Recent quotes:

Morning Must-Read: Barry Eichengreen: Greece in Light of the Past and Future of the Euro - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

“I’m strongly of the view that 1929-1931 and 2008-2010 were cut from the same cloth… …broadly speaking, whereas 1920-1922 was a fundamentally different animal… caused by monetary tightening by the Federal Reserve designed to wring inflation out of the economy, not by deeper economic and financial imbalances
#Macroeconomics #Economic-History #Lesser-Depression #Great-Depression #Barry-Eichengree - equitablegrowth.org

Afternoon Must-Read: Yanis Varoufakis: Confessions of an Erratic Marxist in the Midst of a Repugnant European Crisis - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Yanis Varoufakis: Confessions of an Erratic Marxist in the Midst of a Repugnant European Crisis: “Europe is experiencing a slump that differs substantially… … from a ‘normal’ capitalist recession, of the type that is overcome through a wage squeeze which helps restore profitability. This secular, long-term slide toward asymmetrical depression and monetary disintegration puts radicals in a terrible dilemma
#Lesser-Depression #Austerity #Greece #Yanis-Varoufakis #Structural-Adjustment - equitablegrowth.org

Weekend Reading: Best Review of Martin Wolf's "The Shifts and the Shocks" (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)

It is Eric Rauchway in the Times Literary Supplement. My only complaints about the review are: It was more than just the desire of rapidly-growing emerging markets not to find themselves under the hammer of a 1998 that produced the global savings glut. It was increased income inequality in the North Atlantic core, plus increased wealth in the periphery seeking a North Atlantic bolthole as a form of political risk insurance as well and in addition. Although Keynes argued that deflation was worse than inflation, he sought to avoid both rather than lean on the inflation side. Keynes did not win at Bretton Woods: Bretton Woods did not mandate symmetrical adjustment. Keynes's victory was partial, and for the most part came after his death: policy during his life was hardly Keynesian. Summers served Obama; Summers's preferred policies were not adopted by Obama. But that failure was by no means written in the stars. It was contingent--depending on both a Treasury Secretary and senior political advisors who did not understand the situation and on Obama's imprinting on them rather than on Summers. It was a near-run thing, in the United States at least. A much better world is only a butterfly wing-flap away on some alternative quantum frequency of the multiverse. Here it is: Eric Rauchway: Debt Piled Up: "Martin Wolf THE SHIFTS AND THE SHOCKS: What we’ve learned--and still have to learn--from the financial crisis. 496pp. Allen Lane. £25. 978 1 84614 697 8 Published: 29 December 2014: Over the course of his new book on the current economic unpleasantness, Martin Wolf conveys a sense of increasing frustration. He begins with a sober account of recent history and a capsule proposal for how to solve the malaise with which we are confronted, and then begins to evaluate competing accounts and proposed solutions, often with a single word. Here is a non-exhaustive list of those words: nonsensical, simplistic, mistaken, childish, asinine, self-refuting, nonsense, silly, insouciant and grotesquely dangerous, and--most
#Lesser-Depression #Martin-Wolf #Eric-Rauchway #The-Shifts-and-the-Shocks #Books - bradford-delong.com