Archive

What’s behind rapidly worsening inequality in the United States?

Let Them Eat Credit: Has Financial Capitalism Failed the World?

Can China lead the way on innovation?

The global financial cycle has transformed the well-known trilemma into a ‘dilemma’. Independent monetary policies are possible if and only if the capital account is managed directly or indirectly. This column argues the right policies to deal with the ‘dilemma’ should aim at curbing excessive leverage and credit growth. A combination of macroprudential policies guided by aggressive stress‐testing and tougher leverage ratios are needed. Some capital controls may also be useful.

Where will today’s innovation come from?

The degree to which economics is isolated from the ordinary business of life is extraordinary and unfortunate.

The battle for a living wage for the nation’s poorest workers is set against the backdrop of mass unemployment and the highest level of economic inequality in the U.S. in almost a century.

what is economically correct must always be balanced with what is morally right.

We are coming up to the fifth anniversary of the Lehman crash in September 2008. How bad was it? Have we fixed the problems?

economists still conceive of law too narrowly, mainly as a means to reduce transaction costs and protect investors.

What does the bankruptcy of Detroit say about the US social contract?

The shortage of liquidity in the interbank market in China has sparked off a fear of “monetary famine.” This seems rather odd when the national savings rate is 50 per cent of GDP

Recent austerity policies have been guided by ideology rather than research. This column discusses research that reconciles disparate estimates of fiscal multipliers in the literature. It finds that common identification assumptions are problematic. Matching methods based on propensity scores show how contractionary austerity really is, especially in economies operating below potential.

Did the global economic collapse in 2008 stem from structural failures in the capitalist system?