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Jump-Starting America

Can the United States grow faster, create more good jobs, and genuinely spread opportunity? Yes: by investing more in science and technology, by placing those investments strategically around the country, and by creating an Innovation Dividend – paying cash to all Americans every year, based on the success of public investments in the tech sector. What technologies should receive support?  Which cities have the potential to become the next...

Puzzle: Has real wages growth outstripped productivity growth or not? – Part 2

Inspector Commissionaire Bill is back on the case today for Part 2 and the solution of the puzzle we posed in – Puzzle: Has real wages growth outstripped productivity growth or not? – Part 1 (November 20, 2019). The puzzle was relatively easy to understand. The RBA (Australia’s central bank) published analysis in its most recent – Statement on Monetary Policy (November 2019), which showed that since the early 2000s, real earnings per hour have...

IPA’s weekly links

A slope even non-economists can loveGuest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action First, please pass along to your skiing friends that the owner of the ski treehouse above in Whitefish, MT (Glacier National Park adjacent) is offering to donate proceeds to the non-profit I work for, IPA, from any rentals between now and Jan 31. (Instructions here)Among other things, IPA’s been investing in expanding the things that academics...

Three Things I Think I Think – I’d Like to Report a Mass Murder

Here are some things I think I am thinking about today: 1) Hello, 9-1-1: I’d like to report a mass murder. Here’s a JP Morgan note that has been going around twitter the last 24 hours. I don’t have much to say here other than this – most of the people on this list have a few things in common – political bias and/or a permabear bias. So, don’t be biased or one day you might end up on a list like this getting carried out in a body bag....

Is Venezuela Stabilizing?

Maybe. ry It looks the inflation ratei in Venezuela maxed  out in January at an annuualized rate of 192,000 % , whiich fell by September to 4,600% rate, still in hyperinflationary teritoryy, but  clearly coming down substantially.  I am not  a fan of this regime and never was, unlike some prominent economists saying nice t8ings about tueir economic performance, especially back in 2007, just berofe  the  world crash, when indeed their  numbers ...

Where are we on growth and macro policy right now?

I think it's a good time to outline where we are in this business cycle right now because a number of factors are coming together to present a larger picture in the US both in terms of growth and the policy response to that growth.The FedI want to start with the view I expressed in my last post, t...

Hitting the wall

It is 2.30 am, and I can't sleep. Today I must file my final piece for American Express's FXIP blog, which is being mothballed. Writing for that blog has been my main source of income for the last four years. Once it is gone, my income will once again become precarious and inadequate, as it has been all too often in the past. Hence my sleeplessness.To be perfectly honest, I'm not sorry that the blog is closing. I've done some interesting work...

Economists Do It With Models 1970-01-01 00:00:00

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My Thoughts On Brexit

I haven’t written a post in a long time. My blog was mostly an attempt to piece together and understand the 2008 financial crisis, and the various consequences of it. One pretty big consequence, at least in my home country, the United Kingdom, has been Brexit. I didn’t vote in the 2016 referendum. Mostly because I was at that time I was living abroad in the United States with my father, having moved there the previous year, and I had trouble...

Woke

The use of “woke” as a term of abuse by rightwingers has expanded rapidly in the recent past. A typical example is Deputy PM McCormack’s claim (rapidly refuted by fire chiefs) that the supposed relationship between climate change and the bushfire disaster arose from “the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital-city greenies.” This is striking for a couple of reasons. First, I’ve never seen anyone in Australia describe themselves...

Econometrics — fictions of extremely limited value

Econometrics — fictions of extremely limited value It is often said that the error term in a regression equation represents the effect of the variables that were omitted from the equation. This is unsatisfactory … There is no easy way out of the difficulty. The conventional interpretation for error terms needs to be reconsidered. At a minimum, something like this would need to be said: The error term represents the combined...

Keiser News Spin

[unable to retrieve full-text content]An interview with Max Keiser on the economic issues of the day:

Andrew Batson — Capacity to transform

Important. Andrew Batson summarizes Charles Kindleberger's insight into development in terms of ability to transform the economy — what promotes it and what hinders it.Neoclassical economics assumes flexibility among the factors of production and also flexibility within them, resulting in immediate response to economic "laws," e.g., based on natural market forces that automatically generate spontaneous order (general...

