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Deck the Halls with Macro Follies!
Happy Christmas! Here’s A light-hearted youtube treat from me (really, MacroStories) to you.
Credit unions not a substitute for regulation of payday lenders
Andrew Lilico of Europe Economics has an article in today’s Telegraph with which I at once agree and disagree. I join his affirmation of the Church of England’s proposed move to more proactively support credit unions like London Mutual Credit Union. This can provide a more ethical alternative to payday lenders and their exploitative interest rates. However, […]
Ethical individuals or ethical institutions?
This week a friend asked me what are the questions we should be asking about the financial crisis and what should be done about it. In recent months I have perceived (perhaps wrongly, since I haven’t attempted a careful survey) a leaning in the UK debate, including among discussions within the Church of England, towards […]
‘Free market’ Keynesian demand management: Oxymoron?
[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 […]
Equality and innovation in symbiosis?
“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 […]
Cyprus banking crisis illustrates key ingredients missing from modern finance theory
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 […]
Still asking the wrong question
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’ […]
Lest macroeconomists forget: the need to reinstate History of Economic Thought on the curriculum
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 […]
Why not ‘resolve to break up big banks’ now instead of ‘resolving broken banks’ later?
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). […]
Reframe Finance 