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BlogThe Real Problem with the $29 Trillion Bailout of Wall Street
I previously summarized research that two of my graduate students, James Felkerson and Nicola Matthews, are conducting on the Fed’s bailout. Using data that the Fed was forced to release, they demonstrated that the cumulative total lent and spent on assets by the Fed was over $29 trillion. (See the first paper here: http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/?docid=1462) Their [...] -
Blog
MMT as Public Policy
First The Economist, now CNBC. CNBC’s Senior Editor John Carney has put together a series of posts on Modern Monetary Theory at his blog. One of Carney’s objections to MMT is this: …my biggest point of departure with the MMTers is they display a political and economic naivete when it comes to the effects of [...] -
Report No. 1
Report January 2012
Papers highlighted in the January issue include a new Strategic Analysis that justifies fears of prolonged stagnation and flat employment, proposals to resolve problems in the eurozone, recommendations for avoiding another global financial crisis, the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty, gender inequalities in work time, and the economic impact of legalizing undocumented […] -
Blog
Heterodoxy and the Mainstream(s)
Over the break an article appeared in The Economist spotlighting three “schools of macroeconomic thought”: Scott Sumner’s market monetarism, Austrian free banking, and neo-chartalism (MMT). In addition to noting the role of the blogosphere in refining and promoting these heterodoxies, the article elects to use Paul Krugman as a stand-in for the “mainstream” opponent. If [...] -
Op-Ed: Need Jobs? Call On Government
Los Angeles Times, January 5, 2012. Copyright © 2012 Los Angeles Times International experience shows that direct job creation by governments is one of the very few options that has succeeded at raising employment levels more than just marginally during a crisis. Is high unemployment as certain as death and taxes? Of course not. But […] -
Blog
A Third Way on Fiscal Policy
Courtesy of INET, here is Pavlina Tcherneva explaining her “bottom up” approach to fiscal policy. Notice the way she uses the term “trickle down” to apply also to conventional pump-priming fiscal policy (targeting growth and hoping for the right employment side-effects). We need to move beyond the conventional options on fiscal policy, says Tcherneva; beyond [...] -
Working Paper No. 703A Comparison of Inequality and Living Standards in Canada and the United States Using an Expanded Measure of Economic Well-Being
We use the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-being (LIMEW), the most comprehensive income measure available to date, to compare economic well-being in Canada and the United States in the first decade of the 21st century. This study represents the first international comparison based on LIMEW, which differs from the standard measure of gross money […] -
Working Paper No. 702
The Euro Imbalances and Financial Deregulation
Conventional wisdom suggests that the European debt crisis, which has thus far led to severe adjustment programs crafted by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in both Greece and Ireland, was caused by fiscal profligacy on the part of peripheral, or noncore, countries in combination with a welfare state model, and that the […] -
Working Paper No. 702
Οι ανισορροπίες του ευρώ και η χρηματοπιστωτική απορρύθμιση
Η συμβατική σοφία υπαγορεύει ότι η ευρωπαϊκή κρίση χρέους, η οποία έχει μέχρι στιγμής οδηγήσει σε σκληρά προγράμματα δημοσιονομικής προσαρμογής διαμορφωμένα από την Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση και το Διεθνές Νομισματικό Ταμείο τόσο στην Ελλάδα όσο και στην Ιρλανδία, προκλήθηκε από μια δημοσιονομική ασωτία από την πλευρά των περιφερειακών χωρών, σε συνδυασμό με το μοντέλο κράτους πρόνοιας, […] -
Blog
Galbraith in Brazil
Via Matías Vernengo, here is the audio of James Galbraith’s keynote address at the ANPEC (Associação Nacional dos Centros de Pós-Graduação em Economia) conference in Brazil. Galbraith addresses the global financial crisis and the intellectual reactions (or non-reactions) to it, dealing both with those who attempted to explain away the crisis and those with a [...] -
Blog
Papadimitriou: To Solve Unemployment, Employ People
In an op-ed in today’s LA Times Dimitri Papadimitriou makes the case for a direct job creation program: It’s unreasonable to expect private enterprises to solve these problems. Full employment isn’t an objective of businesses. … There simply isn’t any known automatic mechanism, in the markets or elsewhere, that creates jobs in numbers that match [...] -
Blog
Some pertinent ideas about growth paths, long and short
In my last post, I reviewed an enjoyable book about some post-Keynesian economic economic thought and thinkers. To round things out a bit more, I thought I might offer a list of a few more often-overlooked but classical themes from economists who may be obscure to some blog readers or perhaps simply forgotten. Many of [...]