Housing, Eurozone construction, Singapore, Consumer comfort, Air freight

You can see from the charts how depressed this cycle has been, and how housing has stalled out overall for the last few years, and all with ultra low mortgage rates: Permits which are more volatile have ‘spiked’ back to 1965 levels when the population was about half: A relatively small economy but the drop in exports is telling: Singapore’s non-oil domestic exports (NODX) tumbled 12.30 percent year-on-year in October 2019, following an 8.1...

Join Us for the 11th Minsky Summer Seminar

Michael Stephens | October 23, 2019 The Hyman P. Minsky Summer SeminarLevy Economics Institute of Bard CollegeBlithewoodAnnandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. June 7–13, 2020 The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College is pleased to announce the 11th Minsky Summer Seminar will be held from June 7–13, 2020. The Seminar will provide a rigorous discussion of both the theoretical and applied aspects of Minsky’s...

Bernie Sanders in 1998 on the Global Crisis and the IMF role in it

[embedded content] Old clip from C-SPAN. It's still worth watching. Strong critique of the failures of the IMF and neoliberal policies in leading to the crisis. We know now that the subsequent bubble pushed the major crisis for another 10 years.

Trump: The Most Corrupt President in US History

So says NEP’s former federal investigator Bill Black, who defines with fine detail what will likely be emerging from the impeachment hearings in this appearance on The Real News Network. You can view with transcript here. [embedded content]

New Economics Foundation 1970-01-01 00:00:00

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Macro Dynamics with a Job Guarantee – Part 4: Dynamic Stability

The model, in its present form, is short run in nature. It concerns an economy for which total employment, within-sector productivity and productive capacity are all taken as given. Variations in total output are achieved by workers transferring between two broad sectors that have differing productivity. In considering this economy, discussion has touched on aspects of a steady state and system behavior outside the steady state. It has been...

How Far Can We Push This Thing? Some Optimistic Reflections on the Potential For Economic Experimentation

Readers are probably aware that there is quite a lot of discussion of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and the potential for fiscal experimentation batting around at the moment. Others have weighed in on this already, and I have little to add. It is striking, however, that most of the push-back — where there is push-back — is not focused on trying to discredit the idea that we should engage in fiscal experimentation. Indeed, the notion that we...

The Rate of Profits is Not the Scale Factor

Figure 1: Rate of Profits Unequal to Scale Factor for Rate of Profits This post continues the example in the previous post. I modify the prices equations so that the rate of profits in producing corn is (s1 r̂), and the rate of profits in producing ale is (s2 r̂). The solution to the price equations are: pcorn = 16 [16 + (s1 - s2) r̂]/[204 + (3 s1 + 9 s2) r̂] pale = 32 [10 - (s1 - 3 s2) r̂]/[204 + (3 s1 + 9 s2) r̂] w = 4 [51 - (9 s1 +...

Dealing with the overhang of non-financial private debt

Building on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Global Debt Database (GDD) comprising debts of the public and private non-financial sectors for  190 countries dating back to 1950, Mbaye et al (2018) identify a recurring pattern where households and firms are forced to deleverage in the face of a debt overhang, dampening growth, eliciting the injection of public money to kick-start the economy. They observe that this substitution of public...

Ten things to know about the 2019-20 Alberta budget

I’ve just written a ‘top 10’ overview of the recent Alberta budget. Points raised in the post include the following: -The budget lays out a four-year strategy of spending cuts, letting population growth and inflation do much of the heavy lifting. -After one accounts for both population growth and inflation, annual provincial spending in Alberta by 2022 is projected to be 16.2% lower than it was last year. -Alberta remains Canada’s...

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Placido Domingo: cancel culture?

‘People who do really good stuff have flaws’ said Barack Obama in a recent talk.  About the same time I read: ‘Placido Domingo has withdrawn from all future engagements at New York’s Metropolittan Opera [after 51 consecutive years] following allegations of sexual harrassment made by several women, including a soprano who said he reached down her robe and grabbed her bare breast’.[The Week,5 October 2019] Domingo’s burnished tenor and acting...

The Rate of Profits is Not the Scale Factor

Figure 1: Rate of Profits Unequal to Scale Factor for Rate of Profits This post continues the example in the previous post. I modify the prices equations so that the rate of profits in producing corn is (s1 r̂), and the rate of profits in producing ale is (s2 r̂). The solution to the price equations are: pcorn = 16 [16 + (s1 - s2) r̂]/[204 + (3 s1 + 9 s2) r̂] pale = 32 [10 - (s1 - 3 s2) r̂]/[204 + (3 s1 + 9 s2) r̂] w = 4 [51 - (9 s1 +...

