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Update 2/28: more details here. Sorry, I’ve been very busy in recent weeks, finishing up a book on Minsky and revising my Modern Money Primer for a second edition (more on both of those projects later). Meanwhile, Lola Books is gearing up to release the Primer in Spanish next week. I’ll be in Madrid for the launch and for a series of meetings. I’ll give two presentations that are open to the public. Details are below. Hope to see our Spanish friends there! March 5, 2015 I’ll make a presentation at the Izquierda Unida economic program. This event will officially introduce MMT into Spanish politics. Location: Sede Central de CC.OO. Address: c/ Fernández de la Hoz 12, planta baja; Madrid Time :19 h. See the event flyer below. March 7, 2015 Presentation of the Primer at the ‘Association pour la Taxation des Transactions financière et l’Aide aux Citoyens’ (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Aid to Citizens) Location: Fuhem Address: c/ Duque de Sexto 40; Madrid Time: 11 h.

The New York Times made waves this week with another piece on inequality, saying that it has not risen since 2007. The article was based on this paper by GWU’s Stephen Rose. The article also suggests that expansions are not a good way of looking at trends in inequality (as I have done in the past, also covered by the NYT). Instead, one needs to look at the business cycle. It also concludes that, thankfully, because of government tax and transfer policies, inequality has not been “that bad” over the last few years and governments can clearly do something about it. So what’s wrong with this picture? Here is the graph that appeared in the NYT (I’ve reproduced it below showing only the bottom 90% and top 10% of families using the same Saez data). Now let’s reproduce the exact same graph, using the same data but excluding capital gains. The trends reverse. The bottom 90% of families have lost proportionately more than the top 10% since 2007. Now, I am not fond of excluding capital gains (I am in favor of annuitizing them), because they are very important to income dynamics, but still, without capital gains, the bottom 90% lose proportionately more (relative to the top 10%) than with them. In any case, if we include the top 1%… Read More

In the interview below, James Galbraith provides a behind-the-scenes account of the latest rebuff of Greece’s offer by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and talks about what lies ahead (in English and Greek): [iframe width=”448″ height=”252″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/_dI75VJUpZY?feature=player_detailpage” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe]

Most analysis of the Greek debt crisis ignores an important reality: While Greece may be the villain du jour, every eurozone nation is profoundly short of cash. That’s because of a well-acknowledged, but not fully appreciated, flaw at the heart of eurozone financial architecture that converted a historically unprecedented number of nations from issuers of their own currency to users of a common currency. Greece is simply the first country to experience the extreme consequences of that loss of monetary sovereignty. With no independent source of funding, no currency of its own, no central bank to guarantee its government liabilities, it has had to ask others for help. And as a condition for securing that help, Greece has until now been forced to consent to radical austerity policies. As an analogy, consider a United States with a common currency but no Treasury to conduct macroeconomic policy, stabilization or stimulus spending. Imagine also that the Federal Reserve was banned by law from guaranteeing U.S. government debt. And imagine that one state, say, Illinois (think Germany) was the major net exporter, accumulating dollars (euros) while most other states (as is the case in the eurozone) were net importers, thereby bleeding dollars (or euros). Finally, imagine Illinois providing a loan to cash-strapped Georgia (think Greece), dictating that it implement slash-and-burn privatization of public… Read More

As deflation sets in in the economies of Europe and Japan, Robert Kuttner’s words in Debtor’s Prison: The Politics of Austerity versus Possibility—an interesting, readable new volume—complement those of many of the Levy Institute’s scholars. The book argues that during the financial crisis and its aftermath, policymakers continually relied on excessively optimistic projections of economic growth. Hence, stimulus plans adopted by Congress were not up to the task. Meanwhile, monetary policy could do little more than keep the crisis from worsening. As a result, the recovery remained exceedingly weak, and deficits overshot estimates to boot. Kuttner notes that in spite of the end of the recession, US growth rates on the order of 1.7 percent in 2011 and 2.2 percent in 2012 have not been high enough “to blast out of the deflationary trap.” The more recently released annual growth rate of 2.4 percent for 2014, as well as the 2.2 percent final figure for the year before, indicate that he is right when he argues against the political “consensus” that “borrowing money is the last thing the government should do.” In fact, fiscal policy still needs to be made more stimulative, perhaps through increased infrastructure spending. Kuttner decries a situation in which an “austerity lobby” is set to bat down such efforts in Washington. Also notably, Kuttner uses a… Read More

For our Spanish-speaking followers, my Modern Money Primer has just been released in Spanish and is available: Here’s the description of the book: El esfuerzo intelectual que se realizó en el campo de la física tras la aparición de la teoría de la relatividad o del modelo copernicano, no se llevó a cabo en la economía tras la aparición del dinero fíat. Teoría Monetaria Moderna es la plasmación de dicho esfuerzo intelectual. En este libro se expone claramente qué es el dinero en realidad y lo que es más importante se exponen las políticas económicas que deberían llevarse a cabo para llevar a la práctica un programa político coherente con dicha realidad. L. Randall Wray es doctor en economía y profesor en la Universidad de Missouri-Kansas City, así como director de investigaciones del Center for Full Employment and Price Stability. Además, pertenece al Levy Economics Institute of Bard College de Nueva York. I’ll be in Madrid for the book launch. See you there. More details to follow.

