454 Results for “inflation”

I’ve already blogged on how undergraduate education evolved at MIT in the postwar era here and here, but since Mike Konczal and Paul Krugman make the case that, to bring introductory economics closer to the real world, macro should be taught before micro as Samuelson did in the first 13 editions of his Economics textbook, it may be worth returning to it.

In a society where asset ownership is incredibly unequal, social mobility becomes severely diminished

The BIS offers a comprehensive picture of the state of the world economy, and of dysfunctional policies holding it back

New research shows that access to elite colleges varies by parents’ income—reinforcing inequality across generations 

Theoretical dogmas that are literally blind to the causes of the racism that determines the economic fates of most African-Americans leaves the economics profession unable to comprehend or recognize remedies for a key driver of America’s crippling inequality. Instead, conventional economic models unmindfully shape policies that actually exacerbate racial conflict.

INET co-founder George Soros is calling on Germany to lead Europe out of its economic doldrums or get out of monetary union altogether.

The YSI Economic History Working Group and the YSI Financial Stability Working Group are hosting a webinar series on the “Institutional Responses to Financial Crises, 1870 to 2017”. 

The New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) is a straightjacket for macroeconomics

Renewed interest by policymakers in the challenges of long-term slow economic growth highlights the importance of the Institute’s research

While Europe faces the specter of overwhelming debt, another deficit lies at the heart of the inability to find a solution: a deficit of trust.

You would have thought that to be a “jazz economist” was a good thing. I first imagined a “cool cat” that would entrance the hearts and minds of the populace. Not so.

Despite post-2008 regulations, the boom-bust credit cycle continues to run wild

70 years ago today, Edward A. Tenenbaum helped pull off an astounding feat—successfully reforming Germany’s currency after World War II

What we’re reading: Recent statements from the IMF and the OECD highlight a growing call for new economic policy thinking in response to the specter of long-term stagnation

Every banking crisis has its own overarching narratives and coincidental streams of various sub-narratives that course through the marketplace day to day.

Industry lobbyists vehemently oppose Medicare drug price negotiations. However, physician-scientist Fred Ledley and economist William Lazonick debunk their arguments.

Honorary Vice President at IMANI Center for policy and education, Bright Simons, on the challenges Ghana is facing

The multipolar financial world is here. The United States can survive it – but only with major political and economic changes at home. It’s time to start thinking about what those need to be.

Why Pushing on a String Has Never Worked

Central bankers pursue a “neutral” rate that doesn’t exist

We know about emergency lending, but what we are missing is the macroeconomic framework to guide a new rule for stabilization policy

The IRA has the potential to rectify the imbalance between public benefit and private incentives

‘Helicopter money’ may in some circumstances be the only certain way to stimulate nominal demand

Austerity for ordinary citizens and bank rescues for the affluent is a toxic mix

Reaching climate goals means rich countries must invest in sustainable technologies in developing countries with huge energy needs.

Alessandro Roncaglia has mulled the topic of power over his long and distinguished career – a topic most economists avoid. His new book explores the historical dynamics of power and asks how we can change its distribution today.

Is r/wallstreetbets really leading a financial revolution?

Inflation targeting insufficient: central banks and governments must manage the quantity and mix of credit created

Last time, I looked at the Chinese property market. The last link in that chain of financial interlinkages is the People’s Bank of China, the Chinese central bank.

The YSI Latin America Working Group is hosting a workshop at the United Nations ECLAC Summer School on Latin American economies.

Bank failures don’t threaten most deposits, but they do threaten jobs

It is high time to look more closely at the labor cost competitiveness myth.

In a new book from Cambridge University Press, Lance Taylor reveals that wage repression — far more than monopoly power, offshoring or technological change — is driving rising inequality.

As part of an International Economy symposium, INET Research Director Tom Ferguson assessed the challenge facing central bankers through the lens of the missing virtues of Dorothy’s travel companions in the Wizard of Oz

Is Neoliberalism a fixed set of ideas, or even an identifiable political movement?

The advent of military Keynesianism is a warning against complacency about the moral superiority of the West in defending Ukrainian democracy.

It’s time to prioritize mental well-being to avoid far-reaching economic and social consequences.

