New Economic Perspectives

By J.D. ALT I recently read in the WSJ that Modern Monetary Theory is defined as the proposition that the federal government can borrow as much money as it needs so long as the interest rate it pays is less than the growth rate of the GDP. The short article, by Desmond Lachman, went on to argue why this was a dangerously false premise. Thus, MMT got shot with two bullets in one paragraph: first by defining it in a way that negates its most fundamental principle (that the federal...

By William K. Black January 14, 2019     Bloomington, MN Queen Marie-Antoinette of France was libeled by the claim that when she was told that her starving peasants could no longer find bread to eat, she responded “then let them eat cake.”  (If you want to get precise she supposedly said let them eat ‘brioche.”)  There is no evidence she said any such thing. Trump, however, really said the modern equivalent.  His remarks, despite being made in response to a question about his empathy for...

William K. Black January 14, 2019     Bloomington, Mn Kate Berry, the American Banker reporter that covers consumer financial protection, has written another important article about the continuing horror story of Trump’s increasingly successful efforts to pervert the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) into an agency dedicated to harming consumers and protecting our Nation’s most predatory lenders.  Unfortunately, her January 14, 2019 article is behind a paywall. The Predatory...

Macroeconomic System for Climate Change A U.S. Patent Application Inventor:  J.D. ALT (acknowledging all advocates of modern fiat money) Assignment:  To all citizens of democratic free societies Abstract: A macroeconomic system including the issuing of a fiat currency by a sovereign government; the establishment of a tax regime on the government’s citizens wherein the taxes levied can only be paid with the sovereign government’s fiat currency; the sovereign government’s debiting of its...

William K. Black December 17, 2018     Bloomington, MN In 1983, Federal Home Loan Bank Board Chairman Richard (Dick) Pratt published his Agenda for Reform about how to deal with the savings and loan debacle.  He had just made that debacle inevitable by deregulating and desupervising the industry.  In his Agenda, he called for some protective steps (none of which he took or even proposed as rules), but overwhelmingly called for more deregulation and desupervision while promising that the...

William K. Black December 18, 2018     Bloomington, MN On December 13, 2018, the Wall Street Journal published an interesting op ed by Jesse M. Fried, a famous law professor in multiple areas of corporate law, and Matthew Schoenfeld, who works at a hedge fund that is the leading funder of civil lawsuits, primarily fraud and tort suits.  The title is “Will China Cheat American Investors?  The answer, of course, is yes – it will continue to cheat American (and non-American) investors. ...

William K. Black December 13, 2018     Bloomington, MN The Wall Street Journal published an article on December 12, 2018 that should warn us of coming disaster:  “Banks Get Kinder, Gentler Treatment Under Trump.”  The last time a regulatory head lamented that regulators were not “kinder and gentler” promptly ushered in the Enron-era fraud epidemic.  President Bush made Harvey Pitt his Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair in August 2001 and, in one of his early major addresses,...

William K. Black December 8, 2018      Bloomington, MN The funeral services for President George HW Bush triggered Ross Douthat’s nostalgia for the “aristocratic virtues of the old WASP establishment, and a disappointment with the meritocracy that has risen in its place.”  This column ignores his nostalgia and alleged virtues and discusses briefly his bizarre assumption that a “meritocracy” runs America.  Given the 2008 Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and President Trump, I thought that the...

William K. Black Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC December 5, 2018     Bloomington, MN  55437 I cannot write many blogs during the fall semesters because I teach four classes (I co-teach one of them).  The fall term of instruction at UMKC is now over so I am writing one piece before turning to grading.  I have recently done additional research on a topic I know is of great interest – the prosecution of elite white-collar criminals.  I have organized it in the form of a game...

Executives of Sears stand to gain up to $1 million in bonuses, should Sears be liquidated, and $500,000 if it’s restructured. Meanwhile, ordinary workers at Sears are being laid off without severance payments. NEP’s Bill Black appears on the Real News Network and talks about how US bankruptcy law is rigged to favor executives. You can view with transcript here. [embedded content] [Translate]