Naked Keynesianism

Tomorrow, for those around Lewisburg, I'll present my paper on “Interest rates, terms of trade and currency crises” at the economics department's brown bag seminar series in ACWS room 116 from 11:45 to 12:50.

Or close to. The figure below is not just the real minimum wage, which I posted before (most recently here). It is as it says the ratio of the minimum wage to the average wage. The figure neatly shows that while in the 50s and 60s the minimum wage was about 50% of the average wage, since the 1980s it has been closer to a third. Read rest here.

[embedded content] Although it's framed as a public defender issue, it is really about debtors' prisons and the criminalization of poverty.

New paper by Suranjana Nabar-Bhaduri published by PERI. From the abstract:India’s trade balance and current account have shown persistent deficits for a major part of its post-independence period. Since the mid-2000s, trade deficits have increased perilously, with a sharp rise in both oil and non-oil imports. This has increased the magnitude of the current account deficit, as net earnings from services and remittances have been insufficient to offset the trade deficits. India has relied on...

So Brazil (or here about Petrobras, the State oil company) lost its investment grade status with Standard & Poor's. You would think this is huge given the media attention in Brazil. If you read S&P's actual rationale for the downgrading (here) it is essentially about the fiscal situation. They say: "We now expect the general government deficit to rise to an average of 8% of GDP in 2015 and 2016 before declining to 5.9% in 2017, versus 6.1% in 2014. We do not expect a primary fiscal...

If you're around Lewisburg next Tuesday.

As much as there has been an institutional turn in mainstream economics, since the 1980s, which is not completely dissociated from the anti-Keynesian turn that started in the 1970s and led to the segregation of heterodox groups within the profession, there has been a poverty-turn in the development economic literature, as noted by Jayati Ghosh.Particularly important in this shift is that:"Macroeconomic processes are entirely ignored: patterns of trade and economic activity that determine...

I've been teaching an Intermediate Political Economy course, substituting Berhanu Nega, who regularly teaches this course. The text used, and it was already in the bookstore, is Bowles, Edwards and Roosevelt's Understanding Capitalism, which puts an emphasis on individual behavior as the main difference with the marginalist view, and is not the best choice, in my view. At any rate here are a few old posts on Marx, which is central to the first part of the course (towards the end Veblen...

It seems increasingly probable. Stanley Fischer suggested that is possible in his speech last weekend at Jackson Hole. My bet is that unless labor markets numbers are terrible Friday, there is a good chance there will be a minor rate increase in the next meeting. That is a bit of a surprise. It's also not a very good idea, as I noted before, and Mark Weisbrot suggests here.