By Miguel Navascués, in Madrid | H. Clark Johnson, professor at Yale University, identifies in a paper titled Monetary policy and the Great Recession, what he calls the six myths of U.S. monetary policy during the Great Depression. The paper not only explains the cause of the hole we’re in, but also the reasons why zero interest rate does not imply monetary expansion. In the latter case, the reason is simple:…
WASHINGTON | No more than a 1% of U.S. citizens accumulate 20% of the income and 35.6% of the wealth (in assets, labor income and capital), which constitutes the largest concentration of wealth on the richest hands since the existence of statistics in this country. But at the same time, they contribute a 38% of federal tax income. In addition, there are 43 states that have their own income tax. In…
LONDON | Cheering the crude end that military dictator Muammar Gaddafi met on Wednesday, Libyans in the British capital gathered late in the evening outside the Libyan Embassy near Knightsbridge: they are not the only ones closely watching their freed country. The shots that made history in Misrata will soon open the race among European and US companies to land in Libya and begin doing business, too. Or to renew existing deals. Oil…
LONDON | Cheering the crude end that military dictator Muammar Gaddafi met on Wednesday, Libyans in the British capital gathered late in the evening outside the Libyan Embassy near Knightsbridge: they are not the only ones closely watching their freed country. The shots that made history in Misrata will soon open the race among European and US companies to land in Libya and begin doing business, too. Or to renew existing deals. Oil…
Meet a Republican candidate to the US presidency who dared to sing this at the Omaha press club in 1991: “Imagine there’s no pizza / I couldn’t if I tried / Eating only tacos / Or Kentucky Fried / Imagine only burgers / It’s frightening and sad…”
We've selected some comments from public remarks published on social websites by demonstrators and observers of this weekend's globalised protests against the financial state of things. @Izaakson: Occupying the London Stock Exchange twitpic.com/70npad #occupy Sophie Payne What books on economics should we read? Mises and Hayek? Are we allowed to educate ourselves by reading Keynes or Galbraith? Or even…Marx? DMReporter PROTEST: Occupy London Stock Exchange protesters vow to give up worldly possessions and close their bank…
“I don’t mean to get all class-warfare on you… But unless we find a way to spread the burden upward and cut the middle class some slack, it isn’t Greece we will soon be resembling”, writes Ellis Henican for Fox News, “it’s those old Caribbean islands Jimmy likes to sing about. Where a few super-rich families own just about everything. Where the vast majority of others have hardly anything at all.”
From Bankia, a Wednesday alert on global economic developments: the International Monetary Fund warns that the global economy is entering yet another new dangerous phase: “activity is weakening across the board, the agents’ confidence has plummeted, regional disparities persist and there are increasing risks of downturns in all different scenarios. “The IMF has revised its general forecasts pointing out a significant downturn: global growth would stand at 4% for both…