{*Sorry, I couldn’t resist. As many of NEP’s readers know, Michael Hudson has long advanced the argument that America’s policymakers have purposely created Bubbleonia—NOT to generate growth but rather to enrich the thieves at the top. And many of you are familiar with the work of Geoffrey Ingham—a fellow Chartalist traveler—who has focused on J.M. Keynes’s “Babylonian madness”, the period after Keynes had discovered the writings of A.Mitchell Innes that led him to explore the origins of money in Babylonia. Hudson is also a scholar of that period. Alvin Hansen reintroduced the thesis of secular stagnation, giving it a Keynesian flavor.}
Larry Summers has made a big splash by (finally) recognizing that the US has had a series of financial bubbles. (See here.) Duh! Who wudduv thought? The Reagan years were just a bubble, driven by thrift excesses. The Clinton years were just a bubble, driven by dot-com excesses. And the most recent real estate boom and bust was just a bubble, driven by Wall Street’s thieving Investment Banks. Bubbles-R-US. It’s all we’ve got going on.
