Every crisis reveals unexpected consequences of economic policies. The current euro crisis should be no exception. As European Union governments search for a solution, there are already a number of lessons to be learned. Senior Scholar Jan Kregel outlines the top six.

As the results of the various official investigations spread, it becomes more and more apparent that a large majority of financial institutions engaged in fraudulent manipulation of the benchmark London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) to their own advantage, and that bank management and...

The job guarantee is a proposal that provides greater macroeconomic stability and secures a fundamental human right. Despite the economic and moral merits of this policy, often the program is rejected because of concerns about its administration. How would the program be implemented? Who will...

This "Modest Proposal" by authors Varoufakis and Holland outlines a three-pronged, comprehensive solution to the eurozone crisis that simultaneously addresses the three main dimensions of the current crisis in the eurozone (sovereign debt, banking, and underinvestment), restructures both a share...

Although it didn't originate with an economist, the malaprop "It's deja vu all over again" is invariably what springs to mind in the aftermath of virtually any euro summit of the past few years, all of which seem to end with the requisite promise of a so-called "final solution" to the problems...

The European Union (EU) is a treaty-based organization that was set up after World War II as a means of putting an end to a favorite practice of the Europeans: sorting out their national differences by engaging in bloody warfare. The European experiment—the formation of a Common Market,...

Monetary policy is running out of gas. Six years ago, in the heat of crisis, the Federal Reserve's response was awesome. The Fed created trillions of dollars and flooded the system with easy money--enough to stabilize financial markets and rescue wounded banks. It brought short-term interest...

In the late 1990s low unemployment rates, increases in the minimum wage, and improvements in labor productivity contributed to a boost in wages, which translated into 12.4 percent cumulative growth in real wages from the late '90s until 2002. Real wages then stagnated despite continued growth in...

In a recent policy note (A Decade of Flat Wages?) we examined wage trends since 1994, and found that while wages grew between 1994 and 2002, average real wages stagnated or declined after 2002-03. Our latest study provides a more detailed analysis of wage trends for wage-level, age, and...

In the postwar period, with every subsequent expansion, a smaller and smaller share of the gains in income growth have gone to the bottom 90 percent of families. Worse, in the latest expansion, while the economy has grown and average real income has recovered from its 2008 lows, all of the...