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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...

The Weekend Quiz – October 12-13, 2019

Welcome to The Weekend Quiz. The quiz tests whether you have been paying attention or not to the blog posts that I post. See how you go with the following questions. Your results are only known to you and no records are retained. 1. The price at which the central bank provides reserves to the commercial banks is restricted by its target monetary policy rate.True False2. For a country facing strong terms and trade and an...

IPA’s weekly links

Ethiopian Prime Minister and Nobel Laureate Abiy Ahmed Ali Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali has won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work towards peace with Eritrea, though the committee acknowledged it’s still a work in progress. Ethiopia has also loosened some of its more repressive policies around security and journalism recently. Commentary from BBC starting around 6 minutes...

Three Things I Think I Think – Banning Billionaires and Other Stupid Ideas

Here are some things I think I am thinking about on this beautiful Wednesday before the Washington Nationals defeat the Los Angeles Dodgers¹: 1) Should we ban billionaires? Bernie Sanders says we should ban billionaires. It’s all part of the growing trend in the idea of wealth taxes that have become popular with some Democrats. It sounds like an okay-ish idea if you’re into progressive taxation, but it’s also an impractical idea that is...

Eeeeeeeeemoluments And How Bad Bruce Springsteen Is

I have almost never watched through a Trump speech to one of his rallies, but I was curious what he would say at the first one after the impeachment inquiry officially started, which he held a few days ago in Minneapolis, supposedly trying to take MN away from the Dems in 2020.  I missed the opening, but listened to all of it after that. Much of it was just boilerplate stuff he says all the time, much of it blatant falsehoods, but whart we...

The Fed’s overtightening and the shift to a fiscal paradigm

The Fed's discomfortFor the better part of 4 years, I have been telling you that the Federal Reserve has been uncomfortable with a mid-cycle role which required it to keep rates at zero percent. The Fed sees its role as principally reserved for cycle turns and not as an agent of mid-cycle stimulus. ...

The high price of dollar safety

The world is saving like crazy. Corporations are building up cash mountains that they can’t or won’t invest in expanding their businesses. Individuals are building up pensions and precautionary savings. Governments, especially in developing countries, are building up FX reserves. The “savings glut,” as former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke dubbed it, shows no signs of dissipating. It is sloshing around the world looking for a productive home. But...

YOU GUYS CHECK OUT THE HOVERTEXT ON THE SITE… Also, more…

[unable to retrieve full-text content]YOU GUYS CHECK OUT THE HOVERTEXT ON THE SITE… Also, more commentary here.

Bitcoin Is Failing As Money—But Bitcoin Cash Isn’t

Money has three principal functions: as a medium of exchange, as a store of value, and as a unit of account. Secondary attributes that have aided the adoption of various forms of money include interestingness (“Ooh! Look how shiny that gold is!”), uniform divisibility, portability, resistance to counterfeit, and imposeability. That last one is important, because it is what makes state-backed fiat currency the dominant form of money in the...

We thought Australian cars were using less fuel. New research shows we were wrong

That’s the self-explanatory headline for my latest piece in The Conversation , written with Robin Smit of Transport Energy/Emission Research (TER), who did the research. It’s another point showing the falsity the Morrison governments claim that Australia can “do its bit” to reduce emissions even as his government does nothing. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

Das Jahr in dem die Mauer fiel

Das Jahr in dem die Mauer fiel  [embedded content] Herausragende Dokumentation. Ohne Tränen kann man das nicht gucken.

Break up the Dem Party

Your access to this site has been limited Your access to this site has been limited Your access to this service has been temporarily limited. Please try again in a few minutes. (HTTP response code 503) Reason: Exceeded the maximum global requests per minute for crawlers or humans. If you are a WordPress user with administrative privileges on this site please enter your email in the box below and click "Send". You will then...

Gilbert Achcar – On Gutter Journalism and Purported “Anti-Imperialism”

This is a critique of all the journalists I like, especially those at Greyzone and the Western journalists who work for RT. Gilbert Achcar has a point, but I have watched loads of videos by Putin and he always seems to be fairly reasonable and sensible up me, unlike our Western bellicose politicians. I think Oliver Stone captured the Putin the way he has always appeared to me, so I'm going with that for now. Although I don't get on with his...

