The Spanish crisis is generally portrayed as resulting from excessive spending by households, associated with a housing bubble and/or excessive welfare spending beyond the economic possibilities of the country. We put forward a different hypothesis. We argue that the Spanish crisis resulted, in...

Conventional wisdom suggests that the European debt crisis, which has thus far led to severe adjustment programs crafted by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in both Greece and Ireland, was caused by fiscal profligacy on the part of peripheral, or noncore, countries in...

Conventional wisdom about the business cycle in Latin America assumes that monetary shocks cause deviations from the optimal path, and that the triggering factor in the cycle is excess credit and liquidity. Further, in this view the origin of the contraction is ultimately related to the excesses...

Post Keynesian (PK) growth models typically fail to model unemployment. That shows up in the absence of any equilibrium condition requiring the growth of employment equal effective labor supply growth. Consequently, the models can have an imploding or exploding unemployment rate. The underlying...

Romer (2000) provides an alternative model to the AS/AD and IS/LM models that abandons the LM schedule by having the short-term interest rate set by the central bank. His framework acknowledges the critical role of the central bank in determining short-term interest rates, which moves mainstream...

The current economic crisis offers an historic opportunity for change. The depth of the crisis means there will likely be a policy turn in a Keynesian and even Post Keynesian direction. However, there are profound political, intellectual and sociological obstacles blocking change in underlying...