by Kenneth Thomas of Middle Class Political Economy Greg Mankiw doesn’t understand competition for investment Greg Mankiw’s column in Sunday’s New York Times makes the case that competition between governments is a good thing, that it makes them more efficient in the same way that competition among firms does. He paints it as also being […]
You know things are weird when pretty strongly right-of-center economists are proposing ideas first touted by MMT econocranks (yes, beowulf, I’m talking about you) to bring about the Obama breakout moment that progressives (despairingly) dream of at night. The world is a very strange place. And people argue with Steve Randy Waldman when he says […]
Speaking of “extractive elites,” don’t miss Pete Kotz’s cover story in the Village Voice, Mitt Romney, American Parasite. (I read it in their subsidiary Seattle Weekly.) It details a whole string of Bain purchases under Romney — thriving companies that were saddled with debt so Romney could extract cash in the form of “profits,” leaving […]
It’s pretty amazing to read a cover story in, and by the publisher of, The American Conservative that could have run in The Nation, Mother Jones, or on Daily Kos — almost. Certainly America’s top engineers and entrepreneurs have created many of the world’s most important technologies, sometimes becoming enormously wealthy in the process. But […]
by Mike Kimel Update …Since this post has gotten a lot of attention, jump here for myfinal word on this topic. I’m sure I’m missing something here, because Paul Krugman is so often extremely perceptive, but I think here he is very, very wrong. He writes: The naive (or deliberately misleading) version of Fed policy […]
First a qualification. I am basing the following on info I found on the net. If the info is wrong, then I stand corrected as to who is or is not paying but not as to what happens when a large entity does not pay. The specific city and company are used purely for example […]
My mobile just got a call from a robotic “Amy” asking me to take a 30-second survey about “the nation’s debt crisis.” Since I don’t live in Greece and could care less about the magazine, I figured they had a wrong number and hung up.
A few weeks ago I showed energy consumption as a share of nominal personal consumption expenditures (PCE ) and though it would be interesting to follow up with food and energy as a share of PCE. From 1959 to 1999 food and energy fell from about 33% of PCE to 17.5%. This almost 50% drop […]
Randall Wray highlights two great insights that arose at the annual Minsky conference last week in NYC. First Joseph Stiglitz (Wray’s words, emphasis mine): Recall that part of the reason for the creation and explosion of derivatives was to spread risk. For example, mortgage-backed securities were supposed to make the global financial system safer by […]