Technical difficulties and, frankly, my own stupidity, prevented me making three points I thought were important on Primetime last night.
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First was the nature of the problem: banks have liabilities in the form of loans that might go belly up, and homeowners have the other side of that balance sheet with their [...]
Also tagged Add new tag, Bank, Business, Interest rate, Loan, Mortgage, Short, United StatesThe smart economy is a nice idea, perhaps even a good idea. But like most nice ideas, when exposed to reality, the smart economy just breaks down. The smart economy as a concept takes no notice of the detail: who is looking for what type of job right now, and how long will it take [...]
Also tagged Add new tag, Business, Construction, Ireland, Limerick, Mid-West, Organisations, UnemploymentEC6012 students should take a look at this article on debt and trade deficits, on how the US, with a very low savings rate, and already up to its eyeballs in debt, can experience an improvement in its trade deficit over 2009, mainly by printing money. Put these two charts from Mike’s post side by [...]
Also tagged Add new tag, Balance of trade, Business, Debt, Economic, Personal Finance, Quantitative easing, SavingHere are the lecture notes in 2*2 format, a recording of the lecture is below.
Irving Fisher’s 1933 article on Debt, Deflation, and Depression is here, Hyman Minsky’s big book on financial panics and the theory of debt-deflation is here, you can learn more about him here. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s 1983 paper on debt-deflation [...]
Published in today’s Sunday Independent.
Recovery is not reform. The government’s intended path to recovery is
a mixture of borrowing, pay cuts, and spending cuts. All recovery
plans treat the symptoms of a downturn. Global aggregate demand has
been buoyed by injections of capital by governments. There is evidence
the medicine is working. Global recovery looks in sight. Reform
however, is [...]
Arthur Laffer is a rare economist. He has lived to see his theories enacted as policy at the highest level over many years, and those theories have been shown, everywhere they’ve been tried, to be false. Here he is debating Peter Schiff two years ago.
Listen to what both men are saying, and ask yourself, with [...]
The world’s financial governance structures are in need of a comprehensive overhaul. The G20 ministers met over the weekend, and produced this document, which says, in effect, we’ll try really, really hard to do something, m’kay? You find steaming phrases like this:
We will: Continue our vigorous efforts and take whatever further actions are necessary to stabilize [...]