New Economic Perspectives

Cross-posted from ineteconomics.org The Panama Papers are not simply a story of public corruption as depicted in news outlets like the Wall Street Journal, says former financial regulator William K. Black. They’re a reminder that such corruption destroys the possibility for honest businesses to succeed. “Markets become completely perverse when cheaters prosper,” explains Black, a leading expert on corruption and finance and frequent speaker at Institute events. When cheating brings a...

In order to complete system upgrades, it will be necessary to take NEP offline for awhile. The scheduled maintenance window for this is for Saturday April 9, 2016 between 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. [Translate]

By William K. Black April 5, 2016     Bloomington, MN I wrote a two-part column on the joint report by AEI and Brookings on poverty reduction.  Part two of my column focused on the policy that report pushed most prominently – a government program of propaganda urging pregnant women to marry.  My first article, however, criticized Eduardo Porter’s February 2, 2016 column in the New York Times for ballyhooing the supposed wondrous nature of Brookings and AEI working together.  Porter...

By Felipe Rezende This is the first of a series of posts on the Brazilian crises. There are two major crises Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff is facing: one is a political crisis and the other is Brazil’s sharpest recession in 25 years. Brazil’s Political Crisis The political crisis has two main pillars: a) a vast corruption scandal (with evidence of a kickback scheme funneling billions of dollars from state-run firms and, more recently, in a massive data leak over possible tax evasion,...

By William K. Black April 4, 2016      Bloomington, MN Paul Krugman April Fools’ Day column launched another attack on Bernie Sanders.  In it he announces that he, a strong Hilary Clinton supporter, is “Dad” and gets to set the rules for candidates – “it’s time to lay out some guidelines for good and bad behavior.”  This is a lot like John McEnroe giving lectures on tennis etiquette.  Two sentences later, Krugman mocks voters for Sanders in “very white states,” which is a pretty clear...

By Eric Tymoigne We are done with the study of banking operations. The next step is to incorporate them into the analysis of macroeconomic issues and this post begins on such topic by focusing on inflation. When inflation is mentioned, it is usually in relation to the cost of buying newly produced goods and services for consumption purpose. Another type of inflation concerns asset-prices, i.e. the price of non-producible commodities and old producible commodities. This post does not study...

April 3, 2016 Chairman Jason Chaffetz House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform 2157 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Ranking Member Elijah Cummings House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform 2471 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515 Dear Chairman Chaffetz and Ranking Member Cummings: We, the founding members of Bank Whistleblowers United (BWU), write to express our support for the “Whistleblower Augmented Reward and Nonretaliation (WARN)...

By William K. Black April 3, 2016     Minneapolis, Minnesota I want to thank two prominent “freshwater” macroeconomists, Dr. Narayana Kocherlakota (until recently the President of the Minneapolis Fed and previously the Chair of the University of Minnesota’s economics department) and Dr. Kartik Athreya (Research Director of the Richmond Fed) for their article (2010) and book (2013) , respectively, designed to convey the current status of macroeconomics.  Reading their descriptions, and...

BWU/NEP’s Bill Black is interviewed by Greg Hunter over at USAWatchdog.com. The topic is fraudulent banking. You can view the post here. [Translate]

By Eric Tymoigne The last three posts have explained how the operations of banks are constrained by profitability and regulatory concerns, and how banks operate to bypass these constraints. It is now time to go into the details of how banks get involved into providing credit and payment services to the rest of the economy. Monetary Creation by Banks: Credit and Payment Services Bank A just opened for business and its balance sheet looks like this: Now come household #1 who wants to buy a...