Real-World Economics Review

from David Ruccio Almost 30 thousand people joined the ranks of the global super-rich last year, as booming global stock markets and corporate profits boosted the fortunes of the already very-rich and bumped them up into the ultra-high-net-worth bracket. The global population of ultra-high-net-worth people, classed as those with more than $30 million in assets, increased by 12.9 percent last year to a record 255,810 people,  while their combined wealth surged by 16.3 percent to $31.5...

from Lars Syll In the ongoing discussion on the ’empirical revolution’ in economics, some econometricians criticise — rightfully — the view that quasi-experiments and RCTs are the (only) true solutions to finding causal parameters. But — the alternative they put forward, structural models, have their own monumental problems. Structural econometrics — essentially going back to the Cowles programme — more or less takes for granted the possibility of a priori postulating relations that...

from Dean Baker NYT readers were no doubt disturbed to see a column in which former Fed Reserve Board chair Ben Bernanke, Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson patted themselves on the back for their performance in the financial crisis. First, as they acknowledge in the piece, all three completely failed to see the crisis coming. During the years when house prices were getting way out of line with both their long-term trend and rents,...

from Jayati Ghosh One of the difficulties with discussions on employment in India is the tendency to conflate employment and work. But employment is only that part of work that is remunerated, and in India a vast amount of work is actually unpaid and often not even socially recognised. Once we recognise that, a lot of what appears to be inexplicable about Indian employment trends becomes easier to understand. This is especially true of women’s work. There has been much discussion on the...

from Lars Syll  What kind of financial system do we want? What function should it have? What kind of financial activity do we want to permit or even encourage? These are essential questions for the shaping of economic and social policy at a national and global level. If we leave these questions up to the private sector, we expose ourselves to enormous risks. On the basis of our experience of 2008, we know how to master a massive heart attack in the banking system. But we also know how...

According to D. Trump “The GDP rate (4,2%) is higher than the unemployment rate (3,9%) for the first time in over 100 years!”. This tweet.  Comparing the rate of GDP growth with the unemployment rate surely is interesting. And situations where the unemployment rate is lower than the rate of growth (U<G) are rare and remarkable as well as agents of change. D. Trump is wrong about the economic history of these events (graph). During WW II as well as during quite some years in the fifties...

from Dean Baker Ten years ago we saw the culmination of a period of ungodly economic mismanagement with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and a full-fledged financial crisis. The folks who led us into this disaster rushed to do triage and tend to the most important problem: saving the bankrupt banks. They also had to cover their tracks. They insisted that the financial crisis was some sort of fluke event — a lot of bad things went wrong simultaneously — and who could have predicted or...

from Lars Syll A more pluralist approach would take account of the complexity of markets, the constraints imposed by nature and rising inequality. So what needs to be done? Firstly, listen to consumers, because it is pretty obvious that they are unimpressed with what they are getting. The failure of the economics establishment to predict the crisis and its insistence that austerity is the right response to the events of a decade ago has meant the profession has rarely been less trusted …...

There we go again. According to mister Mersch, a central banker, the ECB only has to care about consumer price inflation and not about financial stability. Mister Mersch knows this isn’t right. Legally, the ECB do has to care about financial stability. It’s part of the mandate of the bank. In a practical sense, caring about financial stability is what central banks do. While they do not excel at influencing the rate of consumer price inflation (which is influenced by wages, profit...

IG: DEANRAVENBAKER Song: Every Time We Run Band name: Alter Ego Music Australia. Band Members: Dean Baker (vocals), Dan Bacon (guitar), Matty Ray (keys), Mike Walker Coulter (drums). The band was highly inspired by the likes of The Doors, Tea Party, Rolling Stones and INXS. "Alter Ego Music Australia eternalized its illusionary psychedelic rock blues sound through the evocation of the true self". - Dean Baker. This original song was first recorded around the year 1999-2000 and unlike...