CalSTRS’ and CalPERS’ consultant, Pension Consulting Alliance, argues for getting rid of benchmarks altogether in a desperate effort to depict investing in private equity as ever and always sound.
Read more...Greece, which has undertaken the most severe austerity, has experienced the deepest economic contraction. But the policy quackery continues.
Read more...Nicholas Shaxson explains how a “Competitiveness Agenda” is being used to set industrial policies that favor the creation of what used to be called “national champions,” as in Really Big Companies. Never mind that neoliberals officially oppose anything so interventionist as industrial policy….
Read more...Is there merit in trying to measure happiness hundreds of years ago versus now?
Read more...Why “neoliberal” is the framework that best describes our new, post 1980 form of capitalism.
Read more...Debunking the uniformed and regularly hysterical mainstream treatment of government debt and deficits.
Read more...Why the Fed should delay its long-anticipated “liftoff”.
Read more...Why the three big charges commonly made against Corbyn’s “People’s Quantitative Easing” or PQE, are all wet.
Read more...Mind you, the rating agencies are far from the only neoliberal enforcers as far as emerging economies are concerned. But it is nevertheless instructive to compare an official rationale with data.
Read more...Evidence suggests that people are more likely to behave in a pro-social way if they are aware of others who behave in such a manner. This column finds evidence for this phenomenon among blood donors. For every unit increase in a donor’s motivation, there is a 44% spillover in motivation to their fellow tenant. There is an overall increase in donation rates due to such a social multiplier of 17.9 percentage points, instead of the 10 percentage points obtained by calling an isolated donor.
Read more...“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.
Read more...Greece needs debt restructuring. On this, a growing chorus of voices is agreed (Manasse 2015, Taylor 2015). Even the IMF (2015) now acknowledges that Greece’s debt is unsustainable. Restructuring is required, it now insists, for the workability of the third programme between the country and ‘the institutions’ that is currently being finalised.
Read more...Deflation is a threat to the macroeconomy. Japan had suffered from deflation for more than a decade, and now, Europe is facing it. To combat deflation under the zero interest bound, the Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank have resorted to quantitative easing, or increasing the money supply. This column explores its effectiveness, through the application of novel methods to distinguish signals from noises.
Read more...This post illustrates how dominant the neoliberal paradigm has become all over the world, and how it fails to acknowledge, much the less address, the well-known failings of markets, such as externalities.
Read more...A new study has important implications for IMF policies as well as for Greece, both “reformers” and those who advocate a Grexit.
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