Real-World Economics Review

On this episode of Going Underground, we firstly speak to Dean Baker, the co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and one of the first economists to predict the property market crash in 2008. He discusses the bailouts passed in the United States by Congress, how they have many giveaways to the richest in society, how the giveaways have nothing to do with the pandemic, why the Coronavirus bailouts are worse than TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), how state and local...

from Dean Baker Last week the Boston Review (BR) published an exchange on a wealth tax that included a proposal from Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, with a number of responses, including one from me. I was critical of the proposal for both political reasons and because I think avoidance and evasion will be massive problems. On the political side, in addition to the difficulty of getting a wealth tax through Congress, there is the virtual certainty that the current...

from Maria Alejandra Madi The fundamental structural flaws in the global economy have not been addressed after the 2008 global crisis.  Monopoly-finance capital became increasingly dependent on bubbles that, both in credit and capital markets, proved to be globally the sources of endogenous financial fragility. This process was reinforced, in a vicious circle, by a concentration of income, wealth and power. By negatively influencing labour and working conditions, it became increasingly...

Unequal Effects        The Aftermath         Averting Catastrophe from Jayati Ghosh There are still many uncertainties about the COVID-19 pandemic: about the extent of its spread, its severity in different countries, the length of the outbreak, and whether an initial decline could be followed by a recurrence. But some things are already certain: we know that the economic impact of this pandemic is already immense, dwarfing anything that we have experienced in living memory. The current...

from Asad Zaman RG2 (Reading Guide 2) – Continues from previous posts on Reading Course: Central Banking and Readers Guide: Goodhart on Central Banks. Writeup is given following the ten minute video: [embedded content] Goodhart starts by discussing discontent with Central Banking System. He wrote this book well before the GFC 2007 -8, which has created much greater discontent. There are two different lines of attack on Central Banking: Free Banking: Private Creation and Provision of...

from David Ruccio Three and a half weeks ago, Bernie Sanders became the last challenger to drop out of the race, thus clearing the way for Joe Biden to become the Democratic nominee on the November presidential ballot. Since then, the novel coronavirus has engulfed the country (and, of course, the world), the U.S. economy has mostly come to a standstill, and tens of million American workers have joined the ranks of the unemployed, while “essential” workers are forced to commute to and...

We provide on-location video production services throughout Florida and the USA. This video was filmed at Lake Monroe in Sanford, Florida. Music liscenced through www.audioblocks.com

We provide on-location video production services throughout Florida and the USA. This video was filmed at Lake Monroe in Sanford, Florida. Music liscenced through www.audioblocks.com

from Lars Syll Mainstream economists often hold the view that criticisms of econometrics are the conclusions of sadly misinformed and misguided people who dislike and do not understand much of it. This is a gross misapprehension. To be careful and cautious is not equivalent to dislike. The ordinary deductivist ‘textbook approach’ to econometrics views the modelling process as foremost an estimation problem since one (at least implicitly) assumes that the model provided by economic theory...

from Dean Baker There has been a new wave of despair among journalists in the last couple of weeks as several major news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times and McClatchy News Service, announced layoffs and/or pay cuts. The immediate cause is the coronavirus. Pandemics sharply reduce advertising opportunities, but the underlying model is clearly not viable for most news outlets. There is a limited amount of money that businesses are willing to pay for web ads, which is now by far the...