Finance

John Kay’s thought-provoking essay The Map is Not the Territory: An Essay on the State of Economics argues that economists have been led astray by excessive reliance on formal models derived from assumptions that bear too little similarity to the world we live in.

At the heart of the Eurocrisis lies a vicious circle where once there was a virtuous one.

After the recent election brought a center-right coalition to power, what’s next in the Greek crisis? Are we finally in the clear? Not so fast, Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis says. Varoufakis explains the real outcome we can except after Greek voters’ “contradictory verdict,” where 55% voted for anti-bailout parties yet a pro-bailout government resulted due to the nature of Greece’s electoral system.

Since September 2011, the Swiss National Bank has held a floor of 1.20 francs per euro.

Below is a revised version of a talk I gave at the New School University, at a conference to launch Lance Taylor’s latest book. The date of the event was April 28, 2011, more than a year ago, and the delay in revision was entirely my fault—overcommitment and pressing deadlines on many fronts. Sorry about that.

The Collapse of Free Market Macroeconomics

We investigate the effects of government spending on U.S. economic activity using a threshold version of a structural vector autoregressive model.

Here is a talk I gave recently at Wake Forest University.

The topic of this session of the INET conference is a question: does the effectiveness of fiscal policy in stabilizing an economy depend on the underlying economic context in which the policy is implemented?

In conversation recently, I was called upon to defend the claim that banks are in the business of creating and destroying private money.

When Paul Krugman paints John Maynard Keynes as a pioneering critic of dominant free-market economics, he exaggerates wildly, both about the rigidity of orthodoxy and about the pioneering character of Keynes’ critique.

Paper revised for the Institute’s Plenary Conference in Berlin

The text below is the comment I offered on Mr. Soros’ opening speech at INET’s Berlin Conference April 12, 2012. The text of Mr. Soros’ own speech is here. Video of the entire session is below—my bit starts at 55:00.

Financial stability, or the lack thereof.

The ongoing eurozone crisis has prompted many to argue that monetary union withoutfiscal union was bound to fail.