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Tag Archives: Uncategorized

Highs and Lows of 2017 – for CLASS

2017 will of course be remembered as Year 1 of a deceitful, authoritarian, racist, misogynous US President. But it is also inspirational for a global women’s uprising, launched in the UK with the London Women’s March in January.The economic surprises of 2017 were the strength of the global cyclical upturn including in the Eurozone (but whose deeper flaws will resurface in the next sharp downturn). Only the UK economy lagged behind – though maybe not as far as many Remainers expected.A...

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Keynes’ intellectual revolution

from Lars Syll Keynes’ General Theory is both a critique and a replacement of classical macroeconomic theory. Both are necessary for an intellectual revolution. On one hand, it is a critique and demolition of classical macroeconomics. On the other hand, it offers a novel alternative theory of the workings of a modern industrial capitalist economy … Keynes’ argument involves sweeping away old theory and introducing new theory. First, Keynes rejected the loanable funds theory of interest...

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WTO, price crops and global hunger

from Maria Alejandra Madi Current food challenges involve issues ranging from land and food access to commodity price volatility, besides national and international regulation. Although the scope and intensity of these challenges vary according to the different economic and social situations of countries, the debate has been global. Today, once again, these issues arise deep concerns on behalf of the 2017 WTO ministerial conference  that has just been closed, in Buenos Aires, Argentina....

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The Efficient Markets Hypothesis

from Lars Syll The really interesting questions about the Efficient Markets Hypothesis — at least when discussed by mainstream economists — usually drown in “the model is the message” pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo of four-factor models with two mispricing factors being better-performing than three-factor models, blah, blah, blah … Diane Coyle has a much more accurate view of what it’s all about: I would defend using the assumption of rational choice as long as one realises that it is not a...

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Bubbles: are they back?

from Dean Baker There has been much greater concern about the danger of asset bubbles ever since the collapse of the housing bubble sank the economy. While it is good that people in policy positions now recognize that bubbles can pose a real danger, it is unfortunate that there still seems very little understanding of the nature of the problem. First, an economy-threatening bubble does not just sneak up on us. Often the discussion of bubbles implies that we need some complex measuring...

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William White: wrong about the future of central banking

“We too must bring into our science a strict order and discipline, which we are still far from having…by a disorderly and ambiguous terminology we are led into the most palpable mistakes and misunderstandings – all these failings are of so frequent occurrence in our science that they almost seem to be characteristic of its style.” – Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1891: 382-83) What William White writes about inflation is wrong, sloppy and seems a conscious effort to derail the discussion. Today...

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Online Shopping

A big change that has occurred in my household this year is the amount of shopping we do online – it has gone up a lot. It extends to food – a significant part of my daily calories now get delivered to our house. It isn’t just price driving that change; some of what we order online is very difficult to obtain locally. In fact, it was looking for items I wanted to add to my diet for health reasons that catalyzed this shift to online shopping. What...

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Economic history — a victim of economics imperialism

from Lars Syll Economic history was one of the first fields to succumb at least partially to so-called economics imperialism, the phenomenon through which the methods and models of economic theory have taken over other social scientific subject fields.  The economic historian’s craft, which probably always tended to err in any case towards retrospective reassurance that things were never as bad as they appeared at the time, was thus at least to some extent overwritten by the economic...

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