Join Us for the 11th Minsky Summer Seminar

Michael Stephens | October 23, 2019 The Hyman P. Minsky Summer SeminarLevy Economics Institute of Bard CollegeBlithewoodAnnandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. June 7–13, 2020 The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College is pleased to announce the 11th Minsky Summer Seminar will be held from June 7–13, 2020. The Seminar will provide a rigorous discussion of both the theoretical and applied aspects of Minsky’s...

Una lunga intervista

Intervista, mi sembra ben riuscita, su letture.orgProf. Sergio Cesaratto, Lei è autore del libro Sei lezioni di economia. Conoscenze necessarie per capire la crisi più lunga (e come uscirne) edito da Diarkos: in che modo la teoria economica può aiutarci a spiegare la crisi europea e dell’euro, e il declino del nostro Paese?  La prima edizione delle Sei lezioni ha avuto un buon successo perché mostra come esistano diverse teorie economiche...

Keynes’ Life: 1931

I give an account below of Keynes life in 1931.January–May 1931 On 27 January 1931, Friedrich Hayek arrived in London at the London School of Economics (LSE). Hayek gave four evening lectures at 5 p.m. from 27 to 30 January 1931 on “Prices and Production” (Howson 2011: 196), and these lectures were later published in England as the book Prices and Production (September 1931), an exposition of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT). Hayek...

A short unpublished commentary on the 2019 Kosovo elections

This is a a short unpublished commentary on the 2019 Kosovo elections for SPUTNIK KOSOVO 2019 elections Kosovo’s opposition Vetevendosje (Self-Determination) party and the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) are running neck-and-neck in the parliamentary election, the latest results with around 96 percent of the votes counted, show. According to the latest data from the Kosovo Central Election Commission, the Self-Determination party has 25.79...

A short unpublished commentary on the 2019 Kosovo elections

This is a a short unpublished commentary on the 2019 Kosovo elections for SPUTNIK KOSOVO 2019 elections Kosovo’s opposition Vetevendosje (Self-Determination) party and the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) are running neck-and-neck in the parliamentary election, the latest results with around 96 percent of the votes counted, show. According to the latest data from the Kosovo Central Election Commission, the Self-Determination party has 25.79...

Plastic: part of the problem . . . part of the solution – Part 1 (of 4): A Global Problem

Introduction: I am still on the mailing lists of quite a few resin and plastics companies. This particular presentation is from Sesotec GmbH (“company with limited liability”). Sesotec was an exhibitor at the K trade fair in Düsseldorf and now is reflecting on an exciting and positive trade fair appearance (for them) with its topic of a “Circular Plastics Economy.” This is part 1 of a 4 part presentation which I believe to be done in an...

Central Bank Independence: A Rigged Debate Based on False Politics and Economics

The case for central bank independence is built on an intellectual two-step. Step one argues there is a problem of inflation prone government. Step two argues independence is the solution to that problem. This paper challenges that case and shows it is based on false politics and economics. The paper argues central bank independence is ...

Surpassing identity conflict via economic justice

Europeans have long observed from a distance the mix of social and racial conflicts which structure political and electoral cleavages in the United States. Given the growing, and potentially destructive, importance taken by these identity conflicts in France and in Europe, they might do well to consider the lessons to be learned from foreign experiences. Let’s take a step backwards. After having been the party of slavery during the civil war...

On The Fall Of The Liberal International Economic Order, Part II

In the last post, I linked to John J. Mearsheimer’s paper Bound To Fail: The Rise And Fall Of The Liberal International Order. The paper was more from a political perspective than from a perspective of political economy, although it did go into the economics of it.There’s a Post-Keynesian paper by Thomas Palley published last year, I thought I should recommend reading, since it goes into the political economy aspect of it. Also it is rooted...

My review of Banerjee & Duflo’s (this year’s Nobel winners in economics) latest book – The Observer

REVIEW: Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo A recent YouGov survey confirmed that economists are the least trusted professionals in the UK today. Brexit is only the latest contributor to the public’s understandable rejection of a profession that has either failed spectacularly to raise the alarm over impending crises or have provided theoretical justifications for the...