Category Archives: Macroeconomic policy

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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David Kotz: Understanding Contemporary Capitalism, Part I

“Neoliberalism,” or more accurately neoliberal capitalism, is a form of capitalism in which market relations and market forces operate relatively freely and play the predominant role in the economy. That is, neoliberalism is not just a set of ideas, or an ideology, as it is typically interpreted by those analysts who doubt the relevance or importance of this concept for explaining contemporary capitalism. Under neoliberalism, non-market institutions – such as the state, trade unions, and corporate bureaucracies – play a limited role. By contrast, in “regulated capitalism” such as prevailed in the post-World War II decades – in the United States and other industrial capitalist economies – states, trade unions, and corporate bureaucracies played a major role in regulating economic activity, confining market forces to a lesser role.

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