Bank loans, CEO confidence, India

Tariffs have caused a global economy (that has a pro cyclical bias) to turn south. It’s always an unspent income story. When decisions to not spend income (decisions to ‘save’) are not sufficiently ‘offset’ by agents spending more than their incomes GDP (sales/income) decelerates until said deficit spending- private or public- expands to fill the gap.

Bloomberg Interview: Wray on Modern Monetary Theory

Michael Stephens | July 31, 2019 Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Cristina Lindblad and Peter Coy sat down with L. Randall Wray for an in-depth interview on Modern Monetary Theory: $title = the_title('','',false); ?> if ($title == 'Contributors') { //get_levy_contributors(); } ?> Comments

MMT in Developing Countries at the Real News Network

[embedded content] Full transcript of the short interview here. Paper was linked before. Note that we say that Functional Finance does apply to developing countries, but that the insistence of the advantages of flexible exchange rates, as opposed to managed regimes with capital controls, are not correct.

The Kurds, The Most Frequently Betrayed Group, Experience Trump’s Betrayal

William K. BlackOctober 9, 2019     Kansas City, MO The most betrayed people in the world are likely the Kurds.  They have the misfortune to live in a particularly violent region dispersed among five nation states – Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Armenia.  They are a large ethnic group (the fourth largest in their region).  They are overwhelmingly Sunni.  Kurds have tried to be a nation, and the West betrayed them.  Kurds have tried to develop...

Top 15% of taxpayers should fill NHS funding gap, think tank suggests

New Economics Foundation (NEF) proposes levying £11.1bn for NHS through reform to National Insurance Contributions (NICs) By abolishing the Upper Earnings Limit on NICs, top 15% of taxpayers will pay their fair share for our health system NEF calls for increased investment in preventative measures to ensure a more efficient health system in the future The New Economics Foundation (NEF) today proposes a radical, progressive tax change to...

Macro Dynamics with a Job Guarantee – Part 3: Adjustment Process

The model as outlined so far implies particular dynamics. These dynamics are driven by the quantity response of the broader economy (sector b) to mismatches in supply and demand. With the size of the labor force, level of total employment, within-sector productivity and the economy’s productive capacity all taken as exogenously given, the quantity response of sector b requires a change in the sector’s level of employment. The response of...

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...

Structural Economic Dynamics and Fake Switch Points

Figure 1: A Pattern Diagram with Joint Production1.0 Introduction This post completes an example. I analyzed bits of this example here and here. This post may make no sense if you have not read a long series of previous posts or, maybe, the papers highlighted here and here. I am interested in how and if my approach to analyzing and visualizing variations in the choice of technique with technical progress extends to joint production. The...

The Pope, Quincy Jones, Bono, Willie Colón – and the burden of sovereign debt.

On the eve of the 2019 annual meetings of the World Bank and IMF, we are once again alerted to a rise in the debt burdens of low-income countries. Last year the total external debt of both low- and middle-income countries climbed 5.3 percent to $7.8 trillion, while net debt flows (gross disbursements minus principal payments) from external creditors tumbled 28 percent to $529 billion, according to the World Bank’s International Debt...

Canadian Political Economy on Staple Thesis

In an impressive overview of the state of Canadian Political Economy, a new book Change and Continuity ed. by Mark P. Thomas et.al. includes two important articles on the continuing relevance of the staple thesis. On the one hand, Jim Stanford’s “Staples Dependence Renewed and Betrayed: Canada’s Twenty-First Century Boom and Best” does just as its title tells because of the reversion to dependence on petroleum as a staple export since 2000 and...

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How to Achieve Shorter Working Hours

I have great pleasure in presenting this report on shorter working hours, which John McDonnell asked me to prepare, and which I have written with the valuable assistance of Rachel Kay. I accepted John’s invitation because shorter working hours is something I believe in. In fact, I wrote a book with my son, How Much is Enough?, which made the case for reducing the burden of work as part of the good life. The philosophy of this Report is quite...

