Market Participation, aka Shopping, as a Toll of Neoliberalism: Obamacare as Case Study
Why Obamacare illustrates a big hidden cost of neoliberalism: that you are required to shop, and shopping is work.
Read more...Category Archives: The dismal science
“Can Societies Be Commodities All the Way Down?”
Get a cup of coffee while you settle down to watch this video of Nancy Fraser discussing the crisis as a joint problem of ecological, financial, and social systems.
Read more...Is Krugman Running on Brand Fumes? (TransPacific Partnership Edition)
It may seem a bit de trop to take on a Paul Krugman blog post yet again, but the reason for focusing on his post yesterday on the TransPacific Partnership is less for its substance and more as a political zeitgeist indicator.
Read more...The Eurozone: If Only It Were the 1930s
Yves here. This post looks at the strictures of the Eurozone (debt to GDP and deficit limits) and not surprisingly concludes that the supposedly independent ECB is making matters worse that a more “political,” as in growth oriented one, would. But depicting central bank independence as detrimental is a novel and important argument.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Confessions of an Erratic Marxist in the Midst of a Repugnant Eurozone Crisis
Yves here. Even though Yanis Varoufakis has savaged the Trokia’s austerity policies that are driving Greece and other periphery countries into economic and social distress as well as fueling the rise of extreme right wing parties, some readers of this blog have criticized him for advocating reforms to pull the Eurozone out of its nosedive […]
Read more...Philip Pilkington: Hjalmar Schacht, Mefo Bills and the Restoration of the German Economy 1933-1939
Yves here. I’m a big fan of economic history (and mystified that contemporary economists so rarely take interest in it). Pilkington describes an illuminating and oft-neglected chapter.
Read more...Rob Parenteau: How to Exit Austerity, Without Exiting the Euro
Yves here. This is an important post by Rob Parenteau which outlines a viable plan for subject nations austerity-afflicted Eurozone countries with reasonably-well-functioning tax bureaucracies to escape their downspiral.
Read more...Capital Inflows and Booms in Asset Prices
Yves here. This is a tidy and useful addition to the literature on how high levels of international capital flows generate financial instability.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis Discuses Bitcoin and Litecoin on RT
Yves here. Yanis makes a couple of observations which won’t sit well with digital currency enthusiasts.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: What Europeans Should Know About the Current Situation in Greece
Yves here. In an interview with Edward Geelhoed, Varoufakis gives an urgent, sobering picture of the conditions in Greece, which contrasts dramatically with the claims made by Eurozone politicians.
Read more...Policy and the Worship of Prediction Markets
The idea of the market as ‘information aggregator’ is, like many ideas, probably as old as humanity itself, but Friedrich Hayek is usually credited with popularising the idea in his 1945 article “The Use of Knowledge in Society”.
Read more...Servaas Storm: Some Remarks on “Larry Summers, Secular Stagnation and the Crisis of the New Consensus Model”
It is truly ironic to see Lawrence Summers and Paul Krugman promote sustaining asset price inflation as the only viable option left to get away from secular stagnation.
Read more...The European Balanced Budget Disaster
In the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, most European governments allowed the automatic stabilisers to kick in and implemented some mild discretionary measures, despite the strictures of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). But it was not long before the siren calls for “fiscal consolidation” arose…
Read more...Steve Keen: The International Financial Architecture
In this video, Steve Keen reviews the history of Keynes’ proposed international currency, Bancor, and why it failed to come to fruition at Bretton Woods.
Read more...Olivier Blanchard: Monetary Policy Will Never Be the Same
The global crisis changed the face of monetary policy. This column, written by the IMF’s chief economist, reviews the main changes. It draws on contributions to a recent IMF conference on the topic.
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