Archive

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?

This year, I’m sharing an office with an econometrician on Mondays and with a geographer on Fridays (you don’t want to go into the subtleties of the French educational system).

There is a “tendency to neglect applied economics in writing the history of economic thought,” Roger Backhouse and Jeff Biddle remarked in 2000. They then followed the “applied” trail back into the XIXth and early XXth centuries, at a time the scope and nature of economics were debatted by continental and especially British political economists

Reinhart and Rogoff’s 2010 paper “Growth in a Time of Debt” has recently come under scrutiny

INET Advisory Board members Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff today issued a response to recentcriticism of their paper “Growth in a Time of Debt.” Their response in full is below.

It is often argued that in recent years the question of the ‘dissemination’ of economic knowledge has been increasingly addressed by historians of economics.

A minimum wage is a small minnow in an ocean of deficient aggregate demand

At dinner yesterday Niall Ferguson made the argument that China (or the East) were perhaps no longer looking to how Western countries had built their social institutions and formed their empires, and were instead now doing their own thing as the Western approach was shown to be flawed

Imperfect knowledge economics, or IKE to their friends, is popular with all the popular kids. George Soros, Bill Janeway and Anatole Kaletsky were in attendance as Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg - or more properly, their students - showed the latest work in progress.

Japan is going to double its money supply, according to today’s front page of the Financial Times (5 April 2013), and a salient question might be what we should compare that to. It sounds like a lot, but is it?

Having lunch next to Edward Fullbrook he told me the story of how the post-autistic economic review got its start, leading to what we today know as the World Economic Association and all the great work coming from this community.

Some personal touches to hospitality at the INET conference, although I feel for the people who have been holding that sign all day.

In his opening remarks, Robert Johnson said that this “is not the institute of anything goes” with INET now getting to a point where it needs to stop criticising the mainstream and should instead “create a new vision.”

What is the purpose of economics?

The INET conference in Hong Kong is serious business.