasury Secretary, later Citigroup vice chairman Bob Rubin.
Read more...Michael Hudson: Life and Thought – An Autobiography
Michael Hudson discusses his life as a young Communist intellectual, how he became interested in economics and finance, his life in academia, and his recent work on rentier capitalism and debt jubilees.
Read more...How Hedge Fund Activists Coopted “Shareholder Democracy”
How hedge fund activists, who largely operate as a type of corporate raider, have subverted the notion of “shareholder democracy” and what can be done to rein them in.
Read more...The Explicable Mystery of the National Debt
Why US Treasury bond issuance and Federal deficits are functionally not debt at all.
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