Naked Keynesianism

xxx A panel about Maria da Conceição Tavares with talks by three of her disciples and students, Ricardo Bielschowsky, Carlos Medeiros and Franklin Serrano.

[embedded content] Podcast with about the never ending crisis in Argentina with Fabián Amico, and myself and interview by Carlos Pinkusfeld Bastos and Caio Bellandi from the Lado B do Rio Revista, and sponsored by the Centro Celso Furtado (Carlos is the director). In Portuguese (but fine if you speak Spanish or at least Portuñol).

The debate between Biden and Trump is on everybody's mind. And for good reason, the future of the global economy, and the well being of the planet are always at stake in American elections. I, of course, will restrict my brief comments here to the economy, and what the alternatives might entail. But the analysis of the impacts of both programs, if one can talk of programs per se, is very poor, to say the least.Broadly speaking there has been increasing agreement on a tougher policy with...

Robin Brooks, previously the chief economist at from the Institute of International Finance (IFF), and now at Brookings, suggests Brazil needs austerity, and, here is the punch line, that would promote growth (laugh track here).The notion that it is the fiscal balances that determine the interest rate on public debt, and that fiscal deficits and high debt must imply high interest rates has no correlation with reality. Imagine the rate of interest that Japan would have if that was correct. In...

ROKE continues to improve it's ranking (based on the Clarivate Impact Factor measure) among heterodox journals. An old discussion about that here. You can see how much we went up since the last time I posted about this here and here.

Paul (I'm next to him) and the Brazilians at the UMKC, PK Conference in 2002Paul has passed away a few days ago. He wasn't in good shape for a while, and this was expected. He lived a long and productive life. I wasn't personally close to him, even though I met him several times from the mid-1990s onward. He went to two conferences I co-organized at the Federal University in Rio, always with Louise, which was a central figure of Post Keynesian (PK) life, and basically run the Journal of Post...

[embedded content] Our panel at the UNICAMP conference last Thursday, with Mark Schwartz, and Andrés Arauz.

Almost everything that’s wrong with conventional views on fiscal policy is on display in this column (well written and clear) by one of the key journalists from Folha de São Paulo, Vinicius Torres Freire. He suggests that the current fiscal adjustment is not credible. For him, this is a confidence crisis, caused by Lula’s insistence on attacking the central bank policy and his lukewarm support for the adjustment. Why the adjustment is necessary, he never asks. It’s evident, for any educated...

The media and a good chunk of the policy wonks are surprised that Biden does not get the deserved recognition for the relatively good state of the US economy, and that as a result he is suffering in the polls. There are two separate, but interrelated, causes for that. The most obvious can be defined in one word, inflation. The second, is related to the fact that, even though the recovery from the pandemic was fast, the economic situation for most working class people has not been great for a...

(1930-2024)Maria da Conceição Tavares passed away last Sunday. She was among the key thinkers of the Latin American Structuralist School, often associated with the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). In her case, Anibal Pinto, who was her teacher in a ECLA course in the early 1960s, and Celso Furtado, who was never formally her teacher, were her major influences. She was instrumental in introducing Kalecki in Brazilian academic circles, and in her debate with Furtado on the...