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Pushing Back For Democracy Around The World  Given the massive impetus the presidency of Donald Trump gave to authoritarian and anti-democratic forces around the world, it is worth seeing that his defeat in a democratic election, despite his efforts to illegally overturn it, seems to have been followed by some outbursts of pro-democratic demonstrations in parts of the world, even as we saw a major setback for democracy in Myanmar with the military...

Pushing Back For Democracy Around The World  Given the massive impetus the presidency of Donald Trump gave to authoritarian and anti-democratic forces around the world, it is worth seeing that his defeat in a democratic election, despite his efforts to illegally overturn it, seems to have been followed by some outbursts of pro-democratic demonstrations in parts of the world, even as we saw a major setback for democracy in Myanmar with the military...

from Dean Baker It seems that Larry Summers is worried that the stimulus proposed by President Biden is too large. I will say at the onset that he could be right. However, at the most fundamental level, we have to ask what the relative risks are of too much relative to too little. If we actually are pushing the economy too hard, the argument would be that we would see serious inflationary pressures, which could result in the sort of wage-price spiral we saw in the 1970s. As someone who...

Is the Financialization Hypothesis a Theoretical Blind Alley? Stavros Mavroudeas and Demophanes Papadatos World Review of Political Economy Vol. 9, No. 4 (Winter 2018), pp. 451-476 (26 pages) Published by: Pluto Journals Open Access at Jstor via the following link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.9.4.0451#metadata_info_tab_contents

from C. P. Chandrasekhar January proved to be an unusual month in the US equity market. The shares of GameStop, a brick-and-mortar retailer of gaming consoles and video games, had in the course of that month risen by close to 2000 per cent. The price of the share rose from around $5 in August 2020 to $350 in late January 2021, with much of the rise occurring towards the end of that period. Besides the fact that no set of fundamentals can justify that rise, this was intriguing because of...

from Peter Radford It’s been a month.  It seems a great deal longer. Trump has slunk off the stage and the first signs of what the post-Trump political arena might look like are emerging.  It isn’t hopeful.  Not if you’re looking for peaceful politics. As we become more able to adjust our focus and ask “what just happened?” with a better degree of clarity, it becomes more obvious, to me at least, that the entire movement that has come to be known as Trumpism was not actually Trump’s at...

from Norbert Häring Merkel, Macron, von der Leyen and other international leaders have described the Corona crisis as an opportunity to reorder world politics on the basis of multilateralism. The timing, shortly after the World Economic Forum’s meeting, and the echoes of the Great Reset proclaimed by the forum, are probably no coincidence, as an analysis of key passages will show. In a joint plea printed in a number of important international newspapers, António Guterres, Ursula von der...

from Lars Syll But why are DSGE models still in the mix at all, and in a key position? Given all the criticisms, what can such models tell us, even as a ‘first pass at important questions’? Multiple equilibria do allow for discussion of a wider range of scenarios, but any discussion of a particular scenario is still constrained by the requirements of general equilibrium theory. These requirements are at the root of the more fundamental critiques of DSGE. While Vines and Wills set out an...

It seems that many people have concerns about Larry Summers’s concerns about overdoing the Covid 19 Relief bill. My first reaction to his op-ed is here, but I realize that I had more nearly relevant things to say in the Debt and Taxes series and, in particular in debt and taxes I and debt and taxes II. (the one with plain ascii algebra and only 2 comments but I promise it is relevant). I’m going to try to focus. First, Summers really criticizes...