This paper briefly summarizes the orthodox approach to banking, finance, and money, and then points the way toward an alternative based on socioeconomics. It argues that the alternative approach is better fitted to not only the historical record, but also sheds more light on the nature of money...

The U.S. fiscal imbalance — the excess of what we expect to spend, including repayment of our debt, over what government expects to receive in revenue — is large and growing. And with politicians proposing large new expenditures, little is being done to rectify the country's fiscal health....

The U.S. fiscal cliff has sparked renewed interest on the issue of fiscal sustainability. Using a time-varying parameter model with a longer data set (1916-2011), there is evidence that the response of primary surplus-income ratio to debt-GDP ratio shows (1) substantial variation over time, (2)...

The paper examines the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy, finding substantial evidence in favor. I summarize the U.S. fiscal record from 1792-2003, critically review sustainability conditions and their testable implications, and apply them to U.S. data. I particularly emphasize the...

In this paper, we investigate the consequences of the rise in educational attainment on the US generational accounts. We build on the 1995 accounts of Gokhale et al. (1999) and disaggregate them per schooling level. We show that low skill newborns are characterized by a negative generational...

In this paper, we compare the total size of intertemporal public liabilities (IPLs) of several European countries and the United States. We utilize the machinery of generational accounting in order to calculate the composition of the countries IPLs, that is the sum of the explicit and implicit...

This paper analyzes the causes and implications of recent financial crises. Financial crises in general lead to changes in both theory and practice of economics. The paper takes an historical overview. The global consensus of economic theory during the 20th century is discussed. The paper...

This paper provides an overview of the evolution of macroeconomic thought from 1936, the year John Maynard Keynes published his general theory of employment, interest and money to the year 2010. It explores the reasons for the extension of the business cycle during the postwar period. The paper...

In various writings Karl Marx made references to an ‘aristocracy of finance’ in Western Europe and the United States that dominated ownership of the public debt. Drawing on original research, this paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of the pattern of public debt ownership within...

The policy focus on excessive leverage in the euro area has raised interest in developing comprehensive analytical approaches to better understand the interrelationship between leverage and deleveraging processes across economic agents. In particular, the interplay between government debt and...