INET in the News
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Rob Johnson joined the Background Briefing with Ian Masters
Feb 25, 2021
Rob Johnson appeared on the Background Briefing with Ian Masters to discuss working with Trumpsters, the source of their anguish, and important pathways to healing
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INET funded research articles are cited in The Conversation
Feb 24, 2021
Two separate INET funded research articles are cited; first from Schularick, Jordà, & Taylor on leveraged bubbles followed by Bao, Hommes, & Makarewicz on bubble formation. “Since their inception, financial markets, and to a lesser extent some real markets, have been subject to bubbles. … More recently, stock prices, but also credit, real estate, commodities, bond markets, and famously, bitcoin, are all assets that have experienced bubble episodes. Regarding cryptocurrencies, many economists also defend a permanent bubble, their fundamental value being theoretically non-existent.” …. In fact, the presence of bubbles in the markets (financial and real) seems to stem from the persistent behavior of economic agents. Experimental studies, controlling exactly the actual value, showed that participants tended to set up a bubble-like operation, with price surges and collapses very similar to real economy situations, and in no way related to a change in the market.
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Counterpunch cites James Galbraith’s INET article on the Texas Freeze
Feb 23, 2021
“Texas’ leaders knew as of 2011 … when the state went through a short severe freeze, that the system was radically unstable in extreme weather,” wrote James K. Galbraith, of the University of Texas at Austin, in the Institute for New Economic Thinking. “But they did nothing,” he wrote. “To do something, they would have had to regulate the system. And they didn’t want to regulate the system, because the providers, a rich source of campaign funding, didn’t want to be regulated and to have to spend on weatherization that was not needed – most of the time.” That’s what happens when the private sector calls the shots. Money first.” — Richard Gross, Counterpunch
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The Coastal Review cites INET's Working Paper on the economic history of African Americans
Feb 23, 2021
“Economic opportunity was further restricted by individual and institutionalized racism and political disenfranchisement. Discrimination in hiring by employers and intimidation of black workers through violence placed black workers at a direct disadvantage in the labor market,” Trevon Logan Peter Temin wrote in “Inclusive American Economic History: Containing Slaves, Freedmen, Jim Crow Laws, and the Great Migration,” a working paper written for the Institute for New Economic Thinking.” — Coastal Review
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Makronom cites Servass Storm’s INET working paper, Lost in Deflation
Feb 16, 2021
“That Italy is “lazy to reform” is probably one of the most widespread myths - and has little to do with reality. In 2015, for example, the OECD rated Italy’s reform efforts as significantly higher than those of Germany and France. The Dutch economist Servaas Storm takes the same line. In an in-depth study, he found that Italian politics as a whole adhered much more closely to the (market-liberal) economic policy guidelines of the EU than Germany and France.” — Phillip Heimberger & Nikolaus Kowall, Makronom
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Project Syndicate features Joseph Stiglitz INET funded research
Feb 15, 2021
“The Biden administration must put a high enough price on carbon pollution to encourage the scale and urgency of action needed to meet the commitments it has made to Americans and the rest of the world. The future of our planet depends on it” — Nicholas Stern & Joseph Stiglitz, Project Syndicate
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William Janeway joined the European Straits podcast to discuss YSI and his work on venture capital.
