debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
The Guardian’s Larry Elliot has a useful round-up of a slew of new data from around the world which all point in the same direction. Down. It underlines that the recent decisions in Europe, and especially the ECB’s nascent bond-buying programme (OMT), are only a necessary condition for avoiding a renewed and probably catastrophic crisis. [...]
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the world discovered by Alice was one in which every aspect of reality was inverted. Big things were small. Small things grew big. The Cheshire cat faded into a grin. One side of a mushroom made you grow. The other made you shrink. It was also a world [...]
OK, so the euro area seems bent on committing suicide. The UK appears to believe that austerity and stagnation will be more bearable if done in splendid isolation. The US political system is locked in arcane disputes while the economy stagnates and labour market and fiscal problems pile up. Meanwhile big emerging markets such as [...]
A country faces an economic and political abyss; the government is on the brink of bankruptcy and pursues fierce austerity policies: public employees take huge pay cuts and taxes are drastically increased; the economy slumps and unemployment rates explode; people fight each other on the street while banks collapse and international capital flees the country. [...]
Tim Geithner, US Treasury Secretary (finance minister), has addressed Europe’s finance ministers, meeting in Wroclaw, and told them: What is very damaging [ ] is to see not just the divisiveness [in Europe] in the broader debate, about strategy, but the ongoing conflict between the governments and the central bank and you need both to [...]
Kevin Drum writes a good piece in the American magazine Mother Jones on how he wants to see Barack Obama solve unemployment in USA. Sounds like a good plan: “All of us have our fantasies about what we’d like President Obama to say in his big speech next week about jobs. Here’s mine: ask Congress [...]
One of the calumnies of liberal/conservative commentators and politicians, and some mainstream economists, when the financial crisis broke in 2007/2008 was that it was all the fault of – you guessed it – government. Central banks had kept interest rates too low and blown up asset bubbles. Public institutions like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, [...]
Brad Delong has posted an interesting paper by the San Fransisco Fed, showing that since the early 1990s in the USA headline inflation has tended to revert back to the rate of core inflation. Those of a wonkish bent can read the technical analysis, but it is really sufficient to look at this chart to [...]
What did the President do in response to last week’s horrendous job report — unemployment rising to 9.2 percent in June, with only 18,000 new jobs (125,000 are needed each month just to keep up with the growth in the potential labor force)? He said the economy continues to be in a deep hole, and [...]
The Center for American Progress issued a fascinating and important PolicyLink paper early in April 2011: Prosperity 2050: Is Equity the Superior Growth Model?[1] Written by Sarah Treuhaft and David Madland, both its content and its title raised a central question of our time: whether it is “possible that the traditional assumption that there is [...]
Reading this article about Wal Mart stocking guns reminded me of a post just over a year ago about the US-EU divide. That focused on health-care and included some other major trans-Atlantic differences. The ability of American citizens to buy shotguns and hunting rifles in supermarkets (and the latter’s freedom to sell them) were not one [...]
Obama’s defiance of the right on the budget is a ray of sunshine amid gathering clouds. The deeper problem remains the fact that the American centre-left has utterly failed to win the public over to its Keynesian explanation of the Great Recession. Progressives in the United States enjoyed a rare feeling of encouragement on April [...]
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