New Economic Perspectives

By William K. BlackAugust 22, 2016     Kansas City, MO The New York Times has a columnist who interviews business leaders.  He interviewed, Bracken Darrell, Logitech’s CEO in a column entitled “Be Sure to Tell the Boss What’s Wrong.”  When we, the co-founders of Bank Whistleblowers United, here a phrase like that our ears perk up.  It is exactly the right message the CEO should send.  The people who most obviously take that message to heart, in the most difficult circumstances for the...

Professor Rod O”Donnell is currently engaged in preparing a major edition of the remaining unpublished writings of JM Keynes, of which there remains a HUGE quantity of valuable material scattered across many archives in several countries. Since standard sources of funds for this kind of research have dried up, he has turned to crowdfunding. The CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN begins 11 OCTOBER 2016 on INDIEGOGO. OVERALL AIM:  To complete the publication of ALL of Keynes’s unpublished writings of...

By William K. BlackAugust 15, 2016     Bloomington, MN The Wall Street Journal’s Deputy Editor, Daniel Henninger, wrote an op ed dated August 10, 2016 designed to convince Republicans to hold their noses and vote for Donald Trump.  His means of attempting to convince them was conventional – play on their hate of Hillary Clinton.  Op eds need to be brief, so Henninger picked as his argument the single policy he felt would be most compelling to the paper’s readers. It is a testament to how...

By Ignacio Ramirez Cisneros Some considerations on the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) latest assessment on the handling of the euro crisis. Part II If decisive large scale interventions on the part of the Eurosystem would have been enough to quell financial panic –along with the strategic functioning of the EZ large transactions payment platform, Target2, allowing capital repatriation by core EZ financial agents- the IMF should not have had a role in the crisis resolution process...

By Ignacio Ramirez Cisneros Some considerations on the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) latest assessment on the handling of the euro crisis. Part I The most recent IEO assessment of the IMF’s role in the lending and structural adjustment programs in Greece, Ireland and Portugal (and Cyprus) makes reference to a past held belief within the IMF ‘that large current account imbalances were little cause for concern [for the IMF], and sudden stops could not happen within a currency...

(4th column in my series on Friedman advising Hillary to Move Hard Right)William K. BlackAugust 10, 2016     Bloomington, MN Thomas Friedman has written two columns advising Hillary Clinton to win the election by adopting traditional Republican economic dogmas.  Friedman despairs that Hillary Clinton refrains from: [T]elling people the hardest truth: that to be in the middle class, just working hard and playing by the rules doesn’t cut it anymore. To have a lifelong job, you need to be a...

June CarboneRobina Chair in Law, Science and Technology, U. Minn. Law SchoolAugust 10, 2016     Bloomington, MN I like Hillary.  Would I like to have a mimosa with her?  Wrong question.  I suspect that that neither she nor I have much interest in partying during the mimosa part of the day.   Indeed, I suspect that no woman who meets the mimosa test would run for President or be elected if she did.  Instead, for me, a detail oriented policy wonk, the more relevant question is whether I would...

By Felipe Rezende Part I This series will discuss at length the underlying forces behind Brazil’s current crisis. A consensus has emerged in Brazil (and elsewhere) blaming Rousseff’s “new economic matrix” policies for the country’s worst crisis since the Great Depression (see here, here, here, here, and here).  With the introduction of policy stimulus through ad hoc tax breaks for selected sectors seen as a failure to boost economic activity and the deterioration of the fiscal balance –...

(3d column in my series on Friedman advising Hillary to Move Hard Right) William K. BlackAugust 8, 2016     Bloomington, MN In this column I focus on Thomas Friedman’s plea that Hillary Clinton embrace deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization (the three “de’s”) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as a “knock-out” political strategy against Donald Trump and as a means to produce dramatic economic growth and financial stability.  He claims that embracing the three...

By Payam Sharifi An oft repeated phrase you hear every election cycle is that “this is (one of) the most important elections in our lifetime”.  This is usually said within the context of competing and (supposedly) incommensurable policy positions, during a (supposedly) rare moment of crisis that will transform American policy at home and abroad for at least four years.  Yet this phrase has, much to my surprise, not been said once by anyone in the media or among the social media groups that...