How Recessions Crush Certain Geographic Areas: Puerto Rico as a Case Study.
How US policy neglect helped created Puerto Rico’s lousy economy.
Read more...Author Archives: Nathan Tankus
Who was Alexander Hamilton? Militarism, High Finance and Checking the Democracy.
Alexander Hamilton, often held up by liberals as the most admirable Founding Father, was not the man you probably thought he was.
Read more...The Operational Issues of a Grexit Part Two: Organizational Capacity, Capital Controls and Bootstrapping a New Monetary System
Economics, law and politics are all crucial to the story of Greece, but in the moment of default or Grexit they take a back seat to something far more important: organizational capacity.
Read more...Nathan Tankus: The Operational Issues of a Grexit Part One: Understanding the Payments System
The Greek ruling coalition and European politicians and bureaucrats say they want to avoid a Grexit, Nevertheless, it makes sense to examine that scenario. We start with the payment system and Target2 balances.
Read more...Monetary Policy Implementation: Some Facts and a Monetary Myth.
Nathan here. Tonight I’m moderating an event on monetary policy implementation at my University, the University of Ottawa. We will have three speakers, Donna Howard, Eric Tymoigne and Marc Lavoie. The event will begin about 5:30 and will probably finish- at the latest- by 7:30. Donna Howard is a former head of financial markets at […]
Read more...Money as a Hierarchical System: Legal and Economic Perspectives
If you are in NYC, this event at Columbia tomorrow is a must-see! Be there or be square!
Read more...Larry Summers versus Dodd Frank
By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus
Many thousands of words have been spilled explaining just how horrible Lawrence Summers is and how terrible he would be as chair of the Federal Reserve. While this is true, I don’t think enough has been said on the precise ways he would be able to influence policy in a negative way.
Read more...What Paul Krugman Should Have Learned from James Tobin but Didn’t
Paul Krugman last week wrote yet another response on the issue of “how banks work”. The problem is that Krugman’s critical source for his argument, James Tobin, in fact has taken the position the opposite of Krugman’s on monetary operations, as do central bankers.
Read more...Fixing Old Markets With New Markets: the Origins and Practice of Neoliberalism
Philip Mirowski is the Carl Koch Professor of Economics and the History and Philosophy of Science University of Notre Dame. Professor Mirowski’s latest book is Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
The interview was conducted by Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Fields Institute
Read more...Nathan Tankus: Marx on Ireland, Then and Now
There are many seminal thinkers who are so well known they’re never read. This category includes Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, Immanuel Kant, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Fredrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes and many, many others.
One thinker I’d like to focus on is Karl Marx.
Read more...Nathan Tankus: The Fed’s Tapering Troubles and the Real Liquidity Trap
Since Bernanke started talking about “tapering off” Quantitative Easing, the bond markets have freaked out. This is a very logical reaction once you understand how liquidity traps operate.
Read more...Nathan Tankus: Krugman von Hayek
Mainstream economic discussions employ a false dichotomy. At one “extreme” you have Austrian economists who believe the current Federal Reserve policy is (or should be) causing inflation, malinvestment, and all sorts of other maladies. They think the nominal interest rate set by the Fed is too low and should be raised . At the other “extreme” you have Paul Krugman and “New Keynesian” company, who argue that the nominal interest rate set by the Fed is too high and should be lowered in some way. To the causal observer who is unfamiliar with the history of economic thought, these two positions seem diametrically opposed. They, in fact, are not.
Read more...Nathan Tankus: Memo to Paul Krugman on the Eurozone – Read Your Own Research!
Normally, I’m a harsh critic of neoclassical economics and neoclassical economists. However, sometimes the most frustrating things about neoclassical economists is their lack of familiarity with neoclassical models (especially older ones) and current neoclassical research. Monday provided a rather extraordinary example of this trend: Paul Krugman is apparently not familiar with Paul Krugman’s research!
Read more...Nathan Tankus: New York City Public Libraries Attack Alert – Privatizing Prized Locations and Cutting Budget by 35%
By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus
Now that pubic libraries have “done their jobs” (in FIRE sector terms) they can do one more thing for finance and real estate: be killed for private sector fun and profit.
Read more...Nathaniel Cline and Nathan Tankus: Fiscal Systems, Organizational Capacity, and Crisis: A Political Balance of Payments Approach
In the preface to the forthcoming Festschrift to Alain Parguez, Mosler argues that in the mid 1990s he thought, “the theory of the monetary circuit was correct to the point of being entirely beyond dispute”. However, he also argues that the theory “could be further enhanced by starting from the beginning”. This beginning for Mosler was of course why the workers accepted the units of a currency as payment for their labor services. His answer (which is quite well known among heterodox economists by now) was that imposed debts denominated in that unit of account, give it’s units value; in other words taxes.
This is an important part of the story, but we would argue it is in fact not the beginning. The true beginning to the circuit is the question of where people and organizations gain the ability to tax.
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