The Bank of England, never very cheery, found much to be gloomy about in announcing a further £50 billion of quantitative easing (QE) on Thursday. “Output has barely grown for a year and a half and is estimated to have fallen in both of the past two quarters …,” it said. “Business indicators point to … Read more
It is frequently asked whether it was possible to avoid the present crisis which is still shaking the Western economies, yet it has a negative influence upon a number emancipating and developing economies, including China. Such a general question cannot be answered correctly, since it is necessary to define the time frame it refers to, … Read more
From a Tweet by Stephanie Kelton: MMT: Often imitated, never duplicated I’ve been lecturing in Bogota and Quito (more on that later) but several people sent to me a recent piece by Paul Krugman in which he attempts yet again to show that he understands banking. However, as Scott Fullwiler argued after a previous such … Read more
Cardiff Garcia: White House wants pushover bubble-watching Fed chair who would be fun to have a beer with during a crisis: That’s our exaggerated (but not too much) reaction to reading Neil Irwin’s column on the reasons that White House insiders are uneasy with Janet Yellen as Fed chair. Roughly, the reasons are that she has demonstrated an … Read more
John Fullerton has written a scathing indictment of Wall Street’s morals. He uses Woody Allen’s new film, Jasmine as an analogy to understand the scandal surrounding Steven Cohen’s SAC Capital. The problem is not really that Cohen ran a crooked shop, but rather that he was (and still is) aided and even worshipped by the … Read more
International long-term private finance to developing countries has changed dramatically in the wake of the global financial crisis. Caught in “post-crisis blues”, as my World Bank colleagues Jeff Chelsky, Claire Morel and Mabruk Kabir called it in a recent Economic Premise, some traditional sources of long-term finance are strained, and alternatives have not been able … Read more
Each time I post something on the environment, a number of readers admonish me to get back to economics. Well, it’s been obvious to many observers that the two are interlinked. Consider one graph from NOAA, and two others from Economic Benefits of Increasing Electric Grid Resilience to Weather Outages, a joint CEA and DOE report, … Read more
As Washington hunts ill-defined al-Qaeda groups in the Middle East and Africa, and concerns itself with Iran’s eventual nuclear potential, it has a much more pressing problem at home: Its energy grid is vulnerable to anyone with basic weapons and know-how. Forget about cyber warfare and highly organized terrorist attacks, a lack of basic physical … Read more
OK so it took almost four decades but finally the mainstream is waking up to the fact that banks do not “lend out” reserves (except to one another in the fed funds market). The whole “deposit multiplier” story that was taught in every American money and banking textbook is wrong. Always has been wrong. (Just … Read more
In our previous article we examined the Intra EU-27 trade during last decade and came to the conclusion that the most significant trend with respect to it has been the new EU member states gaining a significant share of the Intra-EU export pie as a result of their accession to the common market and gradual … Read more