Just like during the Gezi protests, it has fallen to Finance Minister Mehmet “Nominal” Şimşek, who is moonlighting as Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda, to clean up the economic debris. This is the introduction to my latest Hurriyet Daily News (HDN) column, where I take on Turkish Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek’s interview with Turkish penguin … Read more
OK a commentator complained that she could not find serious examinations of the MMT and JG literature. Let’s try this. Here’s a short list of some of my downloadable but non-blog articles. You can search the list of titles for related pieces. Hope this works. If not, I’ll try to get someone more expert than … Read more
The Turkish yield curve inverted yesterday (January 6), with the yield on the 10-year government bond falling below the benchmark two-yield. What did this mean? And more importantly, what does it imply? The most general explanation for yield curve inversion is that there are short-term risks to the economy, whereas economic fundamentals are sound in … Read more
One of the worst epithets that can be leveled at a politician these days is to call him a “redistributionist.” Yet 2013 marked one of the biggest redistributions in recent American history. It was a redistribution upward, from average working people to the owners of America. The stock market ended 2013 at an all-time high … Read more
I just returned from the big annual meeting of economists (this time in Philly), at which we had a panel on the Job Guarantee. One of the papers on our panel was by William (Sandy) Darity and Darrick Hamilton, which demonstrated how imperative it is to implement the JG to reduce hiring discrimination in the … Read more
The global economy had another difficult year in 2013. The advanced economies’ below-trend growth continued, with output rising at an average annual rate of about 1%, while many emerging markets experienced a slowdown to below-trend 4.8% growth. After a year of subpar 2.9% global growth, what does 2014 hold in store for the world economy? … Read more
At first blush, the Federal Reserve looked to have pulled off an almost seamless hand-off of accommodation from quantitative easing to forward guidance at the last FOMC meeting. The announcement of the long-awaited taper was met with a subdued bond market reaction while stocks soared. Since then, however, bond yields have climbed, breaching the three … Read more
The news that Switzerland will hold a referendum on a proposal to provide every citizen with an unconditional grant of 2,500 Swiss francs a month (about $2,800) has sparked renewed interest in the old idea of a universal basic income (UBI). Under such a program, the government would not just top up the incomes of … Read more
In the midst of the European Debt Crisis, it is tempting to think that high-debt countries could alleviate the recessionary impact of the budget consolidation process by selling (poorly managed) assets and stakes in their state owned enterprises (SOEs), and by using the proceeds to buy back their debts. In addition to providing a cushion … Read more
Paul Krugman started the New Year yesterday with a zingy little post in his New York Times blog titled “The State of the Euro in One Graph”. Here is the graph . . . . . . and here is the text that accompanies it: What you see here is that borrowing costs for the … Read more