Daily Archives: May 13, 2015

Fundamentals: Automatic Stabilizers and “Clinton’s Surplus”

The latest in a series of class project videos from Eric Tymoigne’s upper division Modern Money Theory class at Lewis and Clark College. Over the next several days, we will be posting  select videos created by his most recent class. Eric has created a YouTube channel to be the home of MMT videos created by L&C students. You can check it out here.

New Labour Leaders Want to Go Back to Blair’s Policies that Blew Up the UK

By William K. Black
Quito: May 13, 2015

Given the media effort and the push by the Red Tories to lionize former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair I thought it was a good idea to explain just how destructive his war on financial regulation, supervision, enforcement, and prosecutions was. Blair most famously made public his war on regulation and his embrace of “winning” the regulatory race to the bottom in his May 26, 2005 speech on “Risk and the State.” In a classic example of “be careful what you ask for; for you may receive it,” he called on his Nation to embrace greater risk. He claimed that the public’s excessive aversion to risk produced a regulatory nightmare: “The result is a plethora of rules, guidelines, responses to ‘scandals’ of one nature or another that ends up having utterly perverse consequences.” Blair endorsed the Chicago School (and Tory) analysis of the folly of regulation – claiming that it characteristically produces “utterly perverse consequences.”

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