Daily Archives: December 11, 2013

Blinder and the Banks

By Dan Kervick

Alan Blinder, writing in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, expresses enthusiasm about some recent hints at a possible change in the Fed’s policy on interest paid on excess reserves. The hints were contained in the minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee’s last policy meeting, which included a passage indicating that most participants in the meeting “thought that a reduction by the Board of Governors in the interest rate paid on excess reserves could be worth considering at some stage.”

Blinder has been a strong proponent of changing the current policy, so he thinks the hinted changes are of the utmost importance. “As perhaps the longest-running promoter of reducing the interest paid on excess reserves, even turning the rate negative,” he says, “I can assure you that those buried words were momentous.”

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Full Employment through Social Entrepreneurship

By Pavlina Tchnerva

Pavlina R. Tcherneva discusses her proposal for eliminating unemployment now and forever by running a job guarantee program through the social  entrepreneurial sector. She examines the problems with conventional stimulus policies and the price-stabilization features of her proposal.

It is the 12/10/2103 interview and starts at 17:30 min mark.

Financial Governance for Innovation and Social Inclusion

The workshop on Financial Governance for Innovation and Social Inclusion brought together international economists working on issues related to “Reorienting Financial Reform” and “Re-shaping Financial Institutions for Innovation and Development” – under the Reforming Global Financial Governance  initiative of the Ford Foundation. Below are the appeareances of Drs. L. Randall Wray and Jan Kregel.  Recorded November 25th, 2013.

Good-Bye Lenin? Is Ukraine’s ‘Revolution’ Pro-European or Pro-Oligarchic?

By Alla Semenova

Protesters topple a statue of a Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin in downtown Kyiv, Ukraine on Sunday, December 8, 2013.

For more than two weeks, Ukraine has been swept by massive pro-European, anti-government protests, the largest the country has seen since the Orange Revolution of 2004. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have stormed the streets of Kyiv, following President’s Yanukovych decision to put on hold a major trade and cooperation agreement with the EU. Pressure from Putin’s Russia is cited as the main reason for the President’s U-turn.

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Of art and money, Bitcoins and Damien Hirst

By Glenn Stehle

Money and art, in the minds of some, are now one and the same.

Izabella Kaminska, for example, recently asserted that art is “the sophisticated man’s Bitcoin.” It is the “safe store-of-value” which “art aspires to that is our intended meaning,” she avers.  “Think sophisticated man’s Bitcoin rather than asset class outright.”

Kaminska goes on to elaborate that much art

is being ‘mined’ purely to satisfy the demand for ‘safe-ish’ assets in a liquidity saturated world. Safe assets, which we should add, are often held in bonded warehouses in places like Geneva, outside of the reach of tax authorities, and which later become a type of bearer security in their own right as the depository receipts which allow redemption of the assets begin to circle amongst the wealthy as their own type of non-taxable currency.

Much of the value of art, according to Kaminska, is just like that of Bitcoins.  It depends on the “the Emperor’s New Clothes effect.  “If we  —  art dealers, collectors, writers and experts – all agree a particular work has value,” she asserts, “it surely does, irrespective of its costs of production, utility and purpose.”

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Krugman, Helicopters, and Consolidation

By Scott Fullwiler and Stephanie Kelton

Paul Krugman has a new post that explains why the debate over money- vs. bond-financing of government deficits is really much ado about nothing.  In it, he essentially echoes longstanding MMT-core principles, as we will show below.  Indeed, MMT blogs have written as much many times previously (for example, see here, here, here, and here).

Krugman’s post looks at two alternative scenarios:

Case 1: The government runs a deficit, selling bonds to offset the shortfall, while the Federal Reserve does QE

Case 2: The government runs a deficit but does not sell bonds, instead financing all of its spending by “printing money” (i.e. with newly created base money)

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