Tag Archives: Uncategorized

The trade war between the US (or rather the Trump Administration) and China (or rather Xi Jinping) is heating up again. The standard view seems to be that, because of the massive imbalance in merchandise trade between the two countries, Trump has the advantage. China could retaliate by dumping US bonds, but this is seen as a weapon too dangerous to use. I don’t think this exhausts the options. As we’ve seen in Australia, the Chinese government can do all sorts of things to...

from Lars Syll In our extended NAIRU model, labor productivity growth is included in the wage bargaining process … The logical consequence of this broadening of the theoretical canvas has been that the NAIRU becomes endogenous itself and ceases to be an attractor — Milton Friedman’s natural, stable and timeless equilibrium point from which the system cannot permanently deviate. In our model, a deviation from the initial equilibrium affects not only wages and prices (keeping the rest of...

This paper provides a critique of zero lower bound (ZLB) economics which has become the new orthodoxy for explaining stagnation. ZLB economics is an extension of pre-Keynesian economics which attributes macroeconomic dysfunction to rigidities and market imperfections. The ZLB is the latest rigidity in that pre-Keynesian tradition. The paper argues negative nominal interest rates, even […]

from Ken Zimmerman Today there is as much, if not more consensus among scientists about global climate change as there was 300 years ago about the laws of thermodynamics and the laws of motion. Polling shows that majorities of “ordinary” people in the USA, Europe, Asia, etc. accept the conclusions of this science. Yet around the world opposition to the science of climate change is well funded, unyielding, and denies the science at the highest levels of government and science. What...

from C .P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh On May 2, the Trump administration brought to an end the waiver the US had granted eight countries, including India, of sanctions on imports of oil from Iran. Having pulled out of the 2015 multi-country agreement with Iran to limit its nuclear programme, the US government had invoked the nuclear threat from that country to impose sanctions. The most damaging element of those sanctions for both Iran and the world’s oil importers was the ban this...

from Steve Keen The pedagogic pressure from students and the wider community has to be matched by the accelerated development of alternatives to neoclassical economics. Though we know much more today about the innate flaws in neoclassical thought than was known at the time of the Great Depression (Keen 2001), the development of a fully-fledged alternative to it is still a long way off. There are multiple alternative schools of thought extant – from Post Keynesian to Evolutionary and...

from Lars Syll Regarding models as metaphors leads to a radically different view regarding the interpretation of probability. This view has substantial advantages over conventional interpretations … Probability does not exist in the real world. We must search for her in the Platonic world of ideals. We have shown that the interpretation of probability as a metaphor leads to several substantial changes in interpretations and justifications for conventional frequentist procedures. These...