During times of economic crises, the public policy response is to abandon basic economic thinking and engage in ‘emergency economic’ policies. We explore how the current financial crisis was in part caused by previous emergency economic measures. We then investigate the theoretical...

Mainstream macroeconomic theory understands the economy as a phenomenon tractable by analysis adequately enough to be manageable by macroeconomic policy guided by this analysis. We explore why this epistemological approach of the economy has remained dominant in mainstream economics despite...

Implicit in monetary models and policy prescriptions is the assumption that the Fed is independent of political and bureaucratic influence. We challenge this assumption. We consider three channels through which the independence of the Fed has been compromised over its 100-year history; debt...