Recent quotes:

Over at Project Syndicate: The Monetarist Mistake - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

To admit that the monetarist cure was inadequate would be to admit that the Great Depression had deeper roots then a failure of technocratic management on the part of central banks charged with maintaining a neutral monetary policy and a stable money supply growth rate. Such deeper roots in severe market failures would not be consistent with a belief that social democracy had been oversold, and that government failure was almost invariably a worse danger than market failure. There was thus an extremely strong elective affinity between a mainstream economics profession caught up in the gathering neoliberal currents of the age and the Friedmanite interpretation of the Great Depression.
#Project-Syndicate - equitablegrowth.org

Over at Project Syndicate: Making Do with More - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

If we as a species can avoid nuclear war; curb those among us who are violent because they are God-maddened, state-maddened, or ethnicity-maddened; properly coordinate global action to reduce global warming from its current intolerable projected path to a tolerable one, adapt to the global warming that occurs, and distribute paying for the costs of that adaptation–well, if we can do all of those things, the human race can have a very bright future indeed.
#Economic-Growth #Information-Economy #Project-Syndicate #Economic-Inequality - equitablegrowth.org

Confessions of a Financial Deregulator: Hoisted from the Archives from 2008 Over at Project Syndicate - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

People have been asking me about this recently, and I keep thinking it is a set of issues I should revisit, reconsider, expand, and write about at length. But I have failed to do so. So here it is again, hoisted from the archives: J. Bradford DeLong: Confessions of a Financial Deregulator: Back in the late 1990’s, in America at least, two schools of thought pushed for more financial deregulation–that is, for repealing the legal separation of investment banking from commercial banking, relaxing banks’ capital requirements, and encouraging more aggressive creation and use of derivatives. The first school of thought, broadly that of the United States’ Republican Party, was that financial regulation was bad because all regulation was bad. The second, broadly that of the Democratic Party, was somewhat more complicated, and was based on four observations: In the global economy’s industrial core, at least, it had then been more than 60 years since financial disruption had had more than a minor impact on overall levels of production and employment. While modern central banks had difficulty in dealing with inflationary shocks, it had been generations since they had seen a deflationary shock that they could not handle. The profits of the investment-banking oligarchy (the handful of investment banks, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley preeminent) were far in excess of what any competitive market ought to deliver, owing to these banks’ deep pockets and ability to maneuver through thickets of regulations. The long-run market-return gradient–by which those with deep pockets and the patience to take on real-estate, equity, derivative, and other risks reaped outsize returns – seemed to indicate that financial markets were awful at mobilizing society’s risk-bearing capacity. The poorer two-thirds of America’s population appeared to be shut out of the opportunities to borrow at reasonable interest rates and to invest at high returns that the top third–especially the rich–enjoyed. These four observations suggested that some institutional experimentation was in order. Depression-era restrictions on risk seemed less urgent, given the US Federal Reserve’s proven ability to build firewalls between financial distress and aggregate demand. New ways to borrow and to spread risk seemed to have little downside. More competition for investment-banking oligarchs from commercial bankers and insurance companies with deep pockets seemed likely to reduce the investment banking
#Finance #Project-Syndicate #Deregulation #Investment-Banking - equitablegrowth.org