Tag Archives: Weisbrot

[embedded content] Panel at the Eastern Economic Association Meeting with Robert Blecker, Orsola Costantini, Esteban Pérez Caldentey and Mark Weisbrot. The mini symposium organized by Orsola I discuss in the beginning is here, and the papers by Cornell West and Nancy Fraser are here and here, respectively.

[embedded content] EPS Symposium: Policy Challenges for the New US President: Global Security: Russia, China, Europe and Latin America from Thea Harvey on Vimeo.

So besides the coup in Brazil (which was all but confirmed by the last revelations, if you had any doubts), and the electoral victory of Macri in Argentina, the situation in Venezuela is reaching a critical situation, and it would not be surprising if the Maduro administration is recalled, even though right now the referendum is not scheduled yet.The economy in Venezuela has collapsed (GDP has fallen by about 14% or so in the last two years), inflation has accelerated (to three digit levels;...

So for the correct view (yes, it was a coup) see Laura Carvalho here. As she says: The impeachment process of President Dilma Rousseff started as a retaliation by the speaker of Brazil’s lower house of Congress, Eduardo Cunha, indicted for taking as much as $40 million in a kickback scheme at the state-owned oil company Petrobras. Cunha, whose name is also tied to the Panama Papers, initiated the impeachment process shortly after a public announcement by government allies that they would...

In 2009 I wrote that: "a progressive U.S. policy agenda toward Latin America should express support of and solidarity with the region’s left-of-center governments themselves." And central to that agenda was the need for: "would be reversing the corporate bias of the free trade agreements (FTAs) that have been signed over the past decade and a half." How well has Obama done in his almost 8 years by that yardstick, you ask. Not very well.Obama never cozied up to the left of center governments...

It seems increasingly probable. Stanley Fischer suggested that is possible in his speech last weekend at Jackson Hole. My bet is that unless labor markets numbers are terrible Friday, there is a good chance there will be a minor rate increase in the next meeting. That is a bit of a surprise. It's also not a very good idea, as I noted before, and Mark Weisbrot suggests here.

A new research paper from the Center for Economic and Policy Research examines the causes of Brazil’s recent economic slowdown and finds that policy choices rather than external factors have been the most important cause. The paper shows that the sharp slowdown that Brazil has experienced since 2011 is overwhelmingly the result of a significant decline in domestic demand that resulted from policy choices made by the government. It concludes that this decision to slow the economy was not...

Mark Weisbrot on why Greeks should vote no."Well, I would go for a no-vote, because you have to look at who is responsible for this mess, who is responsible for six years of depression, who is responsible for the bank closing right now. It’s because the European Central Bank decided last Sunday to limit the amount of emergency liquidity assistance, so that the banks wouldn’t have enough money to open. And they did this very deliberately, I think, to intimidate the voters into...