June 2012

“Not In My Lifetime” – The Muddled Road Toward An Integrated Europe

29 June 2012

Both Angela Merkel and the German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble have been quoted in the media as saying that they won’t go ahead with the “€-bills” and plans like that in their lifetime! Of course such quotes are incompletely reported and what they mean is that they won’t have a plan such as that without a common [...]

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U.S. Net Indebtedness Above $5T Now

27 June 2012

The BEA reported yesterday that the U.S. Net International Investment Position at the end of 2011 was minus $4,030.3bn. The large change compared to the end of 2010 (where it was -$2,473.6bn) was due to large revaluations of assets and liabilities in addition to the current account deficit. See the BEA blog on this. For [...]

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The Full George Soros Interview To Bloomberg

25 June 2012

June 25 (Bloomberg) — Billionaire investor George Soros speaks about Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis. Soros called on Europe to start a fund to buy Italian and Spanish bonds, warning that a failure by leaders meeting this week to produce drastic measures could spell the demise of the currency. He spoke yesterday with Bloomberg Television’s Francine Lacqua [...]

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Alan Greenspan Says “Certain Things” Cannot Be Forecast!

21 June 2012

Steve Keen, have you seen this? I think Greenspan has to read this article by Dirk Bezemer ‘No One Saw This Coming’ – Or Did They? Greenspan however confesses that economic models do not have flow of funds in them (just what Bezemer highlighted about mainstream models as opposed to heterodox ones) but claims that the “sophisticated [...]

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TARGET2 And Capital Outflows

21 June 2012

This is a note by Eladio Febrero Panos sent to me by Sergio Cesarrato. by Eladio Febrero Paños Area de Teoria Economica, Facultad de Economicas, UCLM Pza Universidad no. 1, 02071 Albacete, Spain Let us assume the following initial situation. There are two private banks, one in Spain (SPB) and another one in Germany (GPB); we [...]

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Is Intra-Eurosystem Debt Unconstitutional? [Updated 2]

19 June 2012

There’s an interesting conversation between JKH and Marshall Auerback here on the constitutionality of TARGET2 balances of the NCBs of the Euro Area. Rather than intervene in the comments, I thought I will let them exchange comments because I am not sure why Marshall Auerback thinks these are unconstitutional and more generally where he is headed [...]

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Philip Pilkington Interviews Marc Lavoie [Updated]

19 June 2012

Philip Pilkington’s interview of Marc Lavoie on his textbook Monetary Economics is available to read at Naked Capitalism. New Directions in Monetary Economics: An Interview with Marc Lavoie – Part I (Update: Part 2 appears here: New Directions in Monetary Economics: An Interview with Marc Lavoie – Part II) Wynne Godley used to think that Keynesians were being [...]

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William Dudley On Bank Lending

19 June 2012

I came across this 2009 speech by William Dudley on banking where he rightly says: … A related concern is the question of whether the Federal Reserve will be able to act quickly enough once it determines that it is time to raise rates. This concern reflects the view that the excess reserves sitting on [...]

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Gordon Brown Warns G20

15 June 2012

Gordon Brown  - who is also known for his slightly silly “Golden Rule” of balancing the budget on current expenditures – has called for a coordination of a “concerted global action plan” in a Reuters Opinion article Decisive Euro Action Is Needed At The G20 Summit. In my opinion the idea is roughly right – at [...]

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Jayati Ghosh On G20

15 June 2012

Triple Crisis has a Spotlight-G20 series and Jayati Ghosh has an article aimed at leaders of G-20 who meet next week in Mexico: Spotlight G-20, If Not Now, Then When She says: … the G20 appears to have lost its way. Its original intention – to provide a relatively speedy and workable arrangement for global [...]

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