Cryptocurrency – more fiat than ‘Fiat’ I have previously written about Bitcoin, explaining why I don’t believe it has any future as a replacement for so-called ‘fiat’ currencies. There are various reasons I cited for this, the most important being that actual state-backed currencies are not ‘fiat’ at all. They are not given value simply […]
The UK’s Public Service Crisis There is a crisis in public services in the UK. This is longstanding but has been cruelly exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This crisis is affecting education, legal services, social support and social care, but it is most obvious and most disturbing in the provision of healthcare. Emergency services are […]
What do we know about Labour’s economic approach under Keir Starmer? In his Fabian Society pamphlet ‘The Road Ahead’, and in his Labour Conference speech we are beginning to get some clues to the Economics of Starmerism. So can he rise above the prevailing ‘mediamacro’ economic fallacies so dear to the mainstream media and the […]
IS-LM and MMT The core issue at the heart of debates between the heterodox Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) approach and more mainstream macroeconomics is how the financial economy and the real economy interact. As a consequence we see Keynesians of various hues attempting to illustrate their response to MMT with the standard orthodox Keynesian IS-LM […]
Last year a strange bit of ‘neoliberal’ propaganda surfaced in the New Scientist of all places. In what purported to be a report of recent research, Washington University psychologist Pascal Boyer has written of how the ‘human mind is designed to misunderstand the mass-market economies we have created’. He says ‘evidence from psychology and anthropology…reveals […]
Canadian economist and central banker David Andolfatto recently constructed a model intended to ‘reconcile’ (or I think more accurately to distinguish between) ‘mainstream’ and ‘heterodox’ views of the macroeconomic importance of money and banking. More specifically, he wants to answer the question: does the ability of banks to ‘create money’ when they issue loans give […]
Ann Pettifor is a director of Prime Economics, which advocates for a more Keynesian view of macroeconomics, and has been involved in development and environmental economics for many years. In The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of the Bankers (Verso, 2017) she correctly identifies that ‘money enables us to do what we can […]
Why do I consider myself to be of the ‘left’ rather than the ‘right’, despite the tendency for each term to be converted to a straw-man for all the pet hates of those attaching to the opposing label? For me, to be of the left designates a prioritisation of co-operation over competition. It is to […]
Launched in 2009, and of wider interest since 2013, the ‘cryptocurrency’ Bitcoin has seen both a rise in its value in relation to existing national and supranational currencies, and in the discussion of its forming a partial or even complete replacement to those currencies. This article outlines the nature of Bitcoin and of traditional currencies […]
Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century”, published in 2014, played an important role in directing attention to the issue of inequality in the developed economies of the 21st century. The book was both praised and criticised from many parts of the political and economic spectrum. Least controversial was his laying out of the evidence […]