New Economic Perspectives

BWU/NEP’s Bill Black appears on Phil Crawford’s Voice of Appraisal. Bill discusses past problems with appraisal fraud and the AMC model. He also explains how he would like to work with appraisers in the future!! The introduction starts at about the 11 minute mark with interview starting around the 15 minute mark. [embedded content] [Translate]

By William K. Black April 20, 2016     Bloomington, MN Holman Jenkins, the ultra-conservative Wall Street Journal columnist who specializes in global climate change denial and elite financial fraud denial, has written recently to join Paul Krugman in defending the systemically dangerous banks.  Jenkins is a member of the WSJ’s loopy editorial board.  Jenkins’ title was “Big Banks Aren’t the Problem.”  Jenkins’ thesis raises obvious and vital questions – he ignores each of them because...

Michael Hoexter, Ph.D. Democrats in remaining primary states are now making decisions about whether to continue supporting and campaigning for Bernie Sanders the surprisingly successful underdog in the Democratic primary for President or line up behind the current frontrunner and Democratic Establishment candidate Hillary Clinton.   Sanders still has a chance to win a majority of pledged delegates if primary voters feel positively about Sanders and negatively about his opponent Clinton,...

By Eric Tymoigne Past posts have focused on the mechanics of a specific balance sheet, specifically that of the central bank and of private banks. This post looks at the balance-sheet interrelations between the three main macroeconomic sectors of the economy: the domestic private sector, the government sector and the foreign sector. This macro view provides some important insights about issues such as the public debt and deficit, policy goals that are more likely to be achieved, the...

By William K. Black April 19, 2016     Bloomington, MN The journalist Adam Davidson has written an interesting article about economics and Bernie Sanders.  As an economic adviser to Bernie I found his take on Keynesian and institutional economics of considerable interest.  Institutional economics, contrary to Davidson’s take on it, is thriving and the University of Missouri at Kansas City has long been a center of institutional economics.  (I am one of the scholars at UMKC that works...

By William K. Black April 17, 2016     Bloomington, MN In the first installment of this column I showed how radically the states of the former Confederacy are acting to destroy the policies of the “New South” and disinter the Old South.  I used North Carolina as my example.  This second column focuses on the renewed assault of the Old South on the LGBT community.  In particular, I discuss why so much of the business community reacts so strongly in opposition to this assault.  But what I am...

By William K. Black April 12, 2016     Bloomington, MN The rise of the “New South” is generally dated to around 1970, when socially and economically conservative white Democratic politicians who were moderate on racial issues began to be elected as governors in many Southern states.  The timing was just right in that, due to hatred for the Republican Party’s role in stopping the spread of slavery and then winning the Civil War, that Party was still anathema to many Southern whites.  The...

By William K. Black April 17, 2016     Bloomington, MN Andrew Ross Sorkin has written a column lamenting that “For a Generalist, ‘Too Big to Fail’ May Be Too Tricky to Judge” about the district court opinion finding in favor of MetLife on the question of whether it would pose a system risk were it to fail.  Sorkin runs the NYT’s “Deal Book,” which is supposed to represent the paper’s specialized expertise with regard to Wall Street.  His column demonstrates that one of the areas of...

By William K. Black April 17, 2016     Bloomington, MN Hillary Clinton uses a rhetorical device that is too clever by half.  Whenever Bernie Sanders points out that she continues to take millions of dollars for her campaign and over $650,000 personally from the infamous “Vampire Squid” whose frauds caused the financial crisis she responds that this means that Bernie is attacking President Obama too, for in 2008 his campaign’s largest donor was those same Wall Street felons.  She then says...

By William K. Black April 17, 2016     Bloomington, MN The old joke, that conveys a critical truth, is the poster that says “The daily floggings will continue until morale improves around here.”  The troika misses the irony in the poster, for it thinks that the answer to the eurozone nightmare problems caused by austerity is more austerity.  The latest example is three IMF stories that ran contemporaneously.  The IMF, again, lowered global growth forecasts.  Two, the IMF is calling for...