Is the high level of debt a major economic risk factor?
byBy Dr Frank Shostak According to the British newspaper Daily Mail from February 8 2024 the US debt bomb is on the verge of…
Economics
The Death of Easy Money Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
byReports on the death of the present cycle of politically motivated monetary easing, in the words of Mark Twain, grossly exaggerated. Contemporary market analyses…
Why Americans Do Not See a Strong Economy
byThe euphoria with the fourth quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figure makes no sense. The headline champions say that real GDP increased at an annual rate…
Fiscal Rules Do Not Undermine Investment, But Government Profligacy Does
byTo prevent public debt from soaring in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2009, Germany has enshrined a “debt brake” in its…
Bank Crises and the Interventionist Spiral
bySilvergate Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic Bank fell like dominos in March–April 2023. The United States Treasury, Federal Reserve, and…
Can sophisticated technology prevent severe economic slump?
byBy Dr Frank Shostak According to the 2018 Nobel Prize winner in economics, Paul Romer, the technical knowledge that spills over into the creation…
With a Soft Landing Looking Likely, the Dollar Falls on the CFR Mini Mac Index
byby Benn Steil and Elisabeth Harding The “law of one price” holds that identical goods should trade for the same price in an efficient…
Unbreakable Union: Lessons Learned from the Demise of the Soviet Union
by[This week marks the one-year anniversary of the death of Yuri Maltsev. Dr. Maltsev had been an economist in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev,…
Milton Friedman’s guitar string boom-bust model
byBy Dr Frank Shostak Some economists are of the view that it is possible to enhance our understanding of the facts of reality by…
What is a “Fed Pivot,” And When Is It Likely to Happen?
byBy Mark Thornton Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome “Jay” Powell, recently sent mysterious shock waves into financial markets with comments that suggested that…