The Institute's blog

“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

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

And as the ship is still sinking both literally and figuratively, an intrepid Australian billionaire has given us a timely reminder. Recently, billionaire mining-magnate Clive Palmer announced his intention to build the Titanic II, which will be a modernized replica of the original Titanic – because we all know that went well. Read more

That was the question at the “Future of Europe” panel at INET Berlin. German International Broadcaster Deustsche Welle offers a look behind the scenes at INET’s recent Berlin conference. The video segment - titled “Economists Planning a Revolution” - asks, “What will the new solution be for Europe?” Read more

Human beings aren’t mechanical. And mechanistic economic theories can’t account for uncertainty or political instability and individual creativity. Read more

What to do with Europe? Pick one: federalize or impose austerity.

Or ask Yanis Varoufakis, who picks neither. The professor of economic theory at the University of Athens offers a modest proposal for helping to tackle this Euro Zone conundrum. Don’t worry about federalizing Europe now and don’t cling to the current course of imposing austerity that no one really believes will work. Read more

The Washington Consensus is dead.

So says Andrew Sheng in this op-ed for Project Syndicate. Writing about INET’s recent Berlin conference, where Sheng was also a speaker, Sheng notes, “Almost everyone agreed that the old paradigm of neoclassical economics was broken.” But what comes next wasn’t as clear. Read more

New economic thinking is no passing fad. The movement for new economic thinking is here to stay - with broad-based, worldwide support from undergraduate and graduate students as well as both young and established professors and Nobel laureates. Read more