Real-World Economics Review

from Lars Syll The Bank of England is today wholly-owned by the UK government, and no other body is allowed to create UK pounds. It can create digital pounds in the payments system that it runs, thus marking up and down the accounts of banks, the government and other public institutions. It also acts as the bank of the government, facilitating its payments. The Bank of England also determines the bank rate, which is the interest rate it pays to commercial banks that hold money (reserves)...

from David Ruccio Both the number of initial unemployment claims for unemployment compensation and the number of continued claims for unemployment compensation are once again on the rise, signaling a worsening of the Pandemic Depression. This morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 935 thousand American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. While initial unemployment claims remain well below the...

Volume 10, Issue No. 4This WEA commentaries issue is a PDF document, selected articles are listed below… An interview with Professor Harold James on transformative crises and the end of globalization as we know it › How to Breathe 1—Capitalism as Robbery › One paradigm or many? Toward a democracy-oriented economics › Which healthcare system was up against coronavirus in Brazil? › Why do we need pluralism in times of disruption? A practical guide › The political economy of inequality...

from Lars Syll I’ve never yet been able to understand why the economics profession was/is so impressed by the Arrow-Debreu results. They establish that in an extremely abstract model of an economy, there exists a unique equilibrium with certain properties. The assumptions required to obtain the result make this economy utterly unlike anything in the real world. In effect, it tells us nothing at all. So why pay any attention to it? The attention, I suspect, must come from some prior...

from  Norbert Häring and current issue of RWER On 2 October, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced in a press release that it intends to intensify its work on a digital euro. The ECB enumerated three scenarios under which it might want to issue a digital euro: (i) a sharp decline in the use of cash, (ii) “he launch of global private means of payment that might raise regulatory concerns and pose risks for financial stability and consumer protection” (read: Libra), and (iii) a broad...

from Dean Baker and Arjun Jayadev On Monday, we, along with Achal Prabhala, had a column in the New York Times arguing in support of a resolution put forward before the WTO by India and South Africa, which would suspend intellectual property rights related to vaccines and treatments during the pandemic. The main point is that these rights are slowing the diffusion of life-saving medicines in a crisis. Furthermore, since much or all the cost of developing these vaccines and treatments were...

from Jayati Ghosh It was a long time coming, but the day of reckoning for the big digital companies may finally have arrived. Despite the growing monopoly power of big tech and their use of anti-competitive practices, earlier attempts to regulate them (such as an attempt by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1998 to rein in Microsoft) had only limited success. The novel coronavirus pandemic further enhanced the monopoly power of the big tech giants. Timeline and actions But now, a rash of...

from Lars Syll In physics, we have theories and centuries of experience and experiments that show how gravity makes bodies move. In economics, we know there is nothing equivalent. Mainstream economists necessarily have to load their theories and models with sets of auxiliary structural assumptions to get any results at all in their models. So why then do mainstream economists keep on pursuing this modelling project? Mainstream ‘as if’ models are based on the logic of idealization and a...

from Asad Zaman I was overwhelmed by the level of ignorance displayed by distinguished economist Raghuram Rajan in his article entitled “How Much Debt Is Too Much?” published recently in Project Syndicate on Nov 30, 2020. I had meant to write a critique of the article, but to do so requires starting from the very beginning. In this post, I go over some basic MMT concepts, in order to prepare the ground for this critique. There are now many good videos explaining these basics. I will go...

from  Nikolaos Karagiannis and current issue of RWER “. . . The practical use of the term “neoliberal” exploded in the 1990s, when it became closely associated with two developments. One of these was financial deregulation, which would culminate in the 2008 financial crash and in the still-lingering euro debacle. The second was economic hyper-globalization, which accelerated thanks to free flows of finance and to new, more ambitious types of trade agreements. Financialization and...