Archive

Many Americans have expressed outrage over Pfizer’s plan, through its merger with Allergan, to move its tax home from the United States to Ireland. Now, in a New York Times op-ed, Carl Icahn, the billionaire corporate raider turned hedge fund activist, has joined the chorus. He labels the Pfizer-Allergan deal a “travesty,” blaming the U.S.’s “uncompetitive international tax system.”

Since Aristotle the question about the potential relationship between economic inequality and democratic changes has been studied and debated – but scientifically our ability as researchers to assess and understand how such complex social phenomena may be related is much more limited than recognised.

Patrick Honohan, Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, discusses the Irish banking crisis.

‘Tis the season to celebrate gift giving. But for big banks Santa Claus comes all the time, in the form of handsomely wrapped subsidies and subtly packaged regulatory nuances worth more more gold than the wildest dreams of the Three Wise Men.

This paper applies Schein’s model of organizational culture to financial firms and their prudential regulators.

With the RMB in the SDR, careful progression in China could balance the international monetary system.

The idea of this blog is to engage current financial news and policy debates from the standpoint of the classics of monetary theory. We ask, “What would Bagehot say?”, “What would Minsky say?”, “What would Fischer Black say?” Like them, our starting point is the idea that capitalism is essentially a financial system, which means that we need to take a money view in order to understand how it works.

Can education stop the country’s backward slide?

Innovation is not a magic pill to solve the current afflictions that ail our 21st century economy.

The Cambridge UK vs USA capital theory debates of the 1960s showed that the workhorse mainstream growth model relies on unsustainable assumptions. Its standard interpretation is not consistent with the last four decades of data.

There is a deeper story to be told about the inclusion of the Renminbi.

How might a reimagined American foreign policy both bolster the domestic economy and help build a 21st-century global economy that works for everyone?

Why are we paying for corporate behavior that crushes innovation, cheats taxpayers, cost jobs, and heightens inequality?

In 2003, McCullough and Vinod wrote, “Research that cannot be replicated is not science, and cannot be trusted either as part of the profession’s accumulated body of knowledge or as a basis for policy.”(1)

“Governments propose, markets dispose,” as Charles Kindleberger liked to say.