Structural Economic Dynamics and Fake Switch Points

Figure 1: A Pattern Diagram with Joint Production1.0 Introduction This post completes an example. I analyzed bits of this example here and here. This post may make no sense if you have not read a long series of previous posts or, maybe, the papers highlighted here and here. I am interested in how and if my approach to analyzing and visualizing variations in the choice of technique with technical progress extends to joint production. The...

Bloomberg Interview: Wray on Modern Monetary Theory

Michael Stephens | July 31, 2019 Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Cristina Lindblad and Peter Coy sat down with L. Randall Wray for an in-depth interview on Modern Monetary Theory: $title = the_title('','',false); ?> if ($title == 'Contributors') { //get_levy_contributors(); } ?> Comments

Intervista a il Sussidiario

Pubblichiamo intervista a Ilsussidiario.net Devo a Eurointelligence la notizia della "soffiata". Quella soffiata al Financial Times pericolosa per l’Italia 11.10.2019 - int. Sergio Cesaratto La flessibilità sui conti e il piano verde della Germania non bastano a evitare la recessione europea. Specie se si azzoppa il Qe della Bce...

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...

‘De-globalisation and the Return of the Theory of Imperialism’ – S.Mavroudeas

IJOPEC has published the e-book ‘Globalisation and Public Policy’ edited by Kaoru Natsuda K. et al. The lin for the e-book is the following: http://www.ijopec.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2019_13.pdf I have contributed the first chapter with a paper titled ‘De-globalisation and the Return of the Theory of Imperialism’. The links for my chapter are the following: [embedded content]...

‘De-globalisation and the Return of the Theory of Imperialism’ – S.Mavroudeas

IJOPEC has published the e-book ‘Globalisation and Public Policy’ edited by Kaoru Natsuda K. et al. The lin for the e-book is the following: http://www.ijopec.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2019_13.pdf I have contributed the first chapter with a paper titled ‘De-globalisation and the Return of the Theory of Imperialism’. The links for my chapter are the following: [embedded content]...

Real average and aggregate wages for September

Real average and aggregate wages for September Now that we have the September inflation reading, let’s take a look at real wage growth. First of all, nominal average hourly wages in September increased +0.2%, while consumer prices were unchanged. As a result, after rounding, real average hourly wages for non-managerial personnel increased +0.1%. This translates into real wages of 97.7% of their all time high in January 1973: On a YoY...

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 ...

Will money creation save us?

Before the 2007-2008 crisis the balance sheet of the European Central Bank (that is, the totality of securities owned and loans granted by the ECB) was approximately 1000 billion Euros, or barely 10% of the GDP of the Euro zone. In 2019 it had risen to 4700 billion Euros, or 40% of the GDP of the zone. Thus between 2008 and 2018, the ECB has implemented a monetary creation equivalent to over one and a half years of the French GDP, one year of...

SFC Model From The 80s

SFC Model From The 80sGennaro Zezza has shared a 1987 paper by him and Wynne Godley modeling the Italian economy using a “real stock flow monetary model”

ΜΟΛΙΣ ΑΚΥΡΩΣΑ ΕΠΙΣΗΜΗ ΟΜΙΛΙΑ ΜΟΥ ΣΤΗΝ ΚΩΝΣΤΑΝΤΙΝΟΥΠΟΛΗ ΩΣ ΔΙΑΜΑΡΤΥΡΙΑ ΓΙΑ ΤΗΝ ΕΙΣΒΟΛΗ ΤΟΥ ΤΟΥΡΚΙΚΟΥ ΣΤΡΑΤΟΥ ΣΤΟ ΣΥΡΙΑΚΟ ΚΟΥΡΔΙΣΤΑΝ

Με λύπη, και μετά από πολλή σκέψη, ανακοινώνω την απόφασή μου να αποσυρθώ από το διεθνές συνέδριο που διοργανώνει η Τουρκική κρατική ραδιοτηλεόραση (TRT World) στην Κωνσταντινούπολη την 21η Οκτωβρίου. Yanis Varoufakis will be taking part in "New Horizons for Emerging Powers: Co-operation or Competition?" at #TRTWorldForum on 21 Oct. Visit our website: https://t.co/0KU517OhcO pic.twitter.com/pAMulNY4eh — TRT World Forum...