Here’s a nice piece: The Workers’ Think Tank: With an eye on the United States and Greece, scholars at the Levy Economics Institute are developing plans to ensure full employment, by Sasha Abramsky, The Nation. As Sasha notes, the Levy Institute has a novel approach to fighting unemployment: JOBS! Hardly anyone ever thinks about that—that the cause of unemployment is lack of jobs. For some reason, virtually all policymakers and economists (including progressives) think that jobs will magically appear. True, some suggest that US unemployment is created because China (et al.) “steals” jobs that are rightfully due to America. Hence, the solution is to steal them back. But why not just create more? Is it really that hard to come up with a list of things that people could usefully do, right here in America? As Sasha writes, things appear to have improved in America, “Yet scratch below the surface and you’ll see that the United States still has a considerable economic problem. While the official unemployment rate has fallen to 5.6 percent, the lowest since 2008, the percentage of the adult population participating in the labor market remains far lower than it was at the start of the recession. At least in part, headline unemployment numbers look respectable because millions of Americans have grown so discouraged about their prospects of finding work… Read More

Yesterday on the floor of the US Senate, Sen. Bernie Sanders delivered a speech featuring Pavlina Tcherneva’s widely-discussed chart, which illustrates how the bottom 90 percent’s share of income gains during economic expansions has shrunk to (literally) less than nothing. Watch (beginning at 26min50s): [iframe width=”461″ height=”351″ src=”//www.c-span.org/video/standalone/?c4525785″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe]

The recent 40 percent jump in the value of the Swiss Franc will have some effects similar to those of deflation where it seems to be taking hold, including Japan and much of Europe. When a currency increases in value, foreign debts in those currencies become more of a burden. The New York Times brings it home with the story of households in Poland and other European countries who have some foreign debt of their own—mortgages whose payments are suddenly much higher in their own currency, after the Swiss National Bank (the Swiss counterpart to the ECB and the Fed) stopped using foreign-currency operations to peg its currency against the Euro. In fact, the FT reports that mortgages in the Swiss currency make up 37 percent of Polish home loans. The Swiss decision was encouraged by a European Central Bank that is getting ready to push long-term interest rates down further through its own program of quantitative easing (QE). Instead of printing more Francs to buy Euro and other currency, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) allowed the Franc to rise in one big move, abandoning its peg to the depreciating Euro. This move will increase import demand in Switzerland from Poland and other European producers. But as always with a sudden devaluation, foreign-currency debtors suffer from a so-called currency mismatch… Read More

If one were asked to describe the formal economic and political processes that have shaped the condition of the eurozone since the eruption of the euro crisis in late 2009 in a terse and peremptory way, he or she might boldly and truly say this: “German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policies spearhead the unraveling of the European project while European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi seeks to keep the (neoliberal) game going.” Indeed, there is little doubt that Germany’s neo-mercantilism is the driving force leading a sizable segment of the eurozone’s economy on the path to stagnation and decline, while the ECB has been trying hard to carry out the role of a traditional central bank by fulfilling its duty as a lender of last resort in order to save the euro and preserve the eurozone. The ECB intervened in the euro crisis in May 2010 by buying up government bonds from Greece (even when a 110 billion euros bailout package had been approved for Greece), Spain, Portugal, and Ireland under its Securities Market Program. By 2011, the ECB was buying up Spanish and Italian bonds by the bucketload in order to force a drop in the bond yields of the two largest peripheral economies of the eurozone. With the end of the crisis in the periphery nowhere in sight,… Read More

With Syriza in the driver’s seat, Greece now has some hope for the end to austerity imposed by Germany and the troika. Here’s a good short piece in the New York Times by C. J. Polychroniou, a research associate and policy fellow at the Levy Economics Institute. As he explains, what Syriza wants is no more—and no less—radical than what the USA did in the 1930s to deal with its Great Depression: “the bulk of Syriza’s economic program for addressing the catastrophic crisis in Greece, which has evolved into a humanitarian crisis, is inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs.” The official press is reacting in horror! Oh the horror of bringing Democracy and Pinko policies into the Officially Neoliberal EMU regime! C.J. continues: “Interestingly, the task for the implementation of the employment program has been assigned to a colleague of mine at the Levy Institute, Rania Antonopoulos, who has been appointed deputy minister of Labor and Social Solidarity under a Syriza-led government.” Yes, Senior Scholar Rania Antonopoulos is director of the Gender Equality and the Economy program at the Levy Institute, specializing in macro-micro linkages of gender and economics, international competition, and globalization; job guarantee policies and their macroeconomic and employment impacts; social protection and poverty reduction; and the implications of paid and unpaid work on poverty… Read More

After a record-setting 23 straight quarters of shrinking GDP, the Greek economy was less awful in 2014, and an economic recovery of sorts might finally be under way. However, the Levy Institute’s latest projections (which are generated using a stock-flow consistent macroeconomic model tailored to Greece) indicate that Greece still faces years of anemic growth if it continues its current policies. Given the severity of the economic wounds inflicted on that country, a recovery led by market forces alone — that is, without any fiscal stimulus — likely means another decade or more before Greece climbs back to its precrisis levels of output and employment. In their latest report, Dimitri Papadimitriou, Michalis Nikiforos, and Gennaro Zezza observe that median income in Greece fell by 30 percent between 2010 and 2013, real GDP is now down to where it was in 2001, and the largest share of the unemployed have been out of work for a year or more. Carrying on with the status quo is no longer tenable — and looks very likely to be overturned in the next election. Using their stock-flow model for Greece, Papadimitriou, Nikiforos, and Zezza put together projections for three alternative policy scenarios: (1) a “New Deal” program of public investment and direct job creation funded by EU transfers; (2) a suspension of interest payments on… Read More