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Recently, the Levy Institute, the think-tank centre for post-Keynesian economics (and in particular the theories of Hyman Minsky, the radical Keynesian economist of the 1980s), published a short vi…
In this last part of my review of ASSA 2020, I want to cover some other issues discussed at ASSA, especially one big issue: the economics of climate change; and finally, look at the papers in the s…
Robyn Allan dug into the megaproject’s economics and says it’s already losing money.
The other big debate among mainstream economists at ASSA 2020 was over whether the major capitalist economies are stuck in a long period of ‘secular stagnation’ and what to do about it. Top econom…
ASSA 2020 is the annual conference of the American Economics Association, which brings together all the various economics associations in America. This year’s conference in San Diego, California wa…
The United States engaged in roughly $608 billion worth of research and development in 2018. That figure includes R&D by all entities in the US, from universities to private and public corporations. During the same year, corporations in the S&P 500 spent $806 billion buying back their own stock. In other words, the 500 largest companies in the US are now spending 33% more on their stock buyback programs than the entire country is investing in R&D. Cumulatively, buybacks have now outpaced R&D investment for the last five years. From 2014 through 2018, total R&D investment in the US was roughly $2.736 trillion whereas S&P 500 buybacks totaled $2.978 trillion.
The company is developing financial services that have the potential to force drivers to keep working long past their breaking point
One of the first priorities of the newly re-elected federal Liberal government is a $6 billion personal income tax cut. The Liberals and Conservatives campaigned on similar promises, but the Liberals claimed their cut was more progressive. No matter how you slice it, cutting taxes reduces the amount of money available to provide services, and this specific tax cut goes mostly to higher income earners. There’s nothing progressive about that.
The fantasy world continues. In the US and Europe, stock market index levels are hitting new all-time highs. Bond prices are also near all-time highs. Investment in both stocks and bonds are del…
The bottom line: Opposition to higher minimum wage laws is increasingly based in ideology and orthodoxy rather than real-world evidence, economists say.
“There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a scien…
At the Historical Materialism conference, the Saturday discussion between Professor David Harvey and myself on Marx’s double-edge law attracted more than 250 people. Sunday’s session on the econom…
This year’s Historical Materialism (HM) conference in London was apparently attended by over 850 people with some 400-plus papers presented over three days. HM brings together radical and Marxist …
The mayors of Oakland, Sacramento and more than a dozen other California municipalities are joining San Jose in a campaign to buy out the investor-owned PG&E and turn it into a giant customer-owned cooperative.
Every year, I look at measuring the US rate of profit a la Marx. Official data are now available in order to update the measurement for 2018 (not 2019 yet!). As usual, if you wish to replicate my …
The Triumph of Injustice: how the rich dodge taxes and how to make them pay is a new book by the inequality experts, Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez. It’s a searing indictment of American tax syst…
Paul Krugman and other mainstream trade experts are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization: It hurt American workers far more than they thought…
Those who praise the post-2008 economy as a successful recovery point to the fact that the stock market has soared to all-time highs, while the unemployment rate has fallen to a decade-low. But is the stock market a good proxy for how the overall economy is doing? The low reported unemployment rate sidesteps the predominance of minimum-wage jobs, part-time “gig” work, and the fact that the Federal Reserve’s Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2018 reports that 39% of Americans do not have $400 cash available for a medical or other emergency, and that a quarter of adults skipped medical care in 2018 because they could not afford it.
The annual Credit Suisse report on global wealth has just been released. This report remains the most comprehensive and explanatory analysis of global wealth (not income) and inequality of wealth. …