Is an ancient financial taboo keeping us from prosperity? Adair Turner, author of a new book on global finance, explains.

Over the last four decades, the US economy has done quite well for the top 1%, but it has been stagnant for most Americans. This was not an accident, nor the natural workings of the market and certainly not an inevitability. US policies have been deliberately structured since 1980 to redistribute income upwards. In other words, the system has been rigged.

Times have changed. Now we have David Brooks, of The New York Times, and economics blogger Noah Smith defending neoliberal globalization from the pincer movement of anti-trade populists from both the right and the left.

Billions living in insecurity and injustice is hardly a rational system.

Reactions to the size of the proposed plan rely on discredited assumptions and betray a fundamental misunderstanding of economic growth—and austerity 

Amid the ongoing research interest in questions of inequality, it is important to examine the question of access to housing — and how that has changed over the decades. The specific question I have sought to answer, here, is whether the real cost (measured against income) of buying the average home has risen.

To celebrate its 100 years of publishing, the AER published a special issues, whose retrospective part consisted of a list of the 20 most important articles, assembled by a committee which included Kenneth J. Arrow, B. Douglas Bernheim, Martin S. Feldstein, Daniel L. McFadden, James M. Poterba, and Robert M. Solow, and an essay on the history of the AER by Robert A. Margo.

In accepting mass unemployment, post-communist governments and the democratic parties that constituted them removed the economic foundation for Poland’s democracy.

What we’re reading: Some analysts expect dramatic changes and a short-term boost to the US economy, others predict continuity — and see Trump’s election reflecting a sea change in the global order

Rob Johnson interviewed Columbia University historian Adam Tooze in early 2020 about his work on financial history and how it relates to the Green New Deal.

In her new book, veteran Wall Street watcher and economist Nomi Prins warns that central bank strategies deployed since the financial crisis are destroying the real economy, worsening inequality, and creating societal chaos.

A “global saving glut” was invented by Ben Bernanke in 2005 as a label for positive net lending (imports exceeding exports) to the American economy by the rest of the world. However, there is a more plausible explanation for the persistent trade imbalance between the US and its major trading partners.

In the papers of economist Charles Kindleberger, Perry Mehrling found notes on the paper that won Ben Bernanke his Nobel Prize.

The limitations of the benchmark E-DSGE framework and how these limitations restrict the ability of this framework to meaningfully capture the macroeconomics of the climate crisis.

The “War on Poverty,” and the impact of public policy

An award created as a concession to market-minded bankers needs to recognize the centrality of social-democratic policies to the wellbeing of industrialized economies

Why does the apparently prescient and correct “key currency” view remain an embattled minority view?

James K. Galbraith slams “unreliable” report claiming that raising the minimum wage would reduce jobs

Stock buybacks as a mode of predatory value extraction

What can emerging economies learn from the financial meltdown in advanced economies?

The proliferation of China’s opaque, loosely regulated (or unregulated) shadow-banking system has been raising fears of possible financial instability. But just how extensive – and how risky – is shadow banking in China?

In the 40th anniversary year of John Kenneth Galbraith’s Age of Uncertainty, the 1970s look remarkably stable in comparison with today’s turbulent world 

Five years after the collapse of the U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers, the world has still not addressed the fundamental cause of the subsequent financial crisis – an excess of debt. And that is why economic recovery has progressed much more slowly than anyone expected (in some countries, it has not come at all).

When they told me I was expected to teach “Introduction à l’économie” this year, I thought, OK, this is straight. Every economist knows how to do that.

Donald Trump’s presidency is a symptom of an interregnum between economic orders – a period that will result in a new balance between state and market. While his administration’s economic policies are unlikely to provide the right answer, they may at least show the world what not to do.

Martin Guzman, Argentina’s former Minister of Economy, explains how the role of power should be central to economic research – especially when it comes to sovereign debt.

A response to Jason Furman and Lawrence Summers

What is the real reason Democratic party leaders go along with the debt ceiling ritual?

White House contenders ignore root causes threatening the program, potentially worsened by cuts. Is it due to reliance on wealthy donors?

