Blogs

INET Executive Director Robert Johnson delivered a keynote address at the OECD Forum in Paris today. In anticipation of the conference, Johnson wrote an op-ed for French newspaper Les Echos on reforming the financial sector.

Quoting Nobel Laureate and INET Advisory Board member Joseph Stiglitz, Johnson reminds readers that, “Academic economists played a big role in causing the crisis. Their models were overly simplified, distorted, and left out the most important aspects.” Read more

Below is a revised version of a talk I gave at the New School University, at a conference to launch Lance Taylor's latest book.  The date of the event was April 28, 2011, more than a year ago, and the delay in revision was entirely my fault--overcommitment and pressing deadlines on many fronts.  Sorry about that. 

Lance Taylor, Maynard’s Revenge:  The Collapse of Free Market Macroeconomics (Harvard 2010). Read more

In the wake of INET’s conference in Berlin, Executive Director Robert Johnson poses a profound question during this interview with the German foundation Stiftverband. Who does the economist serve: powerful interests or society?

The answer seems clear-cut. Economists today primarily serve the needs of powerful interests at the expense of society in general.

But why? Read more

Mathematician Michael Edesess has a dose of reality for economists.

“Economics pretends to be mathematics, but it is not mathematics,” he says. “There is a major difference. No mathematician uses a term in a formula, or a statement of a theorem, unless that term has first been defined with excruciating precision.” Read more

Last week, INET gathered with important members of the economics community to celebrate the publication of new books by Joseph Stiglitz, a member of INET’s Advisory Board, and his wife, Anya Schiffrin.

Read more

“While it's incredibly difficult to get a regulatory reform passed, it's far easier – and more profitable to politicians – to kill it.

So says Matt Taibbi, in his audacious new article in Rolling Stone called, “How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform.” In it, Taibbi examines how cash from the financial industry swamped elected officials and regulators and thwarted any efforts to create meaningful financial reform. Read more

You can’t control what you don’t understand. Just take a look at the financial sector.

Despite the trauma of the 2008 financial crisis, the opacity of the financial sector and the oblique way decisions about financial risk are handled by institutions have remained central problems for the global economy. With this in mind, INET Grantee Edward Kane offers some new thinking on how to measure systemic risk in the financial sector.  Read more

Being the smartest guys in the room doesn’t prevent you from making bad decisions.

This is the lesson Paul Krugman offers in his recent NY Times column. “Even supposedly smart bankers must be sharply limited in the kinds of risk they’re allowed to take on,” Krugman writes.

The key to solving this conundrum, in Krugman’s mind, is smarter regulation. Read more

Here is a talk I gave recently at Wake Forest University.  It is pretty long, but you can page through the video (on the left) by paging through the powerpoint (on the right), and anyway the last twenty minutes are devoted to questions.  I couldn't figure out how to embed it in the blog, but the link will get you there.

What has been driving the worldwide growth of inequality, both within and between countries? Jamie Galbraith has an idea: “Surely financial policies strike me as a very plausible culprit.” Read more