Tag Archives: William K. Black

By William K. BlackBloomington, MN      November 22, 2016 In the first column in this series I explained how Hillary Clinton, during the closing 40 days of her campaign, showcased repeatedly her promise to assault the working class with continuous austerity.  I explained that her threat represented economic malpractice – and was insane politics.  I showed that the assault on the working class via austerity was such a core belief of the New Democrats that their candidate highlighted that...

By William K. BlackBloomington, MN     November 22, 2016 I’ve come back recently from Kilkenny, Ireland where I participated in the seventh annual Kilkenomics – a festival of economics and comedy.  The festival is noted for people from a broad range of economic perspectives presenting their economic views in plain, blunt English.  Kilkenomics VII began two days after the U.S. election, so we added some sessions on President-elect Trump’s fiscal policy views.  Trump had no obvious supporters...

By William K. BlackNovember 21, 2016     Bloomington, MN Bloomberg has written an article about the origins of Paul Romer’s increasingly famous critique of modern macroeconomics. His intention actually had been to write a paper that would celebrate advances in the understanding of what drives economic growth. But when he sat down to write it in the months before taking over as the World Bank’s chief economist, Romer quickly found his heart wasn’t in it. The world economy wasn’t growing much...

By William K. BlackNovember 8, 2016     Kansas City, MO I am writing this article late on election night in my office at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, about a mile from the home in which Tom Frank grew up just over the state line in Kansas.  Beginning with his famous book, What’s the Matter with Kansas, first published in 2004, Tom Frank has been warning the Democratic Party of the increasing cost it was paying by abandoning and even attacking the working class, particularly the...

By William K. BlackNovember 2, 2016     Kansas City, MO The uber-right wing economist Tyler Cowen, has written a column entitled “TPP Is Exciting. Let’s Make the Case for It.”  Cowen’s column is remarkable for his inability to even get himself excited about TPP, much less his readers.  He begins with what should be an important warning – there will be a major effort by President Obama and the largest corporations to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) during the lame duck session after...

By William K. BlackOctober 30, 2016      Bloomington, MN When last I wrote of Roger Lowenstein he was complaining that the Wall Street felons were being criticized – not jailed – criticized.  Lowenstein is Wall Street’s self-appointed apologist-in-chief.  Naturally, he despises Senator Warren, the most effective elected official in exposing Wall Street’s elite frauds.  The New York Times granted him an op ed in which he sought to mansplain financial regulation to Senator Warren. Lowenstein...

By William K. BlackOctober 24, 2016     Quito, Ecuador Pete Peterson is back, and his message and rhetoric are always the same.  The federal budget deficit is a disaster and – any day now – will produce massive inflation.  Peterson has written his 20,000th version of this fantasy in the NYT with Paul Volcker.  The first rhetorical game that Peterson plays is to assert that it is bad for a sovereign nation to run budgetary deficits because they are not “sound and sustainable.”  Except that...

By William K. BlackOctober 23, 2016     Kansas City, MO The general media has been treating the WikiLeaks disclosures of the Clinton campaign documents, particularly the transcripts of her lucrative talks with Goldman Sachs as much ado about nothing.  I have not found any article about the disclosures, however, that reported on the extraordinary statements she made in her talk with Goldman Sachs on June 4, 2013. Hillary told the Vampire Squid that the “good news” was that China was removing...

By William K. BlackOctober 20, 2016     Kansas City, MO Elite bankers and the pathetic economists who serve as apologists for their frauds specialize in proving our family saying that it is impossible to compete with unintentional self-parody.  The subtitle of the WSJ article providing the latest proof is “Fines on banks translate into $5 trillion of ‘reduced lending capacity,’ bank says.”  The “bank” referred to is the Bank of England, which is supposed to be the UK’s primary bank...

By William K. BlackOctober 20, 2016     Kansas City, MO The New Democrats and their Republican counterparts’ economic policies have created a rigged system of crony capitalism.  Crony capitalism produces devastating epidemics of elite fraud that have shrunk the overall economic “pie” and distributed the “pie” overwhelmingly in favor of corrupt corporate elites like Donald Trump and their political cronies like the Clintons.  Wall Street has been open about being ecstatic about the rise of...