New Economic Perspectives

NEP’s Bill Black appears on The Real News discussing Congressional Republicans have approved their tax bill, a massive upward transfer of wealth that fulfills a decades-long right-wing goal of permanent tax cuts for corporations. You can view here with a transcript.[embedded content] [Translate]

The New Regulatory Regime of Modern Fiat Money By J.D. ALT I was momentarily taken aback to read in the Washington Post that a primary reason Donald Trump was elected president of the United States was because of a little swampy area in the middle of an Iowa farmer’s cornfield. The cornfield in question belongs to an Angus beef farmer named Annette Sweeney who was both incredulous and outraged by the Obama administration’s new regulations on Clean Water. The regulations, known as WOTUS...

By J.D. ALT We define poverty, I suppose, as that living condition which is unable to acquire enough dollars to purchase some, or most, of the basic necessities of life. It also seems to be an accepted notion that a certain amount of “poverty” is a necessary condition of our modern market economy—that a certain segment of the population will always be “unemployable” by the profit-oriented business community, either because they lack skills or because the business community simply does...

By William K. Black December 22, 2017     Bloomington, MN As Brad DeLong aptly puts it, John Cochrane was once an economist.  Cochrane is now a right wing ideologue surrounded by similar ideologues at Hoover.  He is pushing his new chapter in a Hoover book entitled American Exceptionalism in a New Era.  His chapter’s title is “Law and the Regulatory State.”  I will be writing several articles responding to Cochrane’s chapter, but this first piece concentrates on one key belief that...

By William K. Black December 19, 2017     Bloomington, MN Lawrence J. Christiano was the lead author of the article announcing the Dilettante doctrine that I discussed in the first column in this series.  His ‘dilettante article’ claimed that modern macro got the last crisis so wrong because it ignored the ‘shadow’ financial sector.  I have found a 2008 article by him and two Minneapolis Fed co-authors that illustrates modern macro’s blindness to the shadow financial sector.  The article...

By J.D. ALT The Republican tax reform will be criticized on many fronts. It is a battle of criticisms that will likely become as chaotic, ill-informed, and counter-productive as the tax reform process itself has been. This is because it will surely ignore the only strategic battle-front that ultimately matters: the basic premise of what taxes are for and why they’re necessary. Before the Republican tax reformers even said a word, their arguments and proposals were packaged in the tired...

By William K. Black December 18, 2017     Bloomington, MN The truly exceptional thing about ‘modern macroeconomics’ devotees is not that they are so consistently and horrifically wrong or that they persist in their errors – but their exceptional combination of arrogance and disdain for those who have dramatically better records and broader and more relevant expertise.  Kartik Athreya, the Richmond Fed’s Research Director, led the modern macro parade on June 17, 2010 with his blog (which...

By J.D. ALT What follows is a to-do list for the next political power generation―the Millennials in whose hands the operation of America will begin soon, thankfully, to be grasped. The Boomer and GenX generations have succeeded in guiding America to the brink of social chaos and environmental disaster. Thankfully, the Millennials actually have the critical tool necessary to build anew what the 1% power-structures of the Boomer/GenXers have so greedily destroyed. All that is required is...

Nine million children will go without health insurance under the new GOP tax bill, says NEP’s Bill Black in his latest appearance on The Real News Network. You can view here with a transcript. [embedded content] [Translate]

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is in limbo as two people claim to be its new acting director. The outgoing head tapped Leandra English as his successor, but Donald Trump then appointed Mick Mulvaney, who has called the CFPB a “sick, sad” joke. NEP’s Bill Black appears on The Real News Network discussing the attack on CFPB. You can view here with a transcript. [embedded content] [Translate]