Feb 12, 2021
— European
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Brad Delong recommends William Janeway’s INET Video Series: Venture Capital in the 21st Century
Feb 12, 2021
William Janeway: Venture Capital in the 21st Century: ‘In this eight-part lecture series, Bill Janeway investigates the relationship between venture capital and technological innovation, and the interdependent roles of entrepreneurial firms, the mission-driven State and financial speculation in the overall innovation system… LINK: https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/videos/venture-capital>
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Daily Kos lists Sheila Dow's INET article on the Future of Macroeconomics as suggested reading
Feb 9, 2021
The Future of Macroeconomics Institute for New Economic Thinking, via Naked Capitalism 2-2-21]
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Taylor and Barbosa’s response to Krugman's inflation argument is summarized in Daily Kos
Feb 9, 2021
RSS PUBLISHED TO eState4Column5©2013 Political Economy Group DK PEG Anti-Capitalist Chat TAGS Culture Economy Employment Media MMT PoliticalEconomy publicpolicy stagflation WhiteHouse Share this article Let real wages (of $15+/hour) grow faster than labor productivity for some years, undoing the wage repression of the last decades. We have been misled by neoliberal economics for now many decades, it’s time to turn many things around in what is becoming a second-rated US economy, recently crippled by the malevolent and narcissistic “king of debt”. In economics, stagflation or recession-inflation is a situation in which the inflation rate is high, the economic growth rate slows, and unemployment remains steadily high. It presents a dilemma for economic policy, since actions intended to lower inflation may exacerbate unemployment. The biggest risk for the stock market in 2021 is inflation, according to Morgan Stanley. Unprecedented radical spending by the federal government and the Federal Reserve, to stave off a panic-induced market crash, helped artificially drive stocks to temporary new highs last year. www.laloftblog.com/… For some, the math bore out the possibility that exuberance was rational even if the economy is always more irrational than its math. “The Lucas fantasy of costless disinflation from credible commitments in an ergodic world of rational agents was decisively falsified long ago.” The underlying problems of supply shocks related to Trumpian idiocy atop bailing out the banksters may have made the economy much worse. The pandemic has only made a bad situation worse, or made more of us myopic in our isolation. Paul Krugman has now taken the time to question the orthodoxy of stagflation. Darn economic orthodoxy being wrong since the 1970s. Let me start with the inflation story the way most economists, myself included, have been telling. In the beginning was the Phillips curve: the apparent tradeoff, fairly visible in the data, between unemployment and inflation. In the 1960s many people looked at that tradeoff, considered the mild costs of inflation versus the benefits of lower unemployment, and argued for monetary and fiscal policies aimed at running the economy hot. But in a hugely influential speech Milton Friedman made an argument also independently made by Columbia’s Edmund Phelps: the unemployment-inflation tradeoff wasn’t real, because any sustained effort to keep unemployment low would lead not just to high inflation but to ever-accelerating inflation. They claimed, specifically, that people setting wages and prices would begin marking them up to anticipate future inflation, so that the inflation rate associated with any given unemployment rate would keep rising. They predicted, in particular, that the course of the economy over time would look something like this: https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_81db75c8-59f2-4b95-a60a-fe404a50c119_914x5331.png First, a government would push unemployment down; but this would lead to ever-rising inflation, which would stay high even as the economy cooled. So it would take a sustained period of high unemployment to get inflation down again, until finally unemployment could be brought back to a sustainable level. So their analysis predicted “clockwise spirals” in unemployment and inflation. Then came the 1970s: https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_1d91277a-44fe-422b-b0c3-f1dfa8fb7428_933x5501.png This sure looked like a dramatically successful out-of-sample prediction — sort of an economics version of “Light bends!” Almost everyone in the economics profession took the Friedman-Phelps analysis as confirmed. This in turn had big practical and intellectual consequences. First, governments and central banks stopped pursuing low unemployment, believing that excessively ambitious stimulus caused the stagflation of the 1970s. They began aiming for stable unemployment around the NAIRU —non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment — instead. Second, since the Friedman/Phelps prediction was based on trying to assess what rational price-setters would do, their apparent success gave a big boost to the notion that all economics should be based on maximizing behavior. Friedman always had too strong a reality sense to personally go down the rational-expectations