C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh: The Great Jobs Disaster: Early this year, the International Labour Organi... http://t.co/JLaokR46nB
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Category Archive: Uncategorized
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The economic consequences of the peace (for Turkey)
John Maynard Keynes wrote “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” one year after the Great War ended. Misconceptions on the economic consequences of Turkey’s peace with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) led me to act now. This is is the intro. to one of my recent Hurriyet Daily News (HDN) columns. I am sure that [...]
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Of Muslim terrorists and terrorist Muslims
The Boston manhunt came to an end when the police arrested the second Boston Marathon bomber late Friday night. It is likely to be an isolated incident. Here’s the intro. to my latest Hurriyet Daily News (HDN) column, where I calculate the probability of being a terrorist given one is a Muslim. Nothing fancy, I [...]
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Saudi Arabia’s Shale Gas Hopes Dashed Due to Lack of Water
Much of Saudi Arabia’s conventional natural gas is produced as a by-product of the crude oil extraction. Nearly all is then re-injected back into the well in order to maintain the reservoir pressure. What little may remain is allocated to industrial projects such as petrochemical expansion. The result of all of this is that there [...]
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Expansionary Austerity: Reinhart&Rogoff and the Neolibs
I just did another interview on Reinhart&Rogoff and the magic, disappearing, 90% debt ratio, centered on the Neoliberal belief in “expansionary austerity”. You can see the original here: http://acemaxx-analytics-dispinar.blogspot.ch/2013/04/interview-prof-l-randall-wray.html Here is the text of the newest interview: Q: Around two years ago, you pointed to an economic error in R & R paper. You said (*See [...]
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Why Reinhart and Rogoff Results are Crap
Kudos to UMass economists for exposing the flaws in R&R’s empirical work. The conclusion that there is some magic debt ratio beyond which growth slows was never substantiated by R&R’s data–they fudged and flubbed the empirical work. True enough. However, the whole “research” method as well as the “theory” behind it was bunk anyway, as [...]
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Open Letter to Ilham Aliyev
For a change, I am not writing about Turkey. I have an open letter to Ilham Aliyev, President of Azerbaijan: “Your Excellency; I visited Azerbaijan for the first time last week to participate in a conference. The presentations were great, and I learned a lot about the Azeri economy. But I was most impressed that [...]
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NO, ROGOFF AND REINHART, THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT! SLOPPY RESEARCH AND NO UNDERSTANDING OF SOVEREIGN CURRENCY
Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff came as close to celebrity status as an economist can ever come, with their book, This Time Is Different. They claimed that 800 years (!) of financial history proves that high government debt ratios lead to low economic growth. Governments all over the world took heed and downsized, adopting austerity that [...]
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KRUGMAN DOES MMT AGAIN: GOLDBUGS AND BITBUGS
In a very nice piece, Paul Krugman blasts the anti-social orientation of those who tout gold or bitcoins as an alternative to state money (see here). You see, Uncle Sam is hell-bent on generating hyperinflation through President Obama’s run-away deficits and Chairman Bernanke’s money-dumping helicopters. To protect yourself, you need to buy gold and bitcoins—like [...]
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Crisis Management Lessons from the Cyprus Crisis
The Cyprus crisis has produced a large number of negative comments about governance in the eurozone, especially with respect to the predominant influence of Germany in the negotiations, the ultimatum issued by the European Central Bank (ECB) and the weakness of the European Commission, which was unable to block the proposal that bank deposits of [...]
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A Disappointing, Procyclical, and Highly Politicized Budget
The White House has officially unveiled its budget for fiscal year 2014. I hope to have a chance to look at some of the numbers and programs in depth over the coming weeks, but the overview alone confirms what many leaks have suggested, namely, that this is a disappointing, highly politicized document. Here are some [...]
