This paper provides a simple model of deleveraging that surfaces the contradictions inherent in neoliberal financialization and explains the pattern of US business cycles over the past thirty years. Deleveraging involves a two step correction. The first step is when a borrowing boom ends. The...

This paper explores the macroeconomics of fiscal austerity. A binding budget deficit cap makes the economy more volatile by turning the government budget into an automatic destabilizer. Public debt helps maintain aggregate demand (AD) in the presence of a lower price level because a lower price...

Gattopardo constitutes change that keeps things the same. Gattopardo is relevant for understanding the economics profession's response to the financial crash of 2008. This paper explores gattopardo economics as it applies to the issues of the macroeconomics of income distribution; the global...

This paper explores and contrasts the revised Bretton Woods hypothesis (BW II) with the structural Keynesian hypothesis. Whereas the former sees the growing global imbalances of the 3 decades prior to the financial crisis of 2008 as beneficial, the latter sees them as problematic and destructive...

Federal Reserve Chairman William McChesney Martin famously declared that the Federal Reserve 'is in the position of the chaperone who has ordered the punch bowl removed just when the party was really warming up.' This paper uses the punch bowl metaphor to analyse how the Federal Reserve can...

The conventional wisdom is that there have been two globalizations in the modern era. The first began around 1870 and ended in 1914. The second began in 1945 and is still under way. This paper challenges that view and argues that there have been three globalizations, not two. The first half of...

Financialization is a process whereby financial markets, financial institutions and financial elites gain greater influence over economic policy and economic outcomes. Financialization transforms the functioning of economic system at both the macro and micro levels. Its principal impacts are to...

Over the last several years debate over monetary policy has focused on two issues, inflation targeting and asset price bubbles. This paper explores the case for explicitly targeting asset price bubbles, a policy that the Federal Reserve Bank has opposed on the grounds that it is both infeasible...