New Economic Perspectives

Originally published in The Minskys by Lara Merling The U.S. trails the rest of the world in benefits available to families. Currently, the only industrialized country that does not guarantee paid maternity leave for new mothers is the United States. While other countries offer generous paid parental leave and some form of childcare subsidies, the U.S. does not. This lack of policies to support working families widens economic inequality and limits opportunities of children not born in...

By William K. BlackOctober 24, 2016     Quito, Ecuador Pete Peterson is back, and his message and rhetoric are always the same.  The federal budget deficit is a disaster and – any day now – will produce massive inflation.  Peterson has written his 20,000th version of this fantasy in the NYT with Paul Volcker.  The first rhetorical game that Peterson plays is to assert that it is bad for a sovereign nation to run budgetary deficits because they are not “sound and sustainable.”  Except that...

By William K. BlackOctober 23, 2016     Kansas City, MO The general media has been treating the WikiLeaks disclosures of the Clinton campaign documents, particularly the transcripts of her lucrative talks with Goldman Sachs as much ado about nothing.  I have not found any article about the disclosures, however, that reported on the extraordinary statements she made in her talk with Goldman Sachs on June 4, 2013. Hillary told the Vampire Squid that the “good news” was that China was removing...

By William K. BlackOctober 20, 2016     Kansas City, MO Elite bankers and the pathetic economists who serve as apologists for their frauds specialize in proving our family saying that it is impossible to compete with unintentional self-parody.  The subtitle of the WSJ article providing the latest proof is “Fines on banks translate into $5 trillion of ‘reduced lending capacity,’ bank says.”  The “bank” referred to is the Bank of England, which is supposed to be the UK’s primary bank...

By William K. BlackOctober 20, 2016     Kansas City, MO The New Democrats and their Republican counterparts’ economic policies have created a rigged system of crony capitalism.  Crony capitalism produces devastating epidemics of elite fraud that have shrunk the overall economic “pie” and distributed the “pie” overwhelmingly in favor of corrupt corporate elites like Donald Trump and their political cronies like the Clintons.  Wall Street has been open about being ecstatic about the rise of...

By William K. BlackOctober 18, 2016     Kansas City, MO What happens in the petrocracy formerly known as the State of North Dakota to the tiny minority of reporters who actually expose the misconduct of the petrocrats?  Fracking has perverted many organs of the government in North Dakota into petro-cronies.  They act to protect their petrocrat patrons from criticism from this minority of reporters.  A county North Dakota prosecutor decided to use what is becoming the petrocrats’ favorite...

Monday, 17 October, on the weekly progressive radio program Hopping Mad with Will McLeod and Arliss Bunny, JD Alt was interviewed about his book The Millennials’ Money. The broadcast version of the interview, which aired on Netroots Radio at 8AM Eastern on Monday, 17 October, was twenty-two minutes long. The podcast version of the interview is about twice that. The podcast is available on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play and on the Hopping Mad website. JD’s book was previewed here, on NEP, in...

By J.D. ALT Recently, I’ve been trying to zero in on a peculiar set of ingredients that seem to be baked into our economic pie―and which are depriving that pie of a sustenance we, as a collective society, need it to provide. The peculiar ingredients have to do with our monetary system. Specifically, the fact that we―whether intentionally or by happenstance―have put in place and operate a money system that seamlessly creates dollars, as necessary, for profit-making enterprise, but...

Michael Hoexter, Ph.D. In a recent piece, I introduced the concept of “soft climate denial”.  In soft climate denial, people acknowledge that climate change is real and threatening and may even be panicked about it.  However, in this cultural-political constellation with attendant states of mind, the solutions for climate change that are embraced are in no way commensurate to the acknowledged threats to human existence posed by anthropogenic global warming.   Consequently, soft climate...

NEP’s Pavlina Tcherneva appears on the Laura Flanders Show. Pavlina says the current practice of gender-blind and race-blind fiscal policy lacks visions and helps no one. Congress, according to Pavlina is focusing on the wrong things. A self ascribed feminist economist, Pavlina says feminist fiscal policy is real, not simply ideological, and should be a central part of the American economy. We’ll encourage growth, she says, by creating employment — not the opposite. And employment begins...