Articles

Two things seem to be taken for granted in the current debt-ceiling debate: 1. The parties will come to an agreement on the debt ceiling because 2. These United States have never defaulted and will not start now.

The Political Economy of Debt

The financial and economic crises started by the fall of Lehman Borthers came as a big shock, a financial shock, an economic shock, a psychological shock, and a political shock among others.

Further Thoughts

Sense about Social Security

I was just amused with two projects by Shaun Usher: to “gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos” in his blog Letters of Note, and to present interesting letterheads in his Letterheadyblog.

Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job forces us to fundamentally rethink the connections between economics and policy making.

We have been talking and video interviewing people at the conference, and we’ve narrowed down a small list of questions which we try to build on and have so far talked to Kenneth Rogoff, Brad DeLong, Ha-Joon Chang, Stephen Ziliak, Philippe Aghion, Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Barry Eichengreen and tomorrow we start with James Galbraith.

For one and a half days we had Anglo-Saxons talking finance and financial crisis: Keynesian stimuli, surplus countries bashing, drawing China in, and bullying of the Euro area and in particular Germany’s role in it.

Exit Strategies and the New Normal