[Continuing to read Pasinetti's 1981 tour-de-force Structural Change and Economic Growth. This post inspired by page 90-91 (available at Google Books preview).] Following the advent in 2008 of the global financial crisis, government ‘demand management‘ again rose to prominence in mainstream economic debate and actual policy in many countries, under the label of ‘stimulus’, and indeed […]
“Innovation will tend to be greater in a society where resources[1] are distributed more equally”. This hypothesis formed in my consciousness today while reading the great economist Sraffa’s 1960 book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities[2] (more interesting than it sounds!) though don’t ask me how I got from there to here. First, when […]
The Cypriot banking system, long waiting to collapse from financial exhaustion, finally succumbed over the weekend. The deal that was initially struck (since rejected by the country’s Parliament under popular outcry, though they will have to strike a deal of some kind soon) was widely seen as inequitable[1], because retail depositors (people like you and […]
Tonight at Cass Business School in London, Prof Franklin Allen from Wharton will be speaking on “Is Finance a Force for Progress“. Now it’s good to be talking about these matters in the Universities. But when are we going to start asking the right questions?! As I argued in an earlier post, the catch-all ‘finance’ […]
I never cease to be amazed by how much economics as a profession has forgotten down the decades. Today, my research led me to a 1990 paper by Ronald Coase entitled ‘Accounting and the Theory of the Firm’. It was published shortly before he was awarded the 1991 ‘Nobel Prize’ in Economics. Coase reminisces about the early part […]
Apologies for the month-long silence. The US and UK financial regulators responsible for dealing with the next Lehman Brothers disaster have been making joint plans to do so. A couple of days ago they released a draft. The next Lehman is likely to be one of the other so-called Globally-active Systemically Important Finanicial Institutions (G-SIFIs). […]
Our new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, will take office at a time when chronic problems with the economy and financial system are high on the agenda. So I am encouraged that he speaks regularly to these issues with a measure of technical insight as well as spiritual wisdom. In a previous post I suggested […]
