By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they […]
Read more...The Fed seems to be exhibiting a pretty bad case of “if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” syndrome, particularly when it has (or perhaps more accurately, had) other tools at its disposal. In case you somehow missed it, global markets got a bad case of deflation heebie jeebies […]
Read more...By Steve Keen, Associate Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney, and author of the book Debunking Economics, cross posted from Steve Keen’s Debt Deflation. The record $6 billion profit that the Commonwealth Bank is expected to announce today is a sign of an economy that has been taken over by […]
Read more...This post first appeared on July 11, 2007 Readers of this blog know that I have been concerned about the state of the credit markets for some time. We’ve had (until the last month or so), rampant liquidity feeding asset bubbles in virtually every asset class except the dollar and the yen, tight risk spreads […]
Read more...Don’t expect this updated assessment, that Medicare now is expected to be viable till 2029, to stem the expected push to gut Social Security and Medicare. From Bloomberg: Medicare will gain an extra 12 years of fiscal life as a result of the health law signed in March by President Barack Obama, a government report […]
Read more...→ Rajiv Sethi In a recent post on his (consistently interesting) blog, David Murphy questions the value of equilibrium analysis in economics and finance, and points to two earlier posts of his in which the same point is made. Here he is in July 2007: An interesting post on the Street Light Blog, on currency […]
Read more...From Ed …the private sector in the west is in a higher savings and slower growth mode. The only way that the government can net save at the same time is via an increase in net exports to the emerging economies. The FT’s Geoff Dyer is right when he writes the “G20 looks to Beijing […]
Read more...Cross-posted from The price of everything By Tim Price, Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management, a London-based fund manager “More than half of all workers have experienced a spell of unemployment, taken a cut in pay or hours or been forced to go part-time. The typical unemployed worker has been jobless for nearly six […]
Read more...Economists really do seem to struggle with history – and sometimes geography, too. Brad DeLong needs to remember that the Financial Times is published in London. As far as most combatants were concerned, the second world war broke out in September 1939. Niall Ferguson, FT, 20th July 2010. Goodish point. On the other hand, Ferguson […]
Read more...Crossposted from New Deal 2.0 By L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Budget deficits and government spending are necessary to end today’s crisis. In recent months, a form of mass hysteria has swept the country as fear of “unsustainable” budget deficits replaced the earlier concern about the financial crisis, […]
Read more...Der Spiegel (hat tip reader Richard Smith) presents a detailed sketch of German thinking, specifically that of chancellor Angela Merkel and finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, regarding how countries who fail an initial round of restructuring within the eurozone would be treated. This piece is very much worth reading, but the German proposal has all the […]
Read more...The New York Review of Books has an article by George Soros with his take on the challenges facing the Eurozone. It includes a good, high level recitation of the structural deficiencies in the Eurozone (in particular, its lack of a treasury), the evolution of recent stresses, and suggested remedies. While the initial discussion covers […]
Read more...Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ esteemed economics editor, launches another salvo against misguided austerity measures today. It’s also noteworthy that he argues from a Modern Monetary Theory perspective. Wolf first stresses that yields on government bonds show that inflationsitas are all wet: I have a question: do we believe that markets are unable to price […]
Read more...Rob Parenteau and I have an op-ed at the New York Times today. Rob’s last post here argued energetically that the now-established trend of the corporate sector to save, as opposed to invest in growth, in advanced economies, and even most emerging economies, was tantamount to capitalists abandoning their traditional role. It reminded me of […]
Read more...For those who did not catch wind of it, the Peterson Foundation, which has long had Social Security and Medicare in its crosshairs, held a bizarre set of 19 faux town hall meetings over the previous weekend to scare participants into compliance and then collect the resulting distorted survey data, presumably to use in a […]
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