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The ABC has an article quoting University of Melbourne epidemiologist Tony Blakely as saying (approvingly) that the object of the current “flattening the curve strategy is to smooth the path to herd immunity. Key quotes You don’t go in too hard because you actually want the infection rate to pick up a bit and then hold,” he said. “What they’re not saying is [that] ‘flatten the curve’ likely means [that] by the time this is over, 60 per cent of us will have been infected, to...

from Maria Alejandra Madi The  United States declared an economic war on China in early 2018. Economic warfare is a unilateral action that questions the existence of multilateralism and places the question of what regime we are about to enter after the weakening of the existing multilateral trade agencies. US trade policy opens the door for new relationships between emerging market economies and international financial institutions on issues of liberalisation but mostly it ends a period...

Not surprisingly, many business owners are upset to discover that their business interruption policies do not cover losses due to pandemics.  Although it is easy enough to understand their frustration, it is important to understand the underlying economics.  (Full disclosure, I worked in the property casualty industry for many years.) The main business of insurance companies is risk pooling.  They take premiums from (say) large numbers of drivers, and...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh The global devastation caused by Covid-19 is only just beginning, with the severe threat to public health worsened by the evident inability to cope of most health systems across developing and developed countries. Many states across the world appear to have realised the serious potential of this pandemic and have declared lockdowns, closures, partial curfews and curtailment of all but essential activities in efforts to contain the contagion. The...

from Peter Radford We are all familiar with what a “Minsky Moment” is.  Or we should be given the disaster of the Great Recession.  Whilst it’s true that economics has bumbled along pretty much unaltered since this dark years of just over a decade ago, and, yes, I am aware of the rumblings around the discipline’s edges, others have taken a bash at looking at facts. One of those people is Walter Scheidel who has given us a much needed historical context for our discussion about inequality....

The coronavirus pandemic and the health and economic crisis Stavros D. Mavroudeas Professor of Political Economy Panteion University Department of Social Policy e-mail: [email protected] blog: https://stavrosmavroudeas.wordpress.com facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stavros.mavroudeas twitter: @ StavMavroudeas Athens, 25/3/2020 A double crisis: health and economic Today, humanity is in the throes of a coronavirus pandemic resulting in a huge health crisis. At the same time,...

The recent insider trading by members of Congress (notably but not exclusively by Senator Burr) is appalling.  One policy response – advocated for by Elizabeth Warren – would prohibit MOCs from investing in the stock of individual companies, requiring them instead to invest in mutual funds.  This would prevent the type of corruption evident in the Chris Collins case.  However, under this proposal MOCs could still have cashed out of stock funds and moved...

The news is as bad as it can be. Our most dependable indicator, people dying from Corona, suggest an exponential rate of growth of over 10%. Per day. Actually: 14%.  In a little over 2 weeks, 20.000 people will die. At least. Per day. If we do nothing. The news is as good as it can be. High biotech companies are developing fast track tests at an unbelievable rate while the government offices which (rightly) have to approve these are working around the clock to do this. Korea will soon...