wynne godley

Kenneth Rogoff Is Back With Another Sneaky Article

23 May 2013

Kenneth Rogoff is back with more unscholarly stuff. In a new article for Project Syndicate Europe’s Lost Keynesians, Rogoff subtly tries to belittle Keynesians and Keynes himself. According to him, The eurozone’s difficulties, I have long argued, stem from European financial and monetary integration having gotten too far ahead of actual political, fiscal, and banking union. This [...]

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Endogeneity, Exogenous, Et Cetera

4 May 2013

Louis-Philippe Rochon and Sergio Rossi have a very interesting article Endogenous Money: The Evolutionary Versus Revolutionary Views in the Review Of Keynesian Economics. I think it was written many years back and was in an unpublished form and has been published now. It is a nice critique of views of some Post-Keynesians such as Victoria Chick and also [...]

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Margaret Thatcher’s Gigantic Con Trick

8 April 2013

There have been too many praises for Mrs Thatcher after her death today. Wynne Godley once described the Thatcher “miracle” as a gigantic con-trick. Here is from a newspaper article: I regard the Thatcher miracle as a gigantic con-trick. Almost every major indicator – output, unemployment, industrial investment, and the balance of payments has performed [...]

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Claims Economists Make

17 January 2013

Economists struggle with simple things. Two examples. National Saving, Trade Deficits etc. In a blog article Has Anyone Heard of the Trade Deficit?, Dean Baker uses the sectoral balances identity to make a claim which is presented like a no-go theorem. Baker says: Fans of arithmetic (a tiny minority among DC policy types) like to point [...]

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Wynne Godley And The Dynamics Of Deficits And Debts

5 January 2013

In a five-part series in his blog, Functional Finance and the Debt Ratio Scott Fullwiler claims that if the interest rate is held below the growth rate of output, sustainability of the public debt/gdp ratio is guaranteed in the sense that the ratio converges and does not keep increasing forever. This is erroneous and his conclusions are [...]

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Random Tidbits On National Accounts And Keynesian Models Of Income And Expenditure

13 December 2012

I came across this article (via a Tweet from Stephen Kinsella): Accounting As The Master Metaphor Of Economics by Arjo Klamer and Donald McCloskey which discusses how the framework of national accounts has been pushed to the background in economic analysis over the years. It is a nice read – although boring in a few places. I [...]

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Jan Hatzius On Sectoral Balances

10 December 2012

Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal interviewed Goldman Sachs’ Jan Hatzius recently with questions aimed at his usage of the sectoral balances approach: … BI: Back to the balance sheet, multi-sectoral framework of looking at the economy. How did you come to this view? On Wall Street this is still very rare. I don’t see many economist [...]

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“Maastricht Is A Half-Baked Half-Way House”

8 December 2012

I frequently quote Wynne Godley’s Maastricht And All That written for the London Review Of Books in 1992. Here’s from another article (paywalled) for the same magazine from 1993: I am in favour of Britain having much closer ties with other European countries, provided that appropriate institutions are created and the whole thing is brought under [...]

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Origins Of The Sectoral Balances Identity

29 November 2012

I thought I should share what I found recently about who was to state the sectoral balances identity first – since it comes across as enlightening to say the least. I found the identity in Nicholas Kaldor’s 1944 article Quantitative Aspects Of The Full Employment Problem In Britain. It was published as Appendix C to Full Employment [...]

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Canada’s Mark Carney To Head The Bank Of England

26 November 2012

So the news is that Mark Carney – the Governor of the Bank of Canada will now be the next Governor of the Bank of England. Wynne Godley would have been happy – had he been alive and known that Carney is perhaps the only central banker to have recognized his foresight. (Carney probably is [...]

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