Blogs

Discussion of the results of the ECB's LTRO2 has revolved around the question of hoarding, specifically whether banks are using the newly-created reserves to fund new lending. Answers to this question usually make reference to the amount of overnight deposits held by eurozone banks at the ECB. Read more

In his notorious "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong" NYT article in 2009, Paul Krugman relied on the freshwater/saltwater distinction to explain that the economists' inability to predict and solve the current economics crisis was due to the fact that MIT/Harvard economics lost their long dispute against their Chicagoan counterparts. Read more

An interesting debate is taking place among the top financial regulators and bankers in China. Read more

Fundamentally, the ECB is trying to keep the ongoing sovereign debt crisis from turning into a full-fledged bank credit crisis.  Three things they are worried about (see here, here, here). Read more

What is Debt? David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5000 Years explores this question by tracing the historical development of the idea of debt from ancient Mesopotamia to present, in the process challenging the idea that a barter economy preceded the development of money.

Crooked Timber hosts an online seminar on Debt that includes a series of essays by scholars from different disciplines to provide some critical perspective. You can find the online seminar here.

Judy Klein is Professor of Economics at Mary Baldwin College in Virginia. She is the author of Statistical Visions in Time: A History of Time Series Analysis 1662-1938, (Cambridge 1997) and co-editor of The Age of Economic Measurement (Duke 2001), and co-author of The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (in preparation). She has been a research fellow/visiting scholar at the National Humanities Center, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, the École normale supérieure de Cachan, and the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science. Read more

In Europe and the United States, political and economic breakdowns have become untenable. Existing political and economic systems protect and favor creditors over borrowers and leave us with systemic debt imbalances of the kind we now face in Greece and the EU, where well-intentioned policymakers are being held hostage by financial architecture. Solutions to these urgent problems are essential if society is to move forward or simply avoid collapse. New economic thinking is needed. Read more

Perry and I extend our apologies for the unplanned hiatus. By way of breaking radio silence, it seems appropriate to check in on our two favorite banks. Here's the Fed's balance sheet, asset side first:

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Alexander Field offers a new take on postwar prosperity in the United States. While public spending during the Second World War is often credited with laying the foundation for postwar growth, Field suggests this foundation had long been laid. In this INET interview with Rob Johnson he says productive capacity increased tremendously in the years preceding the war, and that fact – not the war spending – provided the basis for prosperity and productivity improvements in the 1950s and 1960s. Read more

I am writing from my notes. The event I want to report took place some two months ago, I have since been preoccupied, then occupied, and now increasingly overwhelmed. In the rooms of the Washington Duke Inn sat some 20 economists, philosophers, historians and methodologists, discussing "herding behavior" in the economics profession. I have been to several of similar events and they are spottingly attended, with folks coming in and out of the room, physically and mentally. Not so this time. Read more