Blog Benefits debt deductions trapping people in poverty and debt DWP taking £1.6bn a year from low-income households for debt repayments By Sam Tims, Hollie Wright 02 June 2024 The erosion of our income safety net is no...

I have written about student loans or have added articles about student loans to Angry Bear here, here, here, here, etc, etc, etc. I go back years on the topic as well as Alan Collinge of Student Loan Justice does. Politicians resist loan forgiveness claiming students are taking advantage of the system. It is a lie and many of the students have interest on loans which surpass the principal. I know of no bank or business loan which has such harsh...

I still like to read the news “pages” rather than hear the news. Turning a page is more thorough than watching 2-minute clips on TV news. It challenges and stimulates the mind also. If you want short, cheap, and incomplete state, national, and global news; then the TV is your answer. Reading the daily and weekly news will render far more accurate information. You will decide for yourself what is true or false while reading the detail. US lost...

Kevin Drum has a post up showing that EV sales have plateaued recently in the US. It’s not clear to me whether that’s all EVs or just Teslas, but since Teslas remain the dominant EVs in the US, that’s a distinction without a difference.I’d be happy to see more EVs on the road. But what would make me buy one? Well, one issue is price. I’d consider an econobox EV under $30K, but auto makers seem mostly to be slotting EVs as luxury purchases. Then...

In modern times legal currencies are totally based on fiat. Currencies no longer have intrinsic value (such as gold and silver). What gives them value is basically the simple fact that you have to pay your taxes with them. That also enables governments to run a kind of monopoly business where they never can run out of money. A fortiori, spending becomes the prime mover, and taxing and borrowing are degraded to following acts. If we have a depression, the solution, then, is not...

Η Τοπική Επιτροπή ΑΝΤΑΡΣΥΑ Βορείων σας καλεί στην Προεκλογική Συγκέντρωση ενόψει των Ευρωεκλογών στις 9 Ιούνη, η οποία θα γίνει στον Σταθμό ΗΣΑΠ Μαρουσιού την Τρίτη 4 Ιούνη στις 7μμ.

Armine Yalnizyan, Atkinson Fellow on the Future for Workers – Recipient of the 2023 Galbraith Prize in Economics This lecture was delivered on May 31, 2024, at the Canadian Economics Association Annual Meetings, Toronto Metropolitan University Thank you for the immense honour of being awarded the Galbraith Prize in Economics — and for agreeing to wait a year to hear this speech in Toronto instead of Winnipeg.  Some of you know why the delay occurred. Others can find me later and...

Weekly Indicators for May 27 – 31 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. None of the high frequency indicators made any meaningful change this week. The short term outlook continues to be positive. As I wrote yesterday in my summation of the personal income and spending report, the leading goods-producing sectors of manufacturing and construction are most important to my analysis of where...

Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial readingTom WalkerOverview (chapter summaries will be presented in a future post)This book proposes a remedial reading of the relationship in Marx’s critique of political economy between the forces and relations of production, real wealth, and value. It is remedial in two senses. First, it seeks to remedy the long-standing misconception of the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy as Marx’s definitive statement...

(1924-2023)Robert Solow, who was a member of the editorial board of the Review of Keynesian Economics (ROKE), died in December 2023. Solow holds a special place in the history of macroeconomics, and he was a strong supporter of the ROKE project. In this brief note I want to honor Solow’s contribution to economics and to place on record his contribution to ROKE.Histories of macroeconomics tend to emphasize the disputes between Keynesians and Monetarists, at least up to the 1970s. Those...