rabbit hole that swallowed much of macroeconomics, but given the law of diminishing disciples it was bound to happen. Third, the whole affair gave a boost to conservative ideology. We had seemingly seem a demonstration of the limits to government action; also, the Chicago boys had seemingly been proved right about something big. (I remember classmates in grad school saying “They were right about this. Why don’t you think they’re right about the rest?”) Finally, the Volcker disinflation of the 1980s — using high unemployment to end high inflation — became, in many minds, the model of what responsible policymakers should do: make tough choices for the sake of the future. BUT WHAT IF WE’VE BEEN TELLING THE WRONG STORY ALL ALONG? […] But suppose something like this is true. In that case, the narrative that saw stagflation both as the cost of excessively ambitious macroeconomic policy and as a vindication of conservative economic ideas was mostly wrong. And that matters not just for history but for policy right now, which is still to some extent constrained by the fear of a 70s repeat. How do you ask someone to be the last worker to be unemployed for a mistake? paulkrugman.substack.com/… The reality in a response by Lance Taylor and Nelson Henrique Barbosa Filho is that “For practical purposes, the results mean that, for the Fed to meet its inflation target, it would be necessary to let real wages grow faster than labor productivity for some years, undoing the wage repression of the last decades. Biden’s $15 minimum-wage proposal is a correct step in that direction.” This is despite so many economists taking an opposite, more cautious position. — Daily Kos
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Lynn Parramore joined the This is Hell! podcast to discuss her recent article on the surge in deaths of despair amid the pandemic
Feb 9, 2021
“Cultural theorist Lynn Parramore on the deep social effects of economic precarity, and her article “Epidemic of Despair Could Haunt America Long After COVID” at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/epidemic-of-despair-could-haunt-america-long-after-covid” — Chuck Mertz,This is Hell!
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Osservatorio cites INET Working Paper on Carbon Pricing
Feb 8, 2021
“A recent study by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, painting a wider picture, shows that the effective reduction in emissions due to carbon pricing policy comes to between just 1 and 2.5 percent of the total.” — Ornaldo Gjergji, Osservatorio
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MIT News features Baron and Verner’s INET funded research into banking crises
Feb 8, 2021
“Panics are not needed for banking crises to have severe economic consequences,” says Emil Verner, the MIT professor who helped lead the study. “But when panics do occur, those tend to be the most severe episodes. Panics are an important amplification mechanism for banking crises, but not a necessary condition.” Indeed, in an ambitious piece of research, spanning 46 countries and going back to 1870, the study surveys banking crises that occurred with and without panics. When there is a panic and bank run, the research finds, a 30 percent decline in banking-sector equity predicts a 3.4 percent drop in real GDP (gross domestic product adjusted for inflation) after three years. But even without any creditor panic, a 30 percent decline in bank equity predicts a 2.7 percent drop in real GDP after three years.” — Peter Dizikes, MIT News
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Rob Johnson s quoted in Jacobin on why cable networks are hostile toward Medicare for All
Feb 8, 2021
“Consider the following point made by Institute for New Economic Thinking executive director Rob Johnson during a recent interview when asked about Medicare for All: “Public opinion polls show more than 70 percent of the population is in favor of Medicare for All. It’s not the population that doesn’t want it, and they’re the ultimate voters. It’s vested interests and the struggle that has to do with the relationship between money-raising campaign war chests and the probability of re-election and what you might call the refractory influence of the mainstream media, where pharmaceutical companies in particular and insurance companies as well are very big advertisers.” — Luke Savage, Jacobin
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Lazonick and Shin's INET funded research is cited in Naked Capitalism
Jan 26, 2021
“In taking over industrial companies, financial managers focus on the short run, because their salary and bonuses are based on current year’s performance. The “performance” in question is stock market performance. Stock prices have largely become independent from sales volume and profits, now that they are enhanced by corporations typically paying out some 92 percent of their revenue in dividends and stock buybacks.[6]” — Michael Hudson, Naked Capitalism [6]William Lazonick, “Profits Without Prosperity:Stock Buybacks Manipulate the Market and Leave Most Americans Worse Off,”Harvard Business Review, September 2014. And more recently, Lazonick and Jang-Sup Shin, Predatory Value Extraction: How the Looting of the Business Corporation Became the U.S. Norm and How Sustainable Prosperity Can Be Restored(Oxford: 2020).