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Old charters still shed light on recent monetary developments… While in the Leeuwarden archive, investigating 19th century quantities and insurance prices of clay soil hay in central Friesland (a coastal part of the Netherlands) I got sub-focused and found myself thumbing through the Frisian ‘Charter books’ (internet version here). These books contain all Frisian government ‘oorkonden’ from the end of the fifteenth century onwards. ‘Oorkonden’ literally translates as ‘ear messages’. And...

The AUKUS subs plan will cost Australia way more than that That’s the headline for my latest piece in The Conversation . Using defense procurement as a job creation policy is a really bad idea Australian governments have a long and generally dismal history of using defence procurement, and particularly naval procurement, as a form of industry policy. Examples including the Collins-class submarines, Hobart-class air warfare destroyers and, most recently, the...

(1) The origins of the Ukraine conflict lie in the ambitions of US Neocons. Those ambitions threatened Russian national security by fuelling eastward expansion of NATO and anti-Russian regime change in the Republics of the former Soviet Union. (2) The Ukraine conflict is now a proxy war. The US is using Ukraine to attack and […]

from Lars Syll The theory is a vending machine: you feed it input in certain prescribed forms for the desired output; it gurgitates for a while; then it drops out the sought-for representation, plonk, on the tray, fully formed, as Athena from the brain of Zeus. This image of the relation of theory to the models we use to represent the world is hard to fit with what we know of how science works. When applying deductivist thinking to economics, economists usually set up ‘as if” models...

Bank failures: The specter of crisis once again looms over capitalist economies S. Mavroudeas Department of Social Policy Panteion University THE BANKRUPCIES On 10/3, California-based Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) became the largest bank to fail since the financial crisis of 2008. It was the 16th largest US commercial bank. It specialized in transactions with technology and healthcare companies and particularly in investments in start-up companies. SVB’s bankruptcy was...

from Peter Radford The circumstances of Silicon Valley Bank are well rehearsed by now.   The bank sat at the epicenter of the tech-bro start-up ecosystem and played a pivotal role in the collection and disbursement of all the cash that flows through that system.  It was an extremely odd bank.  Unlike the everyday banks most of us deal with it had very few deposits that originated from regular customers.  Most of its deposit base consisted of the chunky piles of cash belonging to start-ups...

… contains the seed of a good idea but his version is an inequitable mess That’s the headline for my latest piece in the Guardian , over the fold It is always disappointing when an important, and potentially transformational, policy idea is introduced in a form that almost certainly guarantees its rejection. That’s even more true in the context of an election campaign, where reasoned analysis of policy invariably takes a back seat to partisan polemics. Dominic...

from Dean Baker There are two key points that people should recognize about the decision to guarantee all the deposits at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB): It was a bailout Donald Trump was the person responsible. The first point is straightforward. We gave a government guarantee of great value to people who had not paid for it. We will get a lot of silly game playing on this issue, just like we did back in 2008-09. The game players will tell us that this guarantee didn’t cost the government a...