Randy Wray: When Will They Ever Learn – Uncle Sam is not Robin Hood
Why Obama’s budget is yet another economic policy failure.
Read more...Category Archives: The dismal science
Steve Keen: Godzilla Banks are Good for You?
Yves here. Although Keen’s use of the Godzilla metaphor is fun, the unvarnished facts he presents are plenty alarming. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney is actually gleeful at the prospect that England’s banking sector might grow to be as large relative to its economy as Iceland’s and Cyprus’ on the eve of their busts. But even worse, Carney’s enthusiasm for a banking sector that continues with its cancerous (or as Keen would have it, monstrous) growth gives license to bank lobbyists in the US and Europe to press for high rates of growth in their finance sectors so as to defend their national champions.
Read more...Yes, Virginia, Banking Contributes a Lot Less Value Than You are Led to Believe
One thing we’ve discussed repeatedly is that the activities of large banks, as presently constituted, are purely extractive. And to add insult to injury, GDP calculations exaggerate what in the way of value they arguably do add.
Read more...What Good Are Children?
Yves here. This post does a nice job, if unintentionally, of showing the limits of using economics as the lens for viewing well-established social norms and biological urges.
Read more...Gaius Publius: Are Democrats who Propose Cuts to Social Security “Stupid” or Just Doing Risk-Analysis?
Are austerity-promoting Democrats stupid or evil?
Read more...Philip Pilkington: James Galbraith’s ‘The Predator State’ – A Testament to Our Turbulent and Troubled Era
Yves here. I’m a huge fan of Jamie Galbraith’s book The Predator State. Aaron Swartz wrote a good recap. Pilkington, who is also keen about the book, uses it to raise a different set of issues: how it reveals the deep-seated impediments to having well-informed public discussions about economic issues.
Read more...Jeff Madrick: Why the CBO Can’t Be Trusted
Yves here. I’ve written from time to time how openly partisan the Congressional Budget Office is, not in the traditional sense of favoring one party over the other, but as serving as an key enforcer of neoliberal ideology. For instance, its projections of government debt to GDP ratios were highly misleading by virtue of failing to net out financial assets. And after being called out for that error in paper, what did the CBO do? Make it even harder to find the data to prove the magnitude of their misdirection.
Read more...Why So Little Media Coverage of How the Rich Are Becoming Richer and the Middle Class Wages are Being Squeezed?
Ryan Grim and Mark Gongloff of Huffington Post described one of the key mechanisms by which CEO pay has risen to stratospheric levels: cronyism and backscratching among board members, many of whom are also CEOs. And that’s not the only one that gets less attention than is warranted.
Read more...Randy Wray: MMT and External Constraints
To fix or to float, that is the question.
Read more...Wage Shares Fall in the US, Germany and Many Other Countries While Financial Shocks Hit Emerging Economies
ves here. This Real News Network interview with Yilmaz Akyuz, formerly the Director of the Division on Globalization and Development Strategies at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), describes how the problems that produced the financial crisis have morphed into new, no less troubling problems. One key part of this discussion focuses on how China has adapted to its considerably smaller trade surplus, and why having Germany as the new excessive exporter poses new perils to the global economy.
Read more...What the Modern World Owes Slavery (It’s More Than Back Wages)
It’s tempting to turn our eyes from how the economics of slavery operated, but that system represented a huge amount of what one would now call the capital assets of that era, and some of the ways in which slaves were exploited are not often recognized in modern accounts.
Read more...Philip Pilkington: Keynes’ Liquidity Preference Trumps Debt Deflation in 1931 and 2008
Why defining “liquidity trap” precisely matters in understanding crisis dynamics, and Keynes, and not Krugman, got it right.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Can the Internet Democratize Capitalism?
Yves here. Trust me, you must read this post. In its entirety. Varoufakis discusses the operation of “liberal democracy” as opposed to “classical democracy,”. and argues that voter apathy is a feature, not a bug. But the real meat is in his discussion of how the economic rights of laborers has changed over time and how that has had profound implications for democracy.
Read more...Will a $10 Minimum Wage Get All Working Americans Out of Poverty?
Yves here. This Real News Network segment discusses what many readers know all too well, that even a $10 minimum wage fails to provide an adequate standard of living, particularly for parents.
Read more...Open Borders: A Morality Play by the 1%
Beware of conservatives arguing from a moral position, at least when it comes to proposals that they claim will help the poor, like open borders.
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