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Regulation of financial services has been an unmitigated policy disaster.

This essay argues that the Achilles heel of the international monetary and financial system is that it amplifies the “excess financial elasticity” of domestic policy regimes, ie it exacerbates their inability to prevent the build-up of financial imbalances, or outsize financial cycles, that lead to serious financial crises and macroeconomic dislocations.

The logic of deep global capitalist crises needs to be incorporated centrally into an understanding of the changes in the within-country inequality levels. I present a theoretical framework that incorporates two levels of political economic processes. First,global capitalist crises lead to the creation of an institutional structure or a regime in the capitalist centers that influences inequality in these core countries and in the periphery. Second the class configuration in the non-core countries - a set of institutional arrangements that can be termed local political economy - also plays a key role in determining inequality outcomes.

The paper presents a newly compiled and improved database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008. In 2008, the global Gini index is around 70.5 percent having declined by approximately 2 Gini points over this twenty year period. When it is adjusted for the likely under-reporting of top incomes in surveys by using the gap between national accounts consumption and survey means in combination with a Pareto-type imputation of the upper tail, the estimate is a much higher global Gini of almost 76 percent.

The global financial crisis led to widespread dislocation. Understanding the forces that led to such a crisis is no easy matter.

Ten hypotheses presented in the session “Beyond Deficits, Austerity and Deflation” at INET Conference 201

Recent weeks have surfaced an intense exchange of top-level finger pointing, both between Congress and the leadership of the Federal Reserve System, between Fed officials and executives in the private sector and within the Fed between the Board of Governors and the New York Reserve Bank.

It is impossible to ignore material inequality. Wealth, and the goods that come with it, are accumulating at the top of society while others seem to be struggling in the middle and bottom.

The inequality of income and wealth is one of the defining issues of our time, in terms of both its social and macroeconomic implications. In this article, I focus on the macroeconomic implications of inequality. In particular, it is possible to identify four themes on which there seems to be growing consensus among many economists especially in the various heterodox traditions, but also increasingly in the mainstream of the economics profession: