How Repo Works
A primer on repo, which due to its critical role in funding major dealer banks, is an important component of bank reform efforts.
Read more...Category Archives: The dismal science
Weaker Unions Correlated with More Inequality, Higher Pay for Top Earners
The decline in union power plays an important role in explaining the rise in inequality in advanced economies.
Read more...Negative Real Rates Signify a Broken Financial System
How the debate on negative real rates has missed role of demand for “safe” collateral for derivative positions, and why that is central.
Read more...Michael Hudson: The Paradox of Financialized Industrialization
The great question today is whether post-feudal rentier capitalism will stifle industrial capitalism instead of serving it. The aim of finance is not merely to exploit labor, but to conquer and appropriate industry, real estate and government. The result is a financial oligarchy, neither industrial capitalism nor a tendency to evolve into socialism.
Read more...Michael Perelman: The Essential Handbook for Engineering an Unequal Society
While the thrust of Perelman’s post is no doubt familiar to readers, take note of how simple and few in number are the essential principles for creating a highly unequal society, and how easy it is to describe them them in antiseptic language.
Read more...Steve Keen: “Mainstream Economics” and Its Deadly Equilibrium Assumption
Steve Keen, one of the very few economists who forecast the crisis, on “What is ‘mainstream economics’ and why has it gone off the rails?”
Read more...Mark Blyth: “Austerity Cures Nothing”
This is a bracing, no-nonsene talk from economist Mark Blyth of Brown University, who is the author of Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century and Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea.
Read more...U.S. Climate Goals: A Reckoning
The current US lifestyle needs to go if the world is to succeed in limiting climate change.
Read more...The Financial Sector is Too Big
Has the financial sector become too large, absorbing too many resources, and enhancing instabilities?
Read more...Michael Hudson on Parasitic Financial Capitalism
An interview with Michael Hudson on his latest book, Killing the Host, which focuses on the destruction wrought by financial capitalism.
Read more...How ‘Competitive’ Tax and Incentive Policies Hurt Small U.S. Businesses
Supposedly ‘competitive’ policies on tax favor multinational firms over smaller, locally-based ones and also reduce market competition.
Read more...Gaius Publius: What Sanders Can Accomplish by Not Acting
Bernie Sanders, if elected President, could accomplish an enormous amount without Congress.
Read more...Who Needs Balanced Trade? Who Needs Balanced Budgets?
Who needs balanced trade? It’s time to challenge the premises of “trade” deals like the TransPacific Partnership.
Read more...Gaius Publius: What’s Called “Capitalism” Is Far from Any Model of Capitalism or Market
Tony Benn and Noam Chomsky take a hard look at what passes for capitalism.
Read more...Frances Coppola: The Great Yield Divergence
Puzzling over the Great Divergence of real and nominal yields. Ever since the Great Depression, nominal yields have been persistently above real yields Yet in the previous 200 years, despite periods of fiat currency and high inflation, real and nominal yields didn’t diverge. Why do they now?
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