Tonight brings an odd pairing: Lord Skidelksy, the highly respected biographer of Keynes, and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who is generally of the Austrian persuasion, both continuing, as each has, to object to the extreme measures in the process of being implemented in the eurozone. Now before you say that they are both Brits, and therefore suspect […]
Read more...Martin Wolf, in today’s Financial Times, uses modern monetary theory (!), also known as the fiscal balances approach, to explain why calls for fiscal belt tightening are premature. Let’s provide a little background, courtesy Rob Parenteau of the Levy Institute: …if we divide the economy into three sectors – the domestic private (households and firms), […]
Read more...Before European readers get upset about the discussion of continued concerns about the eurozone, some of its eager defenders appear to subscribe to an extreme form of indeterminacy. If you recall the famed Schrodinger’s cat, the indeterminacy of the position of an electron is made (somewhat) more comprehensible by a thought experiment in which a […]
Read more...By Satyajit Das, a risk consultant and author of Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2010, FT-Prentice Hall). It Always Ends in the Same Way … No one, including the IMF, seriously believes that the austerity program announced by Greece will work. Argentina had debt […]
Read more...It is not a sign of intelligence to repeat a course of action and expect different results. Yet our officialdom is doing pretty much just that on the economic front. Treasury and the Fed in particular seem quite pleased with their success in patching up the financial system with duct tape and baling wire and […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0 (and happens to be Canadian). For once, Canada is making the news for the wrong reasons: The government of the United Kingdom has braced the country for cuts in government spending of up to 20 per cent as the new […]
Read more...Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ influential economics editor, takes issue with the austerity fad that is sweeping governments in advanced economies. From his comment: Against this background, what would a big tightening of fiscal policy deliver? In the absence of effective monetary policy offsets, one would expect aggregate demand to weaken, possibly sharply. Some economists […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns Everybody in the west knows the fabled effectiveness of weight-loss dietary programs designed around intense cardiovascular regimes which burn huge amounts of calories. The people who work hard, doing as much cardio as possible lose weight. Those that pump iron may get muscular, but they aren’t working as hard […]
Read more...As much as I have been a consistent critic of Geithner in his role as one of the chief enablers of the banking industry, he deserves credit for this succinct remarks at the G-20 via Bloomberg (hat tip reader Scott): In a sign of tension among the world’s economic policy chiefs, Geithner flagged concern that […]
Read more...I owe readers a longer comment on this, since we may be going into crisis mode (ah, the joys of waking up and toddling out to the computer to see what wheels are falling off the global financial system today). Your humble blogger may be a bit jaded (two years of watching the crisis and […]
Read more...Brad DeLong points out that Ronald Reagan was far more concerned about unemployment than Team Obama (or Washington generally) is, and also took far more aggressive measures to combat it. From The Week (hat tip reader Marshall): By the start of 1983, labor unions were frantically giving back previously-promised wage increases and offering wage cuts […]
Read more...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. We are in the midst of severe economic and financial crises. These crises have led to reappraisals of received […]
Read more...You have to hand it to Grayson, this is a very clever way to get the issue of “why is defense spending a sacred cow” the attention it warrants.
Read more...Some commentators on the surprising and not terribly well received unilateral move by Germany to ban naked credit default swaps on sovereign debt and shorting of bank stocks assumed it was intended to placate domestic voters. Merkel’s move to join the Eurozone rescue effort was wildly unpopular at home; taking a tough line with speculators […]
Read more...Some readers and commentators have argued that the EU should not have bailed out Greece, but instead should have restructured its debt. The logic is that Greece is a goner; there is no way it can meet its existing obligations, and a bailout serves to throw good money after bad. Better to engage in triage […]
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