Real-World Economics Review

Dear Ed, Someone hacked my gmail account and is using it to fraudulently ask for funds/money; arguing its needed for WEA. Please alert all members Thanks Juan Carlos PS see the photo here attached of the message sent to Marc using my gmail account!

C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh When the pandemic first swept across the globe and destroyed economies in its wake, there were at least some expressions of international solidarity among leaders of the rich countries. External debt problems were widely recognised to be inevitable in the new crisis context; to address them, G20 governments declared a Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) from May 2020, designed to reduce some of the immediate debt repayment burden of the poorest...

from Lars Syll They try to explain business cycles solely as problems of information, such as asymmetries and imperfections in the information agents have. Those assumptions are just as arbitrary as the institutional rigidities and inertia they find objectionable in other theories of business fluctuations … I try to point out how incapable the new equilibrium business cycles models are of explaining the most obvious observed facts of cyclical fluctuations … I don’t think that models so...

from Norbert Häring The hypocrisy of a working group led by the European Central Bank (ECB) on the preservation of cash, which is dominated by banks who at the same time continue to wage their war on cash, has been exposed by cash industry group ESTA in a report. ESTA sent the report to this working group – after it had recently left it in protest. As a part of its cash strategy, which the ECB Governing Council adopted last September and which it has been hiding in the depths of the ECB’s...

Inspired by a tweet (I probably spend too much time on Twitter), I wanted to understand why health insurance doesn't extend to our eyes and teeth, why the US doesn't have a more robust public health system (thanks racism), how healthcare and drugs got to be so expensive (thanks Bob Dole), and what healthcare looks like in a "post-COVID" world. The tweet: https://twitter.com/stepville/status/1397760624449359882 <br> Connect with Dean Baker on the internet:...

from Peter Radford When a large corporation goes on the hunt for a lower cost base of operations I doubt whether it thinks it will be penalized for what is a rational and frequently made decision.  After all if you can make the same revenue and reduce your costs your profit goes up. Yeah.  Capitalism 101.  If we all go about life in this way, and if we believe Adam Smith, all this pursuit of self-interest will shower society with the glories of social benefits previously unheard of. I...

from Lars Syll The gender pay gap is a fact that, sad to say, to a non-negligible extent is the result of discrimination. And even though many women are not deliberately discriminated against, but rather self-select into lower-wage jobs, this in no way magically explains away the discrimination gap. As decades of socialization research has shown, women may be ‘structural’ victims of impersonal social mechanisms that in different ways aggrieve them. Wage discrimination is unacceptable....

from Dean Baker If the waitress works in an upscale restaurant and earns a decent living, there is a good chance that she is paying a higher tax rate than a private equity partner. The reason is that private equity (PE) partners get most of their pay in the form of “carried interest.” This is money that is paid to them as a share of the returns on the money they manage. Since private equity partners are rich and powerful, their carried interest payments are taxed at the capital gains tax...