New Economic Perspectives

By J.D. ALT My last essay, “A Perfect Example,” elicited six thoughtful and compelling questions from a reader with the moniker “MadcapMongoose.” They deserve an equally thoughtful response, which I’ve been trying to formulate, off and on, these past many weeks. Each formulation I come up with, however, seems to be missing a larger and deeper issue that I keep getting glimpses of. So, with apologizes to Mongoose, instead of answering him (or her) directly, I’m going to try to mine the topic...

Michael Hoexter, Ph.D. Contents Conventional “Hard” Climate Denial A Web of Soft Climate Denial The Foundations of Soft Climate Denial in Economics Settling on Neoliberal, “Market-Based” Carbon Gradualism Soft Climate Denial, Fossil Fuels, and the Hedonic Self 1. Conventional “Hard” Climate Denial The Rio Olympics opening ceremony highlighted global warming as a major theme of international concern even on an occasion of diversion from the cares of the world.  That most Brazilians...

By Felipe Rezende This part of the series (see Part I and II, here and here) will focus on macroeconomic and microeconomic aspects to financial fragility and provision for liquidity. Minsky’s framework not only sheds light on how to detect unsustainable financial practices, but the position adopted in this paper is that the current Brazilian crisis does fit with Minsky’s instability theory. This is a Minsky’s crisis in which during economic expansions market participants show greater...

By William K. BlackSeptember 2, 2016     Bloomington, MN Donald Trump’s opponents have been having a field day with the latest gift from a Trump surrogate.  One of Trump’s few remaining Latino supporters, Marco Gutierrez, a businessman and founder of Latinos for Trump, made an unintentionally hilarious prediction about how awful America’s future would be if Trump were not elected. “My culture is a very dominant culture and it’s imposing and it’s causing problems,” he told MSNBC. “If you...

NEP’s Randy Wray appears on The Radical Imagination with host Jim Vrettos. Topic of discussion is the science of economics and what a U.S. economy will look like under the administration of Stein, Clinton, Trump or Johnson. [embedded content] View directly on vimeo here. Share this:

NEP’s Bill Black appears on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. Nowadays we have zero prosecutions of any of the people that led the three fraud epidemics that drove this crisis. And now they are highly skilled and have seen that they can get away with financial murder. And so they are already back in the business, already selling other toxic stuff and they’re going to produce the next crisis… You can listen to the podcast here. Share this:

By William K. BlackAugust 23, 2016     Kansas City, MO The reporting of Susanne Craig of the New York Times and David Cay Johnston, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting when he was with that paper, and has recently published The Making of Donald Trump, combine to allow us to draw a critical insight about Trump and Goldman Sachs.  From Susanne Craig, we learn: [A]n office building on Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan, of which Mr. Trump is part owner, carries a $950 million loan....

By Felipe Rezende This series will discuss at length the underlying forces behind Brazil’s current crisis. Building on Keynes’ investment theory of the cycle, Minsky’s work suggests that the structure the economy becomes more fragile over a period of tranquility and prosperity. That is, endogenous processes breed financial and economic instability. While Minsky adopted Keynes’ “investment theory of the cycle”, he added a financial theory of investment, with a detailed exposition of the...

By William K. BlackAugust 22, 2016     Kansas City, MO James Stewart has written a column about Roger Ailes’ alleged sexual predation on female Fox News personnel over the course of many years.  He entitled it “Secrecy of Settlements at Fox News Hid Bad Behavior.”  Ailes was the CEO of Fox News.  I write to show how two concepts Stewart did not employ would aid the analysis and to suggest a fundamental change in the law that would make the world a far better place. The two concepts I add to...

NEP’s Pavlina Tcherneva appears on RT’s Boom and Bust with Ameera David and continues her conversation with RT-TV explaining how the Job Guarantee program delivers the economic benefits that the Basic Income proposal only promises. She appears at 12 min and 55 seconds.  [embedded content] Share this: