Economics

Greece fiddled its books and ran a deficit in good times and bad.  But, it is rubbish to paint all of the debtor nations in Euroland now in crisis with the same brush. There are huge differences I would like to point out. And I will…

To paraphrase Shakespeare, things are indeed rotten in the State of Denmark (and Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and almost everywhere else in the euro zone). An entire continent appears determined to commit collective…

Here's something I want to run by you on behavioural economics and the way economic issues are being debated in the blogosphere. We are witnessing an implosion of long-held belief structures that go the core of how we believed our economic…

When bankruptcy comes, it does so normally as a result of a liquidity crisis. This is true for countries as much as it is for companies. It's not as if someone in charge walks in one day and says "you are insolvent so you must default…

Econ 101 Imagine you and I are the only two people in an economy. For the sake of argument, say we use sea shells as a currency and we trade with no one else but each other. So when we do trade, we exchange goods and services with each…

Marshall Auerback here with a post which I originally published at New Deal 2.0. This post on deficits in fiat currency regimes is the second in a series of posts on Modern Monetary Theory. Many market analysts, commentators and economists…

Let's attack the question of hyperinflation using Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany as examples. These are the two most extreme cases of hyperinflation that economic historians have ever witnessed. They are instructive regarding what causes…

Regular readers know that, while I have a little of what Marshall Auerback calls deficit terrorism in my DNA, I fully support fiscal stimulus as a means to arrest a deep downturn.  The horrendous Keynesian nightmare My move into…

Informed researchers are asking what happens to China based on the recent demographic shift from rural labour surplus to rural labour deficit.  The answer may be slower growth and higher inflation, according to a paper released last…

To be an economist these days is a rare privilege and especially; it is a privilege to be a blogging economist since there is just so much good material to write about at the moment. On the one hand, there is the unfolding unravelling of…