Articles

The Collapse of Free Market Macroeconomics

INET Berlin 2012 - back home again. On stage, it’s been a huge amount of claims, assertions, and arguments about what went wrong, about what exactly happened, about why this time was different, about what will certainly happen, and about what remains deeply uncertain, about what “we” shall do about it, about what “we” could do better.

The title of the conference, “Paradigm Lost,” is an obvious combination of two references.

Just wanted to let you all know that amongst the distinguished, distinguishable and disturbing people at the INET conference we have inserted ourselves in the middle to do some interviews, attend talks and blog about what is going on.

In science, empirical disciplines such as physics, chemistry, history, and parts of sociology and political science, reason from facts.

Fundamentally, the ECB is trying to keep the ongoing sovereign debt crisis from turning into a full-fledged bank credit crisis.

Judy Klein is Professor of Economics at Mary Baldwin College in Virginia. She is the author of Statistical Visions in Time: A History of Time Series Analysis 1662-1938, (Cambridge 1997) and co-editor of The Age of Economic Measurement (Duke 2001), and co-author of The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (in preparation)

So with a suitably provocative title I think we can declare 2012 open.

A correspondent sends us to a column of Paul Krugman’s that asserts that “nobody understands debt”. Fair enough.

Europe is embarked on a grand experiment, managing modern financial crisis without a dealer of last resort, so refusing to follow the lead of the 2008 Fed.