from Dean Baker As everyone learns in Econ 101, and immediately forgets, the purpose of the financial sector is to facilitate transactions and allocate capital. This seems like a simple and obvious point, but you would never know it in most discussions of the financial sector. The point here is that we need finance for these purposes. We don’t need finance to develop elaborate betting games and complex financial instruments. Financial instruments are only useful when they serve the...

This book exposes everything they're lying to us about... get it for free this week

Sorry to be so boring, but now I am angry with Gmail. It seems to me that Alphabet has adopted Elong Musk’s approach to customer service, programming, and destroying value. I wanted to send an e-mail and surfed to gmail.com. I was directed on to mail.google.come/mail/u/0/#inbox screenshot below. Notice there is no otion to use the e-mail site to send an e-mail. I have to click on the 3 horizontal lines to get “show main menu” then...

I am watching the evolution of the American automotive industry from combustion engine driven vehicles to electric driven vehicles. It is interesting to hear about all the potential blood to be spilled as management eventually whacks labor and plants to make the move from combustion to electric vehicles. It is inevitable as a new workforce must be trained and the old one phased out as the vroom-vroom is no longer manufactured. By no means should this...

In mainstream economic theory, institutions were long taken for granted. As the far-reaching consequences of institutional assumptions have become increasingly difficult to ignore, economists have, in recent times, made greater efforts to incorporate institutions into their models. This renewed interest in broadening economic theory to encompass economic and political institutions has centred on the analysis of property rights and transaction costs. Ronald Coase’s work has...

 Hysteresis, not hysteria New paper by Thomas Palley. From the abstract:This paper argues for broadening the application of hysteresis to institutions, policy lock-in, psychology, identity, and economic ideas. Hysteresis is an element of historical processes, and the real world is historical. That explains why hysteresis is pervasive and important. Hysteresis should be a fundamental building block of political economy. Expanding its application in economics is both an opportunity and a...

I want to note some instances in the literature that argue that one strain in the marginal revolution was an extension of (a misunderstanding of) the theory of intensive rent in classical political economy to all factors of production, particularly capital. This this is not of only historical interest. It suggests that another approach, that of classical political economy, to value and distribution exists. Furthermore, a treatment of intensive rent exists that is opposed to marginalism, in...

Blog Draining every last drop of oil and gas won’t ease the cost of living crisis The oil and gas lobby is celebrating this government’s plan to expand North Sea oil and gas production. This may be good news for fossil fuel profits, but it is UK households who will pay the price By Theo Harris 06 September 2023...

The famous historical incident

Vehicle sales and residential and manufacturing plant construction continue to outweigh general manufacturing downturn  –  by New Deal democrat No important economic news today, but on Friday in addition to the employment report we did get our typical 1st of the month snapshot of manufacturing, vehicle sales, and construction, so let’s look at each. The ISM manufacturing index has had an excellent record going all the way back to the 1940s,...