Tag Archives: Economics – General

I spend quite a bit of time (more than I should) engaged in Twitter debates with advocates of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Some are generally sensible, while others are convinced they have learned a deep secret which enables us to have whatever we want without paying for it. Unfortunately, the sensible ones (Meaningful Monetary Theory) don’t do the hard work of correcting the others (Magical Monetary Theory) A couple of tweets referring to the latter group (followed by the usual...

Quite a while back we had a discussion of the idea of Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI) as a measure of the viability of solar and wind energy. I did the numbers for solar (including battery backup) and came to the conclusion that EROEI was at least 10 and therefore not a problem. The issue has come up in an email discussion I’ve been having. Thinking about it, I concluded that using a ratio of energy generated to energy invested is incorrect. As a starting point, I assume...

That’s the headline the Canberra Times gave to my article on the implications of the recent short squeezes on Gamestop and AMC . It’s uninformative, but maybe more clickworthy than WallStreetBets and financialised capitalism, the title I gave to the early version posted here. With a bit esprit d’escalier and ignoring word constraints, I’d now go for “You wouldn’t let a bookie manage your home finance, so why let a casino plan our national investment”. Canberra Times is paywalled,...

It’s been hard to miss the chaos that’s arisen from a bunch of Reddit users (on sub-reddit WallStreetBets) getting together to squeeze shortsellers on stocks including GameStop and AMC Theatres. Most of the attention has been confined to the stockmarket action, but I was struck by this piece in The Bulwark[1], making the point that the process has enabled AMC to issue high-priced shares, repay debt and thereby stave off impending bankruptcy. I don’t have a view on whether AMC should...

Slightly behind the pack, it seems, I’ve suddenly started hearing about “ergodicity economics”, presented as an alternative to expected utility (EU) theory. Commenter James asked me about it here, and I also received from a colleague a copy of a paper in Nature, by Ole Peters, who appears to be the main developer of this idea. The essential idea of ergodicity is that the long-run distribution of outcomes for a dynamic process should match the uncertainty of the process at any point...

For decision theory and finance fans, my latest working paper with Ani Guerdjikova https://ideas.repec.org/p/gbl/wpaper/2020-10.html Some difficult math, but there are fundamental implications for financial markets, which will be spelt out later. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

The self-explanatory title of my latest piece in The Conversation. I look back at the last time this scare was run in the 1980s. An interesting sidelight is that the term did not, it seems, originate with Lee Kuan Yew as is commonly claimed. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

That’s the title of my latest piece in Inside Story, expanding my earlier discussion of intangibles and monopoly to take account of Apple’s startling market valuation of $2 trillion. As I observe, this can’t be accounted for in terms of big profit gains Admittedly, Apple’s business hasn’t been harmed by the Covid-19 pandemic, but neither has it greatly benefited — earnings in the June quarter were only about 10 per cent higher than in 2019, yet the stock price has doubled in less...

I’ve been working for some time on a review of the first full-length text based on Modern Monetary Policy, Macroeconomics by William Mitchell, Randall Wray and Martin Watts. A near-final draft is over the fold <h3>Macroeconomics – Review</h3> Voltaire once said of the Holy Roman Empire that it was “Neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire”. Something similar might be said of Modern Monetary Theory, which has shot to prominence in policy debates recently. It is...

I forgot to link to this piece in The Conversation when it came out a week ago. Unlike much of what I’ve written lately, it hasn’t been overtaken by events. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...