The welfare state was created after 1950 with counterproductive mechanisms and this caused high inflation and high unemployment and stagnating growth by 1970, called stagflation. Since 1970 governments redressed the welfare state but did not succeed in finding workable mechanisms. They rather...

(1) The basic problem in OECD countries is the tax void. (2) A tax system with an exemption is more transparant than a system with a tax credit. (3) Exemption should be at the level of the net minimum wage so that such workers can work at net = gross. (4) A tax credit is a sufficient but not a...

We focus on four previous systemic financial crises that the United States has experienced since 1870. These include the crisis of 1873 (called the Great Depression until the 1930s), the 1893 crisis, the panic of 1907, and the Great Depression. Given that all of the earlier crises predate the...

This paper focuses on some of the macroeconomic risks that lie ahead for Latin America. The discussion is informed by my work on crises and capital flows and their macroeconomic consequences. The trends and initial conditions that allowed the region to weather the global economic storm of...

Protracted expansionary monetary policies in advanced countries have renewed the debate over policy options to cope with large capital inflows that drive credit expansions in emerging economies. In a forthcoming paper, we show that during capital inflow bonanzas credit grows more rapidly and its...

A win-win measure that will contribute to getting us out of the crisis is the abolition of the tax void in OECD countries. The tax void is explained with graphics and it is shown how it can be eliminated for free. Adjustment costs will lie in understanding and adaptation of administrative...

The current macro-economic crisis can be diagnosed as repressed stagflation bursting into the open. The Obama Administration and EU stimulus packages prevent economic collapse but do not tackle stagflation itself yet. Without proper measures, a protracted period of high unemployment or high...

The financial crisis that erupted in 2007, continues in 2008 and likely continues longer, is in need for explanation by economic theory. The monetary authorities and financial regulators provide us with piecemeal engineering on the fly but there is a lack of overview. The lack of convincing...

The "traditional structural approach" to determining real commodity prices has relied exclusively on demand factors as the fundamentals that explain commodity prices. This framework, however, has been unable to explain the sustained weakness in commodity prices in the 1980s and 1990s. This paper...

This paper represents a neoclassical model that explains the observed empirical relationship between government spending and world commodity supplies and the real exchange rate and real commodity prices. It is shown that fiscal expansion and increasing world commodity supplies simultaneously...