My talk at the “ ‘Economics With Justice” seminar series at the The School of Economic Science in Mandeville Place, London. I cover where the argument for austerity came from, a thought experiment about what will happen when a government runs a sustained surplus, and a model showing what happens when the government does run a surplus.
These are two lectures on endogenous money in macroeconomics from the Kingston University Political Economy Masters module “Economic Change and Ideas”, which I gave yesterday (Friday March 6th). I will wait till next year before posting the entire lecture series, since I’m giving them for the first time this year and they are a bit rough. But one student couldn’t make yesterday, and I had two lectures in one day to make up for my absence next week when I’m attending my niece’s wedding in Sydney. So these are posted for my absent student and anyone else who is interested.
These should be two of the easiest questions to answer in economics; after all, money is the one thing that we all use in an economy—surely we know what it is, and where it comes from?
I was interviewed by George Galloway on his show Sputnik about the HSBC scandal, and banking scandals in general. Click here to see the show, or watch it below on YouTube:
I was invited by the Rethinking Economics student association at the London School of Economics to give a talk about Greece, Austerity, Post Keynesian Economics and anticipating the crisis. There was an excellent audience of around 150 for the talk, and a good discussion afterwards: the students there are keen (pardon the pun) to learn about non-Neoclassical approaches to economics, which are taught at Kingston University, but which they said they do not learn from their courses at the LSE itself.
I was interviewed last night on the BBC News Channel about the Greek crisis. Negotiations today seem to have bought some breathing space, but the issues raised here will now become dominant. Having garnered a 4 month extension and time to redefine the macroeconomic aspects of the EU package, Syriza will now have to carry the day with its constituency and political rivals back in Greece.
A Twitter correspondent pointed out a simple fact that makes Schäuble’s inflexibility in negotiations with Varoufakis explicable: though he is a Minister of Finance, his PhD is in law.
So is he implicitly approaching these negotiations as a lawyer would? Because from that point of view, what the Greeks are trying to do is to renege on a contract.
A quick quiz: which four countries do you think have done the most to reform their economies over the last seven years?
OK, who said Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain?
No one?
Actually, someone did: the OECD.
The contrast today between Europe—the subject of my first few posts on Forbes—and the USA could not be more extreme. The crisis, when it began in 2007/08, was seen initially as a purely American phenomenon—and by some, proof that the deregulated American(and more generally, the Anglo-Saxon) model of capitalism had failed, while Europe’s more collectivist version was still going strong.
One of the most voluble putting that argument was then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who asserted that the crisis proved that the American deregulated version of finance was kaput:
“A page has been turned,” he said, on the “Anglo Saxon” financial model.
