Tag Archives: Economics

Globalization is not a win-win!  [embedded content] Advertisements

 [embedded content] In memory of Kristina, beloved wife and mother of David and Tora. Today, twenty-five years ago, the unthinkable happened. People say that time heals all wounds. I wish that was true. Advertisements

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Oh dear, oh dear, Krugman gets it so wrong, so wrong Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world. It is compelled to be this, because, unlike the typical natural science, the material to which it is applied is, in too many respects, not homogeneous through time. The object of a model is to segregate the semi-permanent or relatively constant factors from those which...

Finanspolitiska rådet överlämnade idag sin årliga rapport till regeringen. Man konstaterar att svensk ekonomi går bra och att det därför är läga att strama åt statsfinanserna … – Finanspolitiken kan inte anses vara väl avvägd i förhållande till konjunkturen, säger Harry Flam som är ordförande för finanspolitiska rådet. De menar att den expansiva finanspolitiken ökar risken för överhettning i ekonomin och tär på beredskapen att stabilisera nästa konjunkturnedgång … Rådet slår...

An alternative title to this post could have been, ‘The Interest Rate on Public Debt is a Policy Variable’. This remains true even though, in the neoliberal era, governments usually require themselves to follow various unnecessary rules on how their spending is to be conducted. These rules typically serve no public purpose but may have the effect of misleading the public into believing that somehow a currency issuer can run out of the currency that it alone is empowered to create....

Shame — a gender pay gap solution By making companies publicly air their salary information, Britain intends to force a reckoning. Officials in London hope the embarrassing revelations in the reports … will shame companies into doing more to close the divide. The push is one of a growing number of efforts among countries to promote the principle of equal pay. Australia recently mandated gender pay gap reporting for most companies. In Germany, a new law will...

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Fifteen years ago, Swedish citizens were asked if they wanted to join the eurozone. Of the more than 80 % of registered voters participating in the referendum close to 57 % said NO. Yours truly — unlike the ‘usual suspects’ among establishment economists — participated​ actively in the fight against the euro — and it’s still something I’m immensely proud of. New figures from Eurostat show that the unemployment rate in the eurozone countries is​ on average still over 8 percent....

Schumpeter — an early champion of MMT Evidently this phenomenon is peculiar to money and has no analogue in the world of commodities. No claim to sheep increases the number of sheep. But a deposit, though legally only a claim to legal-tender money, serves within very wide limits the same purposes that this money itself would serve. Banks do not, of course, ‘create’ legal- tender money and still less do they ‘create’ machines. They do, however, something—it...