Daily Archives: August 10, 2016

An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton about Pragmatism in 2016

June Carbone
Robina Chair in Law, Science and Technology, U. Minn. Law School
August 10, 2016     Bloomington, MN

I like Hillary.  Would I like to have a mimosa with her?  Wrong question.  I suspect that that neither she nor I have much interest in partying during the mimosa part of the day.   Indeed, I suspect that no woman who meets the mimosa test would run for President or be elected if she did.  Instead, for me, a detail oriented policy wonk, the more relevant question is whether I would find a discussion of political strategy to be exhilarating.  And in spite of the fact that I have supported Hillary for the last thirty years (since I was thrilled to discover that someone who had worked for the Children’s Defense Fund was running for Yale Alumni Trustee) and went out of my way to stick up for her over Bernie Sanders in the Minnesota caucuses, I still have no idea whether she sees the issues – the defining issues of our day – in the same terms that I do.

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Minsky Meets Brazil

By Felipe Rezende

Part I

This series will discuss at length the underlying forces behind Brazil’s current crisis.

A consensus has emerged in Brazil (and elsewhere) blaming Rousseff’s “new economic matrix” policies for the country’s worst crisis since the Great Depression (see here, here, here, here, and here).  With the introduction of policy stimulus through ad hoc tax breaks for selected sectors seen as a failure to boost economic activity and the deterioration of the fiscal balance – which posted a public sector primary budget deficit in 2014 after fifteen years of primary fiscal surpluses – opponents argued that that government intervention was the problem. It provided the basis for the opposition to demand the return of the old neoliberal macroeconomic policy tripod and fiscal austerity policies. There was virtually a consensus that spending cuts would create confidence, reduce interest rates, and stimulate private investment spending. Fiscal austerity, according to this view, would be expansionary and pave the way for economic growth.

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Thomas Friedman: This Time is Different: Deregulation Makes Banking Safe

(3d column in my series on Friedman advising Hillary to Move Hard Right)

William K. Black
August 8, 2016     Bloomington, MN

In this column I focus on Thomas Friedman’s plea that Hillary Clinton embrace deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization (the three “de’s”) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as a “knock-out” political strategy against Donald Trump and as a means to produce dramatic economic growth and financial stability.  He claims that embracing the three “de’s” and the TPP creates an “open system.”

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