Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Dean Baker As everyone learns in Econ 101, and immediately forgets, the purpose of the financial sector is to facilitate transactions and allocate capital. This seems like a simple and obvious point, but you would never know it in most discussions of the financial sector. The point here is that we need finance for these purposes. We don’t need finance to develop elaborate betting games and complex financial instruments. Financial instruments are only useful when they serve the...

I wrote this for the Guardian last week, Events have already moved on, with the snap resignation of Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, but the anomalous status of a “national flag carrier” with no interest in the welfare of the nation remains unresolved. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

from Lars Syll You ask me what all idiosyncrasy is in philosophers? … For instance their lack of the historical sense, their hatred even of the idea of Becoming, their Egyptianism. They imagine that they do honour to a thing by divorcing it from history sub specie æterni—when they make a mummy of it. Friedrich Nietzsche Nowadays there is almost no place whatsoever in economics education for courses in the history of economic thought and economic methodology. This is deeply worrying....

We can talk about a higher rate of GST in Australia, but it will never happen My latest in The Conversation #auspol Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

from Jason Hickel and RWER As the climate crisis worsens and the carbon budgets set out by the Paris Agreement shrink, climate scientists and ecologists have increasingly come to highlight economic growth as a matter of concern. Growth drives energy demand up and makes it significantly more difficult – and likely infeasible – for nations to transition to clean energy quickly enough to prevent potentially catastrophic levels of global warming. In recent years, IPCC scientists have argued...

My latest in The Conversation Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

This is the English transcript of an interview of S.Mavroudeas for the spanish site EL CONFIDENCIAL (https://www.elconfidencial.com/). Its subject is the state of the EU and the Greek economy. The Spanish translation will appear on the 25th of August 2023. [embedded content] View this document on Scribd

from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh The dramatic increase in global oil and food prices from the start of the Ukraine War did not reflect real global supply shortages or demand-supply imbalances. Rather, it reflected the impact of market concentration and financial activity in commodity futures markets, which enabled some large private players particularly global agribusinesses and financial companies to make a killing. This is now so evident from the data that it is more widely...

from Lars Syll Given the lack of consensus in existing empirical analyzes and the difficulties of making causal inferences from macro-level panel data analyzes, it remains an open empirical question how cutting taxes on the rich affects economic outcomes. We believe the question is best answered by looking at the effects of major tax cuts packages, as the story of taxing the rich in the advanced democracies over the past 50 years is one of discrete and stark changes in policy … Our...