Tag Archives: Economics

Top 10 Economics Blog Posts Dumb and dumber in modern macroeconomics Krugman vs Kelton on the fiscal-monetary tradeoff The wisdom of crowds How money is created Paul Samuelson — a case of badly invested intelligence Keynes’ critique of econometrics The real debt problem Is macroeconomics for real? MMT — Krugman still doesn’t get it! What is ergodicity?

Inequality within countries — getting worse or better? In a recent Twitter post, Max Roser of Our World In Data claimed that the narrative about rising inequality within countries is incorrect. Inequality has been falling in as many countries as it has been rising, he said, “which should be really embarrassing for many news stories that suggest the opposite with great certainty” … What Roser doesn’t mention in his tweet is that the Gini index used here is...

Karl Polanyi — Wirtschaft als Teil des menschlichen Kulturschaffens  [embedded content]

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. The 26 artifacts, which include statutes and thrones looted by French troops during a military raid against the once powerful West African Kingdom of Dahomey in 1892, are among some of the 5,000 artifacts requested from France by Benin. And that’s just Benin, there are an estimated 90,000 looted African artifacts in France. A holy grail in economic development, and really all of business investment, is figuring out which small...

MMT — the key insights As has become abundantly clear during the last couple of years, it is obvious that most mainstream economists seem to think that Modern Monetary Theory is something new that some wild heterodox economic cranks have come up with. That is actually very telling about the total lack of knowledge of their own discipline’s history these modern mainstream guys like Summers, Rogoff and Krugman have. New? Cranks? Reading one of the founders of...

Everything you want to now about MMT [embedded content] One of the positive contributions of MMT, especially from a european point of view, is that it makes it transparently clear why the euro-experiment has been such a monumental disaster. The neoliberal dream of having over-national currencies just doesn’t fit well with reality. When an economy is in a crisis, it must be possible for the state to manage and spend its own money to stabilize the economy....

Solow kicking Lucas and Sargent in the pants Professors Lucas and Sargent … have a proposal for constructive research that I find hard to talk about sympathetically. They call it equilibrium business cycle theory, and they say very firmly that it is based on two terribly important postulates — optimizing behavior and perpetual market clearing. When you read closely, they seem to regard the postulate of optimizing behavior as self-evident and the postulate...

Asset price distributions are of great practical significance for portfolio managers. Standard finance theory assumes that asset price changes follow a normal distribution—the well-known bell curve. That this assumption is roughly accurate most of the time allows analysts to use very robust probability statistics. For example, for a sample that follows a normal distribution, you can identify the population average and characterize the likelihood of variance from that average....

RBC — nonsense on stilts 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...

Am heutigen Donnerstag wird EZB-Präsidenten Mario Draghi in seiner drittletzten regulären Pressekonferenz vor der Übergabe seines Amts an Christine Lagarde im November wohl klarmachen: Der Leitzins der Notenbank in Europa, der sowieso schon historisch niedrig liegt, wird niedrig bleiben und könnte demnächst sogar noch weiter sinken. Und was hat das jetzt mit den Mieten zu tun? Sehr viel. Der niedrige Zins der Notenbank spiegelt sich im niedrigen Zins auf viele klassische...