Pandemania
When will the GameStop?
It is worth reflecting on the first major panic on the New York Stock Exchange in 1901. On that occasion two magnates, James Hill and Edward Harriman, one supported by Standard Oil, the ...
Marx has the last laugh
I cannot think of a better interlocutor than Chris Dilow. He raises another set of interesting questions in his reply to my reply. I am in danger of completely forgetting our original divergence of thought, but...
Angrynomics: a reply to Chris Dillow
Chris Dillow writes perhaps the most interesting economics blog I know. Its scope is considerable, and despite his declaration of bias - he self-identifies as a ‘marxist’ - he is typically empirical. His recent...
How long secular stability?
Economics is a curious field of study. For a subject that focuses so much on rational behaviour it is distinctly human. The tribalism borders on parody - post-keynesians, new keynesians, liberal, conservative, ...
The ethics of a Brexit referendum
The debate over Brexit has been dominated by propaganda. To date, I have had sympathy with the one ethical argument, which has been made most effectively by Mehreen Khan, for leaving the EU. It is shared by man...
If you don’t like trade deficits – tax the rich?
Has the word ‘deficit’ done more damage than any other in economics? Deficits are bad, surpluses are good. In economics, nothing could be further from the truth. How can there be virtue, if every virtuous act r...
r* and the range of irrelevance
Despite the fact that interest rates determine all asset valuations, there is nothing close to a general theory of interest rate determination. The rule of thumb when I started working in financial markets was ...
Rethinking Brexit, via Kilkenny & Oxford
Mark Blyth and I have been arguing that nationalism is a global virus, filling the vacuum created by the erosion of political identity under neo-liberalism. The Cold War era now appears, almost nostalgically, a...
MMT part III – conclusion, and a conversation with Ben Bernanke
My last two blogs have revisited the issue of whether or not base money is a liability of the state. The issue played a central role in a discussion over the future of monetary policy at the Brussels think-tank...
MMT part II: a synthesis, an olive branch, and a defence of Twitter
This is a short follow-up to my previous post, ‘MMT - sophistry or substance?’, and Simon Wren-Lewis’s ‘Why is MMT so popular?'.
Summarising, I suggest the two defining characteristics of MMT are: (1) a theo...