kingaj12

Book Review: Where Keynes Went Wrong, by Hunter Lewis

Glad you admit you hadn't read Keynes. It is honest, but it does remove some of the authority from your review. For example, the "quotes" you summarize are taken way out of context.

Please do read Keynes "Theory of Employment...". It is well worth it. It contains the thoughts of a very smart person trying to make some sense of the Great Depression. Most of what people say when they talk about Keynesianism is far beneath the calibre of his thinking.

Keynes probably would not have subscribed to all of what was done in his name. Yes he is arrogant. But it is possible to discern in his writing that he viewed his work as a partial attempt to explain the prolonged unemployment and underconsumption of the Great Depression and to outline the best approaches to deal with it.

I believe he explicitly says that it is unlikely that governments will spend money wisely. But during an extreme deflationary period he concludes that there may be no effective policy choices other than to expand the public debt and create public works.

I have yet to read anything substantial from the Austrian School that gives an explanation of simultaneous presence of underconsumption and unemployment for a length of time approaching a decade.

The Puzzles of U.S. Political Economy Today

Basically we need programs that will spend enough money fast enough and have a high probability of getting something useful at the end.

The technical school system in Germany has always impressed me, although I don't know much about it. Would a national program to establish high-technology training for non-college goers spend enough money fast enough? Even just equipping some of those furniture engineering labs I saw in Germany would be a huge boost to the machine tools industry.

The Puzzles of U.S. Political Economy Today

Brad -

I think it is just that the chattering classes are having a hard time reacting to what needs to be done when the banking system blows up.

After all, a big government that spends money on entrenched clients (defense industries, investment banks) is fine and dandy. But once that big government runs out of clients to spend money on -- then what? Spending money to help ordinary folks with jobs, health care and affordable housing is a bit too much of a U-turn for this country's governing consensus.

Dear Fed: The Problem is Solvency, Not Liquidity

Seems to me that liquidity crisis comes first and is dealt with, then the solvency crisis unwinds.

What does this article say? What is a "solvency" policy?

What if World Governments Had Washed Their Hands of the Financial Crisis?

Following Soros' well made points on radical fallibility, we must assume that it is highly unlikely that we have got all of the most important things right. The things we can't know (closed systems) are likely to be the source of the next trouble.

The best we can do is to insist on more transparency into the most strategic parts of the economy. It would be good to know that someone is watching balance sheets of systemically important institutions, for example, so that all the liquidity generated by new taxpayer debt doesn't just go into building the next unproductive bubble (USD carry trade anyone?).

Wouldn't it be nice to know that of all our precious new debt some of it was funding something important -- like new energy sources?

The Mystery Behind the Parabolic Yield Curve

Time for a bankcor, anyone?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...