Tag Archives: William K. Black

By William K. BlackJune 27, 2016     Kansas City, MO Thomas Frank is a historian and writer.  He is also the man who tried to save the Democratic Party and our Nation from great harm.  He is the great chronicler of one of the most grievous, self-inflicted wounds in modern American history.  Twelve years ago, in What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank tried to warn the Democratic Party’s dominant elites’ that their policies and contempt for workers...

By William K. BlackJune 24, 2016     Kansas City, MO Roger Cohen Roger Cohen published a column decrying BREXIT. Warnings about the dire consequences of a British exit from President Barack Obama, Britain’s political leaders, major corporations based in Britain and the International Monetary Fund proved useless. If anything, they goaded a mood of defiant anger against those very elites. This resentment has its roots in many things but may be summed up as a revolt against global capitalism....

By William K. BlackJune 24, 2016     Kansas City, MO The UK vote in favor of BREXIT has stoked the fears of the New York Times to a fevered pitch.  Their greatest collective fear is the rise of “populism.”  The NYT fashions itself the last redoubt of “serious people” under siege by the rabble.  BREXIT is an opportunity to drive home to the rabble the folly of failing to fall in line with the policies of the serious people featured in the NYT.  The moral of the story is a simple one – when...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The Myriad Mendacious Myths of “Market Regulation” of Finance By William K. Black June 7, 2016     Bloomington, MN Representative Jeb Hensarling, Chair of the House Financial Services Committee has announced that he will introduce a Republican plan to repeal key provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act and replace them with “market-based” … Continue reading → The Myriad Mendacious Myths of “Market...

By William K. BlackJune 5, 2016     Bloomington, MN Proponents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) know that they have a major problem.  Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump each oppose the deal.  CEOs, however, have not given up on their dream of being able to rig the international system through the creation of kangaroo tribunals that can, effectively, destroy effective regulation and the enforcement of rules to protect the public.  As I explained in my most recent column...

By William K. BlackJune 4, 2016     Bloomington, MN When last we read Paul Krugman he was repeatedly demanding that Bernie Sanders cease criticizing Hillary Clinton for a lifetime addiction of taking tens of millions of dollars in political contributions and hundreds of thousands of dollars in speakers’ fees from Goldman Sachs and other business interests.  (I am an economic adviser to Bernie.)  While Professor Krugman consistently stressed that the data show that business campaign...

By William K. Black Trump’s bigotry de jour was quadrupling down on his claim that the judge hearing the fraud lawsuit against the Trumphemistically-named “Trump U” (which was not a university and involved solely Trump’s wallet rather than his “leadership”) was biased against Trump because the judge, while born here, was of Mexican descent.  Trump’s free-floating bigotry is, of course, simply the norm, so the story here is the reaction of GOP leaders who have made public their support for...

By William K. BlackMay 16, 2016     Bloomington, MN John Cochrane is a theoclassical economist.  I struggle to explain to readers how radical theoclassical economics has become.  The more their anti-regulatory policies prove disastrous the more extreme their policies become.  Cochrane wrote a column recently in the Wall Street Journal that exemplifies this pattern.  We are just emerging from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.  The three “de’s” (deregulation,...

By William K. BlackMay 16, 2016     Bloomington, MN This is the second column in a series on the N. Gregory Mankiw’s myths and dogmas that he spreads in his economic textbooks.  The first column exposed the two (contradictory) meta-myths that begin his preface.  This column de-mythologizes Mankiw’s unprincipled “principles” of economics – the ten commandments of theoclassical economics’ priestly caste.  Some of these principles, correctly hedged, could be unobjectionable, but in each case...

By William K. BlackMay 15, 2016     Bloomington, MN In this first installment I discuss the unacknowledged contradiction that lies at the core of the two meta-myths in the preface to N. Gregory Mankiw’s textbooks.  Mankiw is among the leading providers of introductory economics textbooks.  In his preface to these volumes he preaches his first meta-myth in his first substantive sentence about economics. Economics combines the virtues of politics and science. It is, truly, a social science....