Tag Archives: Economic Consequences of the Pandemic

That’s the title of the book I’m working on for Yale University Press, and also the theme of two articles I published yesterday. One, in The Conversation, looked at the potential benefits of remote work and the likely struggle over who will get those benefits. Key paras For the most part, disputes over sharing the benefits of remote office work will be hashed out between employers, workers and unions, in the ordinary workings of the labour market.But what about the other half...

A few thoughts on the fact that r < 0, where r is the real rate of interest on long-term (< 30 years) debt for developed country governments Situation predates pandemic and has happened despite central bank attempts to resist it, such as abandoned attempt by Fed to raise funds rate in 2019. Extends to corporate bonds as well. Lowest investment grade BBB currently offering 2.38 which implies expected real return (net of inflation and expected loss from default) also below zero....

In a recent post, I pointed out that long-term (30 year) real interest rates on safe (AAA) bonds had fallen to zero, and suggested that this meant the end of capitalism, at least in the sense that the term was understood in classical economics. On the other hand, stock markets have been doing very well. So what is going on? This is a complicated story and I’m still working it out,An important starting point is the fact that the most profitable companies, particularly tech companies,...

That’s the title of an article I published in Independent Australia last week. An important part of it was support for the German Kurzarbeit scheme, which pays most of the wages lost by employees when working hours are shortened due to the recession. There’s a striking contrast with the push by Josh Frydenberg to allow employers to cut hours and wages at will. It’s pretty clear that the days of “we are all in this together” are fast disappearing. Share this:Like this:Like...

Although my book-in-progress is called The Economic Consequences of the Pandemic, a lot of it will deal with changes that were already underway, and have only been accelerated by the pandemic. This was also true of Keynes’ Economic Consequences of the Peace. The economic order destroyed by the Great War was already breaking down, as was discussed for example, in Dangerfield’s Strange Death of Liberal England. Amid all the strange, alarming and exciting things that have happened...

As with most really neat sayings, the original (with billions, instead of trillions) is misattributed, in this case to the late Senator Everett Dirksen, a conservative Republican who nonetheless helped to write the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The saying can be traced back to an unsigned New York Times article in 1938, which said ““Well, now, about this new budget. It’s a billion here and a billion there, and by and by it begins to mount up into money”. This in turn improved on earlier...

The title of my book-in-progress, The Economic Consequences of the Pandemic is obviously meant as an allusion to Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace, and one of the central messages will be the need to resist austerity policies of the kind Keynes criticised in his major work, The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money. That title, in turn was an allusion to Einstein*, and the Special and General theories of Relativity. The special theory Keynes wanted to replace...

That’s the title of a book I’ve agreed to write for Yale University Press (their editorial director) Seth Ditchik commissioned my previous two books, Zombie Economics and Economics in Two Lessons when he was at Princeton UP. When we first discussed the book, I took the view that most of the writing would have to be done after November, since the outcome of the US presidential election would be crucial to developments in the US and globally. I’m now working on the assumptions that(a)...