Massachusetts 1690: The First Western Fiat Experiment
byBy Joshua Mawhorter This first experiment with government-issued bills of credit presents a natural historical test case for Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), particularly its…
What causes stagflation?
byBy Dr Frank Shostak In the late 1960’s Edmund Phelps and Milton Friedman (PF) challenged the popular view that there can be a sustainable…
Emerging Markets Soar While Argentina Waits
byBy Alejandro A. Tagliavini The weekly commentary from BlackRock—the world’s largest asset manager and investment firm, with over $12.5 trillion in assets—published on February 9,…
Speech and Panel Discussion on Brussels Bureaucracy
byA couple of weeks ago I gave this speech on EU bureaucracy, followed by a panel discussion at the Martens Centre think tank in…
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
by“Perhaps in his choice for Fed chairman, President Trump should have nominated David Copperfield instead.” “The stock market is the only market where things…
How People Keep the World Economy Running
byWhen institutions strain, behaviour adjusts. By Elias Sanchez Despite rising public debt, intensifying fiscal extraction, recurrent economic shocks, and heightened trade and policy uncertainty,…
The Delusions and Dangers of the New Mercantilism
byMore than 150 years ago, the noted British political economist and one-time editor-in-chief of The Economist magazine, Walter Bagehot (1826–1877), observed in an essay entitled “The…
Making sense of historical data
byBy Dr Frank Shostak In order to make the data “talk,” economists utilize a range of statistical methods that vary from highly complex models…
Defining Money
byMany modern economists struggle to define money. Often beginning with an historical overview of the concept of moneyness, they generally end by describing the…
Inflation: A Dirty Word for “Accommodation”
byBy George Ford Smith As a “stealth tax,” inflation requires no legislation to impose, no agency to collect, and diverts responsibility for damages onto politicians’…