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Steve Keen considers the following as important:
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Topics:
Steve Keen considers the following as important:
This could be interesting, too:
Lars Pålsson Syll writes I am I said
Lars Pålsson Syll writes The non-existence of economic laws
Michael Hudson writes Gaza – Civilization will Win over Barbarism
John Quiggin writes The war to end war, still going on
Austrian economics struck me as political philosophy masquerading as economics, but I knew of it only through intermediaries citing it like Ron Paul and Peter schiff. It seemed pretty circular, like defining inflation as the increase in money supply rather than increased prices, just sort of proclaiming fiat currency to be bad rather than making claims about what would happen with it that were falsifiable. Gotta watch this Lex interview I guess!
@Matt Wiggum it seems like a pretty obvious mistake to say “CPI is flawed so we’re just not going to measure price inflation at all”. And it definitely seems cult like today (or did 10-15 years ago when I was a libertarian) but I’m curious if any within it have made valuable contributions to economics, your summary doesn’t sound like it.
@Matt Wiggum you seem knowledgeable, do you have a suggestion on a well grounded explainer of global reserve currency and it’s relationship to debt and inflation? I’ve been hearing my entire life that the petrodollar is why we in the US can borrow and print so much without hyperinflation but my economic profs in undergrad said it didn’t really matter and every time I hear someone that believes that explains it they never explain the causal mechanism of what changes for us if Saudi and Iran price oil in Yuan for example. But idk if that’s because they don’t really understand it or it’s widely misunderstood or just untrue
@RIP Bernie Worrell 👑 I’m not an expert in international econ /finance and banking so take what I say with a healthy level of skepticism. But as far as I know the Saudi had a pegged currency to the US. When they sell goods an services in a foreign currency they receive that countries currency since it doesn’t mean much for their domestic currency they can do one of two option trade US dollars to Riyal or purchase treasury bond. Saudi oil is public and its central bank is state owned, I’m not sure of the accounting but I’m assuming the central bank would be using US currency generated to peg their currency to the US. Depending how they manage the bonds and cash it might have some level of deflationary/inflationary pressure but it’s probably not substantial because Saudi is holding hundreds of billions in treasury bonds but US GDP is in the tens of trillions. Unless they got rid of all US assets and Cash it will probably have a incredibly negligible effect size.
I’m not sure about Iran I don’t think they are pegged to the US.
George Gammon (The Rebel Capitalist podcast) is also a proponent of Austrian economics.
It’s the ultimate in free market. Read some Milton Freeman and Chicago school
Stuff. Yaron Brook also outlines it well. Basically the opposite of Keynes
Professor Keen – what are your thoughts on global reserve currency and how much does it enable the US in this case to borrow and print more heavily than sovereigns with their own currency who aren’t global reserve currency issuers? I’ve been hearing this all my life but only from fairly fringe people, my college econ profs dismissed it as basically unimportant at least in the debt and inflation areas.
That shows how little your college prof is connected to the real world. It does enable the USA to run sustained trade deficits–in fact it requires them to do so–which other economies could not do without eventually being forced to borrow in another currency if they want to buy goods from another country.
This is one point on which I part company with MMT, as you may be aware. But I haven't done substantial research on it. I suggest you read Yanis Varoufakis's The Global Minotaur, and also history of economics work on the impact on the British economy of having been the reserve currency issuer prior to WWII.
@ProfSteveKeen Thank you for the reply. I like Yanis but haven’t read that, I also found your discussion on the macro something podcast from 3 years ago about this and it seemed you disagree with most people I’ve heard talk about it who think end of the petrodollar will cause a currency collapse.