Category Archives: Economic fundamentals

Michael Hudson: The Paradox of Financialized Industrialization

The great question today is whether post-feudal rentier capitalism will stifle industrial capitalism instead of serving it. The aim of finance is not merely to exploit labor, but to conquer and appropriate industry, real estate and government. The result is a financial oligarchy, neither industrial capitalism nor a tendency to evolve into socialism.

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Michael Perelman: The Essential Handbook for Engineering an Unequal Society

While the thrust of Perelman’s post is no doubt familiar to readers, take note of how simple and few in number are the essential principles for creating a highly unequal society, and how easy it is to describe them them in antiseptic language.

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Michael Hoexter: Should the US Federal Government Invest $4-$6 Trillion Per Year on Climate Protection? (Part 2 of 2)

Further discussion of why the excuses to do nothing or too little on the climate change front don’t hold up to serious scrutiny.

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Michael Hoexter: Should the US Federal Government Invest $4-$6 Trillion Per Year on Climate Protection? (Part 1 of 2)

Why the excuses to do nothing or too little on the climate change front don’t hold up to serious scrutiny.

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Mark Blyth: “Austerity Cures Nothing”

This is a bracing, no-nonsene talk from economist Mark Blyth of Brown University, who is the author of Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century and Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea.

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Michael Hudson on Parasitic Financial Capitalism

An interview with Michael Hudson on his latest book, Killing the Host, which focuses on the destruction wrought by financial capitalism.

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Frances Coppola: The Great Yield Divergence

Puzzling over the Great Divergence of real and nominal yields. Ever since the Great Depression, nominal yields have been persistently above real yields Yet in the previous 200 years, despite periods of fiat currency and high inflation, real and nominal yields didn’t diverge. Why do they now?

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