As Perry Mehrling has recently argued in his intellectual portrait of economic historian Charles Kindleberger, the true undergirding continuity of international finance were not inter-governmental arrangements about national currencies, but the interlocking balance sheets of private finance stretched between the City of London and Wall Street. These made the Bretton Woods system increasingly unworkable by the late 1960s but they also ensured that the end of the system in the early 1970s did...

The deal is much better than I expected for Democrats, and much worse for Republicans (preliminary summaries by Dayen and Stein).  Of course, the whole thing was destructive and pointless and the deal is bad in the way one would expect – it includes work requirements for some food stamp and TANF recipients.  On the plus side, these requirements are crafted to limit the number of people affected while letting the Republicans claim a “win”. Over the...

Still requires approval but current form would suspend until January 2025 … after next presidential election… good riddance…For the curious, here’s the part on how the suspension of the debt limit will work.TLDR: Treasury will again be able to use measures to delay hitting the debt ceiling come 2025. https://t.co/tZY41wWvWY pic.twitter.com/mkNsCUvi04— Justin Slaughter (@JBSDC) May 28, 2023

from Lars Syll We are all realists and we all — Mäki, Cartwright, and I — self-consciously present ourselves as such. The most obvious research-guiding commonality, perhaps, is that we do all look at the ontological presuppositions of economics or economists. Where we part company, I believe, is that I want to go much further. I guess I would see their work as primarily analytical and my own as more critically constructive or dialectical. My goal is less the clarification of what...

Three years after the Civil War ended, on May 5, 1868, the head of an organization of Union veterans — the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) — established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. Maj. Gen. John A. Logan declared it should be May 30. It is believed the date was chosen because flowers would be in bloom all over the country. The first large observance was held that year at...

Two articles here, each on the same topic about extreme wealth going untaxed or taxed less than those in lower income brackets. The first story is about a letter sent to World Economic attendees sent by a bunch of millionaires. The second story is about historian and correspondent Rutger Bregman having a moment at Devos in 2019. Rutger claims he delivered a blast about taxes. If you listen to the clip, it sounds like he had a conversation with them....

Another Message Board Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’ve moved my irregular email news from Mailchimp to Substack. You can read it here. You can also follow me on Mastodon here I’m also trying out Substack as a blogging platform. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

I’m tinkering with the idea of a kind of periodic table for prices. Below, a very rough sketch of what I have in mind relating to administered prices and market prices as well as the sectors of the national accounts (cost prices, shadow prices etcetera have to be added). Gardiner Means defined the difference between market and administered prices (quoted in Gu (2012) on p. 13): “In an engineering economy prices are fixed by...

Annie at Annie Asks You Blog had this post up the last couple of days. Annie is looking at the threat of a third presidential candidate in 2024. The effort of which is to result in the watering down of votes for either candidate in Purple states in which the election results are close. If there is any threat greater to the US, it is the “No Labels” potential intrusion into the 2024 election as the third candidate. This is or could be as bad as...

“The modern free press,” Infidel753 Blog, Infidel753 In the US, we have probably the world’s strongest protections for free speech and freedom of the press, thanks to the First Amendment and the citadel of jurisprudence built on it.  And yet the mainstream media here are usually strikingly timid and reluctant to call a spade a spade.  Recent examples of this include their treatment of Trump as a normal presidential candidate despite his abuse of...