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...
MMT: school of thought or set of personalities?
MMT revisited
Simon Wren-Lewis’s recent post on why MMT is so popular makes a number of important points. The Twitter response to Simon’s post was fairly representative - to its credit, MMT has a committed c...
Secular stability
The defining characteristic of US economic data since the financial crisis is not stagnation, but stability. We all look back on the Great Moderation with incredulity at the hubris of economists. But has realit...
The case for a new economics
What’s really wrong with NAIRU
Earlier this year, Matthew Klein at FT’s Alphaville, made a typically punchy and well-argued case for abandoning a cornerstone of the current macro policy framework - the NAIRU...
Has the Bank of Japan solved the ‘Piketty problem’?
Japan’s unlikely re-distribution
Why is the Bank of Japan (BoJ) trying to raise the rate of inflation? Taking account of its demographic profile, Japan's economic performance has been impressive by developed w...