This is a long post. Briefly in the beginning, the article discusses what the 340B program is about. It is pretty simple. The government has the pharmaceutical companies provide drugs to low income neighborhood facilities at a much lower price than what they would charge to hospitals in higher income areas. This is based upon the income of patients coming to the hospital. The hospitals are to pass the savings on to the patients. For some reason, the...

Initial jobless claims: still at distress levels, still not red flag recession warning  – by New Deal democrat Initial claims dropped -26,000 last week to 239,000, the top of their former range this spring. The more important 4 week moving average rose 1,500 to 257,500, a new 18 month high. With a one week lag, continuing claims declined -19,000 to 1.742 million: For forecasting purposes, the more important comparison is YoY. By this metric,...

The inherent epistemological limitation of econometric testing To understand the relationship between economic data and economic phenomena, it is helpful first to be clear about what we mean by each of these terms. Following Jim Woodward (1989), we can characterize “phenomena” as features of our experience that we take to be “relatively stable” and “which are potential objects of explanation and prediction by general theory.” The phenomena themselves are in...

Reclaiming Economics' True Purpose

History Rhymes Again – Civil Discourse, Joyce Vance, substack.com. Just over 60 years ago, Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, made his infamous stand in the schoolhouse door, barring the path against court-ordered integration at the state’s flagship university. It was June 11, 1963. Wallace, in his inaugural address, had promised voters “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But Wallace’s defiance...

All the monetarists got it wrong. They are all going to have to cover their shorts as the economy is doing well and the market is going to go higher.

It’s been over 10 years since I published Understanding the Modern Monetary System, one of the most widely read papers in the SSRN research database. I published this paper because I was having trouble finding a succinct but thorough explanation of money and macroeconomics during the financial crisis. Further, many of the mainstream explanations of concepts like QE, banking, inflation and money appeared outdated at best and wrong at worst. Since then most of the concepts in this paper...

I am pleased to let you know that the 2023 Impact Factor for ROKE has gone up to 1.6 from 1.219. This puts us as one of the top heterodox journals. There are a few above, in my understanding, like the Cambridge Journal (2), and some incredibly good ones that were not ranked until recently, like the Review of Political Economy (now 1.5). One, of course, should take those ranks with some degree of caution. And old post on that here.

The big question

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Herodotus (History, Book 1.53) tells the story of Croesus, king of Lydia c. 585-546 BC in what is now Western Turkey and the Ionian shore of the Mediterranean. Croesus conquered Ephesus, Miletus and neighboring Greek-speaking realms, obtaining tribute and booty that made him one of the richest rulers of his time. But these victories and Continue Reading The post America has Just Destroyed a Great Empire first appeared on Michael Hudson.