Naked Keynesianism

This is a post for those interested in demand-led theories of growth. Not long ago I wrote a post on misconceptions about Sraffian economics. Marc Lavoie sent me a nice email about it, and a recent paper he published in Metroeconomica (subscription required), which comments on a paper I wrote with Esteban Pérez (working paper available here). In his discussion of supermultiplier models, which put the multiplier and the accelerator together to explain -- not fluctuations of the level of...

One figure is worth a thousand words (negative number imply depreciation). So, if you think China devalued a lot...Source here.

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Numbers are out,employment rose by 151,000 in last month, and December numbers were revised down too.Manufacturing added 29,000 jobs in January. The unemployment rate fell to 4.9 percent. Also, average hourly earnings increased by 12 cents last month, and at about 2.5 percent for the last year. So the unemployment rate has crossed the 5 percent barrier, but inflation does not seem to pick up. The natural rate keeps moving, and mainstream macro has very little to say about it.

That's what Deep Throat said to Bob Woodward in All the President's Men. Good advice. I'm certainly not a specialist on campaign contributions, but Hillary Clinton said regarding Wall Street that "They’re not giving me very much money now, I can tell you that much" after the exchange with Anderson Cooper (video available here), and I decided to check it out. This website provides some comparative data on Hillary and Bernie's donors [I'm assuming the data is accurate and the info I provide...

Curried Keynesianism in action   The review with an intro can be read here (or here). Currie is often considered the first Keynesian in the Roosevelt administration (I suggested here that, while not a professional economist, that merit goes to Eccles), and was also the first to work in the White House, before the Employment Act and the creation of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). He was also later unjustly attacked as a Soviet spy, and Roger Sandilands has dealt with this here...

New paper by Wren-Lewis titled "Unravelling the New Classical Counter Revolution." It provides a strong New Keynesian critique of the New Classical/Real Business Cycle schools. He argues, correctly in my view, that the problem is the abandoning of the Keynesian method of analysis. I'm less keen on microfoundations. Or at least on marginalist microfoundations. But it is important to understand how much the fundamentalist views of Lucas and Prescott have affected the profession.From the...

By Thomas Palley, Louis-Philippe Rochon and Matías Vernengo*This year marks two important anniversaries in macroeconomics: the 80th anniversary of the publication of Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), and the 70th anniversary of Keynes's premature death, at the age of 63. To mark these anniversaries, the first issue of the fourth year of the Review of Keynesian Economics is dedicated to Keynes.The issue contains a symposium of papers titled ‘The...

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The Conference Board argues that Chinese official data should be taken with some skepticism. Nothing new there. They have adopted a new measure, which implies "Chinese economic growth at a more realistic 3.7 percent" for the recent past. In this scenario, interestingly enough, "it’s likely that the bulk of China’s slowdown has already taken place since 2011, even if unapparent in official statistics." So the picture is probably worse than the official one (as shown below, from The...