Category Archives: The dismal science

A Parallel Currency for Greece: Part II

Yves here. I’m quite interested in reader reactions to this scheme. My big reservation is that the amount of the scrip devised by the authors, the TCC, has to be limited to the an amount of discount of future tax payments that is deemed to be credible. Given that Bill Mitchell has estimated that Greece […]

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Latest Award of Frederic Mishkin Iceland Prize for Intellectual Integrity: Former CBO Director Holtz-Eakin’s Garbage-In, Garbage Out Attack on Dodd Frank

As readers know all too well, there is so much obviously half-baked economic research that this site could turn itself over to shredding examples and only scratch the surface. But we have established the Frederick Mishkin Iceland Prize for Intellectual Integrity to highlight outstanding examples of economic shillery in which the attempt at analysis is obviously cooked so as to produce a pre-determined outcome.

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Branko Milanovic: Income Inequality and Citizenship

Dave here. This is a readable discussion of inequality between nations, but the conclusions suffer from the conceit that people – particularly people in poor countries – have universal freedom, wherewithal and mindset to pick and choose what country to which they want to emigrate. But other than that nitpick, worth a read. By Branko […]

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Alicia García-Herrero: Additional Monetary Easing for China?

As many other central banks in the Asian region, the People Bank of China (PBoC) has been on an easing mode for a few months now and more seems to be in the store. The once relatively polarized debate on what the PBoC monetary policy stance should be has increasingly leaned towards additional easing. Some analysts are even proposing full-fledged quantitative easing (QE), in the form of US Treasury sales to raise funds for assets locally, such as local government bonds and other hardly–performing assets. There is no doubt that the PBoC could, thereby, bring another big stimulus into the already heavily massaged Chinese economy as it would help debt-saddled local governments to clean their balance sheets and, at the same time, allow banks’ to lend further. As if this were not enough, any additional easing – capital controls permitting- would also push the RMB to a more depreciated level, bringing thereby an additional push to external demand.

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Matías Vernengo: On Free Trade and Economics Consensus

Mankiw tells us in his most recent NYTimes column that economists agree that Free Trade is good. He links to a poll in which, essentially, mainstream economists of different persuasions, some Keynesian and some not, and different political views, some liberal and some conservative, say that trade agreements are good. He backs his argument by suggesting that theoretically the argument is at the heart of the economics profession since the beginning; I guess an argument of authority.

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The Persecution and Assassination of the People of Greece as Performed by the Inmates of the Troika, Under the Direction of the Eurogroup

A new paper shreds the myths that justified the misguided application of austerity and wage-rate reduction policies in Greece and the Eurozone.

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