Mike Spence talks with Rob Johnson about his upcoming co-authored book “Permacrisis”, India and the G20, and bringing the world together to address our shared challenges.

By suddenly eliminating two widely used bank notes, India’s government risks undermining public confidence in the basic means of exchange

The rising crescendo of bickering and acrimony within Europe might seem to outsiders to be the inevitable result of the bitter endgame playing out between Greece and its creditors. In fact, European leaders are finally beginning to reveal the true nature of the ongoing debt dispute, and the answer is not pleasant: it is about power and democracy much more than money and economics.

A more realistic version of how people “maximize utility”

In our two papers, we analyze how changes in personal and functional (wages versus profits) income distribution interact to produce different macroeconomic outcomes in different countries. On the basis of a stock-flow consistent model calibrated for the United States, Germany, and China, simulations suggest that a substantial part of the increase in household debt and the decrease in the current account in the United States since the early 1980s can be explained by the interplay of rising (top-end) household income inequality and certain institutions (e.g. easy access to credit, privately financed education and health care systems).

The explanation of systematic breakdowns in supervisory oversight over time must include the shift in Federal Reserve culture during and after the 1990s

On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Kalecki’s seminal lecture in Mexico on financing economic development, Jan Toporowski’s INET Working Paper considers the relevance of structuralism and Kalecki’s view of economic development for today.

The speed and duration of COVID-19 economic recovery will depend on how the government will finance emergency programs.

This essay critically evaluates the benefits and costs of the dominant methodology in macroeconomics, the DSGE approach. Although the approach has led to great progress in some areas, it has also created biases and blind spots in the profession that hold back our understanding and our ability to govern the macroeconomy. There is great scope for progress in macroeconomics by judiciously pushing the boundaries of some of the methodological restrictions imposed by the DSGE approach.

By reducing our reliance on chemical fertilizers, policymakers could turn today’s food crisis into a genuine opportunity towards shifting subsidies from agribusiness-led to agroecological-led farming systems

The decline in productivity growth has a longer history

Cryptocurrency was supposed to change the economic outlook for Black America. For many, it made things worse.

The theoretical approaches to analyzing crises have behind them contrasting conceptions of the way the economy works

Walker Todd and Bill Bergman expose the untold story of banking instability, regulatory battles, and the struggle to protect the public from financial chaos

A look at America’s strange and dangerous approach to medicine, and how to fix it

Axel Leijonhufvud showed economists a promising path forward. They should have taken it. Leijonhufvud passed away on May 5, 2022

Sometimes a radical path is the most practical way out of a mess.

Both before 2008 and today, there’s a disturbing tendency in Washington to not take mortgage fraud seriously

Over the next year, the Bitcoin price could double, soar tenfold, or collapse by 95% or more, and no economic analysis can help predict where in that range it will lie. Like other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin serves no useful economic purpose, though in macroeconomic terms, such currencies probably also do little harm.

Brazil’s current economic scenario does not resemble the emerging economy that until recently fueled the optimism of analysts and investors.

Campaign promises aside, the policies favored by President-elect Donal Trump are likely to bring more pain than gain to  working-class Americans 

How orthodox economics paved the way for the political shocks of 2016

The EU is preparing to take a tough line with Britain, in order to deter other member states from following it out of the Union. But it is the neoliberal agenda that has prevailed for last four decades, benefiting only the top 1%, that is fueled voter anger on both sides of the Atlantic.

One of the earliest attempts to tackle the problem of multiple equilibria in Macroeconomics was a byproduct of David Cass and Karl Shell’s engagement with Robert Lucas’s 1972 paper on ‘Expectations and the Neutrality of Money.’

How could reputable ratings agencies – and investment banks – misjudge things so badly?

It’s Nobel Prize time again. And what a beautiful prize this year it is!

Saving the (International) Dollar

The aim of the two-semester sequence is to explore a coherent alternative to neoclassical and post-Keynesian theory that does not rely in any way on concepts of utility maximization, rational choice, rational expectations, or perfect/imperfect competition.

What Strategies can Break This Dependency?

The most likely outcome of the second Trump administration is a recession and an exacerbation of inequalities, and a further degradation of the living standards of working and middle-class Americans.