In 2011, Leo Panitch wrote a piece, The Left’s Crisis, examining the Left’s response to the present crisis. He noted the Left’s response could be broken into two types: “irresponsible” and “fundamentally misleading”. In the irresponsible group, he puts those who called on Washington to let the banks fail, which, [...]

Based on what I have described of Bernanke’s policy failure so far, is it possible to predict anything about the future results of an open ended purchase of financial assets under QE3? I think so, and I share why in this last part of this series. Author: Jehu Eaves Visit [...]

I stopped my examination of Bernanke’s approach to this crisis and the problem of deflation after looking at his 1991 paper and his speech in 2002. I now want to return to that series, examining two of his speeches this to discuss the problems confronting bourgeois monetary policy in the [...]

The world market had been shaken by a series of financial crises, and the economy of Japan had fallen into a persistent deflationary state, When Ben Bernanke gave his 2002 speech before the National Economists Club, “Deflation: Making Sure “It” Doesn’t Happen Here”. Bernanke was going to explain to his [...]

So I am spending a week or so trying to understand Ben Bernanke’s approach to this crisis based on three sources from his works. In this part, the source is an essay published in 1991: “The Gold Standard, Deflation, and Financial Crisis in the Great Depression: An International Comparison”. In [...]

!Quelle Surprise! Like Greece and Spain before it, the UK finds austerity can only result in more austerity: U.K. Tories to Press Ahead With $16 Billion of Welfare Cuts The Conservative Party will press ahead with plans to cut 10 billion pounds ($16 billion) from the welfare budget and reduce [...]

Here is an interesting chart from Zero Hedge: In data going back to 1980, employment for younger workers aged 20-24 has never increased in the month of September — that is, it has never increased until this year: I know what you are thinking: the data provided by Washington is [...]

So, I got feedback from three people who, in one way or another, say they don’t understand my last post on my conversation with Andrew Kliman. One person posting on Reddit, complained it was too dense; another wondered if I was advocating a return to the gold standard; a third [...]

Well, I have just about had enough of my conversation with The Andrew Kliman, so I thought I would try to assess what it accomplished, instead. My ‘tin-ear’ with Andrew began after a conversation with @skepoet on twitter about the odd divergence between gold and dollar measures of economic activity [...]

(Or, more importantly, why should anarchists, libertarians and Marxists be as well) So, has any reader of this blog heard that economists have conceded Marx was right after all? Have you at any time during the past 40 years heard an economist admit that Marx was correct in his transformation [...]

In my previous post, I stated: In reality, there was nothing in Bohm-Bawerk’s argument to be disproved. Bohm-Bawerk had indeed cited the essential contradiction at the core of capitalism. His problem, however, was to imagine the contradiction to be a defect of Marx’s theory, and not a fatal flaw laying [...]

In the previous blog post, I argued that in each of the three great capitalist catastrophes of the 19th and 20th Centuries — the Long Depression, the Great Depression and the Great Stagflation — economists scurried to bone up on Marx in an effort to understand practical problems of state [...]

I’m reading, “The Transformation Problem: A Tale of Two Interpretations”, by David Bieri. According to his profile, David studied economics at the London School of Economics and international finance at the University of Durham (UK). In 2006, he started his Ph.D. studies in SPIA. From 1999 until 2006, David held [...]

A quick note to slap down the standard progressive interpretation of the impact of the Bush tax cuts on the economy. Sorry folks, there is no real empirical support for your position. Progressives who praise the Clinton era job creation performance versus Bush era job creation performance, and link this [...]

This is my final installment on the hyperinflationists section of theories of the current crisis for now. As I find in any good examination of a theory out there, I come away from this one with a better understanding of some of the problems of capitalism under conditions of absolute [...]