Posted by: lettrist on: March 31, 2009
Look around you. There is, simultaneously, a shortage of saving to finance the increased investment and an excess of consumption goods expenditure relative to the supply of consumption goods available. Is that not a monstrous problem? The appearance of excess demand in the consumption goods sector has caused prices to rise and the requisite saving forced out of consumer’s incomes.
Posted by: lettrist on: March 30, 2009
“When policy-makers have already witnessed a significant move in asset values, and are confident in what that move means for the outlook, it should be prepared to adjust policy accordingly. The central bank must be responding to its assessment of what an already observed movement in asset prices will mean for output and inflation.”
- Timothy [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: February 7, 2009
The people hit hardest by the global capitalist downturn of the late 2000s are the disabled. When a recession happens, they are the first people to be laid off, they are among the first in social spending to be cut, and they are the most likely to be overlooked.
The global unemployment rate, 5.7% in 2007, [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: October 2, 2008
What is a Liquidity Trap?
A liquidity trap happens when interest rates come closer and closer to zero, and thereby changes in the money supply are very ineffective at stabilizing the economy.
If at first blush that does not make sense, another way to put it is like this.
“LM” is the money supply and liquidity preference combined [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: May 20, 2008
Bellevue is a Seattle bedroom community, a republican bastion on the East side of Lake Washington, and one of the more anti-human and unhappy cities in the Northwest region. Beyond the consumerist core of the city center, Bellevue Square, I start to notice fewer and fewer places for humans to walk, fewer and fewer places [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: November 8, 2006
[An essay on D. McCloskey’s rhetorical analyzes of the economic science, why it matters that economics is rhetorical, why methodology is not over, and some lingering problems. ]
It is not easy to think of a proposition in economics that all reasonable economists agree to have been falsified by the evidence. It seems that no theory [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: October 16, 2006
When a market left to itself does not allocate resources efficiently, interventionist politicians usually allege market failure to justify interventions. Neo-Keynesians have identified four main causes of market failure: the abuse of market power, externalities, public goods, and asymmetric information. My concern in this blog is with the fourth reason for market failure, asymmetric information. [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: October 15, 2006
I have been reading much transhumanism lately, as is evident from my blogs. So I began to reflect on the nature of technology in capitalist economies.
Keynes argued that prices in the economy were “sticky” in the sense that they very easily moved upward and very stubbornly moved downward. Petrol prices is the example a popular [...]
Recent Comments