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from Peter Radford What on earth were they doing? Rocked but undaunted by the great financial crisis the orthodoxy of our central banks survived to fight another day.  The system had been saved.  That no one saw the onrushing crisis is still being debated.  Of course some people saw it coming.  Anyone with a scintilla of understanding of Minsky for instance.  But those folk are hard to find in the top seats of central banks. The objective of the so-called independent central bank is to...

I’m hoping next year we will make progress getting some of the crazier stuff out of the room. Here’s a little YouTube teaser from Down Under (give it a minute to get to the punchline): Who’s crazy now? All the best in 2022, Tom

I ran across this three-part series while reading one of Kip Sullivan’s articles “Kip Sullivan on the Creeping Privatization of Medicare, ” Corporate Crime Reporter If you wish to understand the evolution of healthcare and how we got to this point the US, the detail is here on YouTube. Kip starts the in the seventies detailing HMOs (HMO Act 1973) during the Nixon era. [embedded content] “Now there are a slew of these insurance companies like...

The Bank of England has a 28 MB Excel dataset containing: “A millenium of macro economic data”. A treasure trove. A good thing about it: as it are long term series and as these are roughly based on national accounts data and not just on economics 101 it’s not only focused on GDP but also on sectoral developments and flows between and within sectors. I can’t show it all, and… will leave, to name only one (!) major part of it, the Flow of Funds data, which, among other things, show...

from Blair Fix As 2021 comes to a close, I’m having a distinct sense of déjà vu. A year ago, I wrote a post celebrating COVID vaccines as a triumph of science. And I noted that vaccine discovery is a collective endeavour. The cumulative number of major vaccines tracks closely with the cumulative number of scientific papers, a bellwether for humanity’s collective knowledge. Here’s the trend: Figure 1: The cumulative number of major vaccines tracks with the cumulative number of scientific...

from Dean Baker From the way our policy types talk about patents, or refuse to talk about them, they must think that the constitution guarantees life, liberty, and people getting incredibly rich from patents. Even as this pandemic has been needlessly prolonged by patent restrictions on the spread of technology for vaccines, tests, and treatments, resulting in millions of preventable deaths, we are still seeing no real debate as to whether we want to rely on these monopolies as a primary...