Tag Archives: Economic History

In recent decades all but the wilfully ignorant have had to face two facts: that climate change is taking place and that it is the result of what we humans are doing. The term Anthropocene was coined in 2000 in recognition of that latter hugely important fact. When had this new era began – and with it the end of the Holocene epoch that had been around for some 11,000 years of climate stability, a transition out of the Ice Ages, that then facilitated the spread of farming and permanent...

Creditors argue, for instance, that if you forgive debts for a class of debtors – say, student loans – that there will be some “free riders.” Students freed from debt will benefit, while students who were able to carry and pay off their debts had to “meet their obligations.” It is further argued that if student debts are forgiven (or “junk mortgage” loans written down to fair real estate valuations), people will expect to have bad loans written off. This is called a “moral hazard,” as if...

Must-read.Naked CapitalismEverything You Thought You Knew About Western Civilization Is Wrong: A Review of Michael Hudson’s New Book, And Forgive Them Their Debts John Siman

Book Review Adam Tooze. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. Viking. New York. 2018 The global economic crisis is now more than a decade old, and is far from definitively behind us. Indeed, many fear, with good reason, that the recent, uneven and lethargic global recovery may soon come to an end, and that the next crisis of global capitalism could be even worse than that of 2008. The financial crisis and resulting crisis of the real global economy triggered by the...

Again, follow the money, here the conversion of the Reichsmark to the DM. Very interesting from the monetary point of view — who controls the money, and all that. I think some of you may have heard on more than one occasion about how that bloodthirsty tyrant Stalin set up a blockade of West Berlin in 1948 and how the freedom-loving nations organized the Berlin airlift to circumvent it. But today we’ll let you in on what really happened.... Russia InsiderWho Really Put up the Berlin Wall?...

If you are interested in Marx.Speaking as a philosopher commenting on Marx as a philosopher more than he was an economist, I think that Matias Vernengo gets is about right. He is in agreement with John Kenneth Galbraith on it.Marx was a materialist ontologically. He had written his doctoral dissertation on Greek materialism.  He looked forward to occupying a chair in philosophy at a university as a career. His political activism obviated this, and he was forced to go into exile to more...

It has been almost ten years since: Bear Stearns folded Lehmann collapsed of its own free will I posted on this blog All of the above Those who guessed “c” or “d” are optimists. Those who are expecting a long series of posts dwelling on the correct answer of “b” (with some references to “a” and AIGFP) will not be disappointed. But this is an introduction. I have been trying to think of how to simplify ten years of lessons as if there were one root cause....

Thousands of years ago, money was a means of debt payment, archaeologists and anthropologists say. Useful summary of the history.Science NewsConflict reigns over the history and origins of money Bruce Bower

 By Thomas Palley (Guest blogger)The conventional wisdom is there have been two globalizations in the modern era. The first began around 1870 and ended in 1914. The second began in 1945 and is still underway. This paper challenges that view and argues there have been three globalizations, not two. The first half of the paper provides empirical evidence for the three globalizations hypothesis. The second half discusses its analytical implications. The Victorian first globalization and...

Former Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky was quoted as saying during the 1979 Austrian election campaign that: “I am less worried about the budget deficits than by the need for the state to create jobs where private industry fails”. That is the statement of a social democrat. That is a progressive Left view. In June 1982, with French unemployment at 7.2 per cent (having risen from 2.4 per cent in 1974 after a near decade of austerity under the right-wing Prime Minister Raymond Barre), the...