Cheat sheet on the MMT JG. Useful reference.Pavlina TchernevaFrequently Asked Questions About the Job GuaranteePavlina Tcherneva | Associate Professor of Economics at Bard College, Research Scholar at The Levy Economics Institute, and Senior Research Associate at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability

Yesterday, the SEC issued a Wells notice to the stablecoin issuer Paxos, warning it that the SEC intended to take legal action against it for issuing an unregistered security. The security in question is the fully-reserved stablecoin BUSD (Binance USD), which Paxos issues expressly for use on the Binance crypto exchange. The Wells notice doesn't apply to Paxos's other fully-reserved stablecoin, USDP, which it issues for use on its own platform.  A few hours later, the New York Department of...

More neoliberalism gone bad.Overall, the main takeaway is that decentralization is not a silver bullet that occurs in an abstract environment. As in other contexts, decentralisation can worsen problems when pursued within insecure environments, where people are already marginalised and/or elite capture is rife, as in Ukraine. Despite promises that decentralization in Ukraine would reduce oligarchic power and empower marginalised groups, it seems these aims have not been met and may now,...

I joined The Investor’s Podcast again this week to discuss a wide range of topics. The YouTube chapters in the interview are linked below and you can listen to the full audio here. I caught some flak for my comments on ESG investing and whether Central Banks should have a climate change mandate. I didn’t answer this as clearly as I’d wished, but my general comments were accurate in my view. In short, the Fed (and other Central Banks) operate with very blunt instruments. Fighting...

Farmers in low-income countries have multiple channels through which they respond to climate change. Some switch to growing more heat-resilient crops or crops that require less water. Others migrate or leave agriculture altogether. In new research, Amrit Amirapu, Irma Clots-Figueras, and Juan Pablo Rud find that temperature shocks to agricultural production in India increase voter turnout in rural areas and push rural voters to elect candidates who are on average poorer, less tainted by...

A new cold war is upon us, but only China is in a position to push it beyond the point of no return. That moment will come when China’s policymakers cross the Rubicon and decide to wean Chinese economic growth off the US trade deficit.Interesting article about the symbiotic relationship and the changing conditions that threaten it. One of these factors is the development of the Chinese economy beyond the point that the Americans that entered into the deal foresaw.Yanis Varoufakis points out,...

Blair Fix caused a bit of a stir last week on economics Twitter with a cleaned up version of the above chart taken from his article on interest rates and inflation. My chart is a scatter plot of the U.S. annual CPI inflation rate versus the effective funds rate, from 1954-2022. The blue line is the best linear fit of the two variables. The “linear model” suggests that inflation is an increasing function of the nominal interest rate.Blair was met with a predictable howl of indignation on...

It’s killing them that the market is not crashing.

As Economist David Zetland states, “I’m a political-economist from California who now lives in Amsterdam.” AB: I passed through Amsterdam a few times on my way to Germany. Not a huge fan of the airport. I wish I had the chance to explore the country a bit more like I did other parts of Europe. Not in the cards then. David has an interesting commentary on race, separation, the history of discrimination, and the economic impact of it. It...

from Asad Zaman The two World Wars in the 20th century depleted the gold stocks of European governments and made a return to the (UK Sterling based) gold standard impossible. This led to the Bretton Woods conference of 1944, where leaders of the world came together to find an alternative, non-gold-based, global trading system. John Maynard Keynes brought a proposal for a symmetric trading system, but it was rejected in favor of the dollar standard, which transferred global hegemony from...