Articles
Articles and analyses from the INET community on the key economic questions of our time.

Big Money, the Maine Senate Race and US Party Competition: A Tale in Two Pictures
What can one Senate race reveal about the hidden machinery of American politics? In Maine, donor patterns expose how campaign finance can shape party competition, political narratives, and the choices voters are asked to make long before ballots are counted.

What Does it Mean to Work Under Algorithmic Eyes?
AI surveillance and algorithmic management threaten worker autonomy and dignity. It’s time for a rethinking of rights. Part of “AI and the Future of the American Worker,” a series on how artificial intelligence is impacting labor, power, and the meaning of work.

The New Merger Guidelines: Consumer Welfare vs. Protecting Competition Standards
Should antitrust law focus primarily on measurable performance outcomes such as price and output as indicated by Robert Bork’s Consumer Welfare Standard? Or is it more important to concentrate on whether conduct undermines the competitive process itself as per the newly revitalized Protect Competition Standard?

America’s Real Health Crisis? Economics — and a Generation Pays
Health researcher Steven H. Woolf tells INET’s Lynn Parramore why making Americans healthy again means economic policies that help working- and middle-class families. Raw raw milk won’t cut it, and even being rich won’t save you. *This is Part 2 of the interview; Part 1 is here.

Why American Life Expectancy is Falling Behind Globally, Falling Apart by State
In a discussion with INET’s Lynn Parramore, researcher Steven H. Woolf explains how the peculiar features of life, policy, and economics in America are killing us sooner, and what we can do to change it. *This is Part 1 of a two-part interview; Part 2 is here.

Red Tech and American Politics: Nick French Interviews Thomas Ferguson
Venture-backed “tech capital” is reshaping U.S. politics through campaign finance, platform gatekeeping, defense/AI procurement, and policy entrepreneurship. In an interview with Nick French, INET’s Research Director Thomas Ferguson discusses these channels of influence, examining their macro-distributional consequences, and outlining guardrails to restore democratic accountability and broadly shared gains.

Hungry for Development: The leadership of the Global South from G20 to COP30
Since 2007, recurring food-price spikes reveal hunger as a problem of market design and underinvestment, not scarcity. With Brazil’s COP30 on the horizon, aligning climate commitments with food systems could cement policy space to manage markets and advance the right to food.

Bretton Woods: A System That Can’t Be Fixed—But Can Be Made Fairer and More Effective
The IMF and World Bank can no longer function as instruments that discipline some member countries while deferring to others. Their challenge is to transform the exercise of power among member countries into a framework of mutual respect and cooperation.

Time Bomb: How Uninsured Stablecoins and Crypto Derivatives Threaten Financial and Economic Stability
The GENIUS Act is a disastrous law that poses grave and unacceptable threats to our financial and economic future. Congress must remove those threats by (1) repealing the GENIUS Act and passing legislation that requires all stablecoin providers to be FDIC-insured banks, and (2) adopting legislation that requires all crypto derivatives to comply with the rules governing non-digital derivatives under Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Act.

Jim Chanos on Crypto, AI, and Casino Capitalism
The famed short-seller reminds us that technology might advance, but we’re still a pretty predictable bunch of apes.