Mainstream economists are mystified why wages/salaries are still stagnant after 7+ years of growth / “recovery.” The conventional view is that wages should be rising as the labor market tightens (i.e. the unemployment rate is low) and demand for workers…
The Keynesian gods have failed, and as a result we’re in the eye of a global financial hurricane. The Keynesian god of growth has failed. The Keynesian god of borrowing from the future to fund today’s consumption has failed. The…
Is anyone else fed up with the Federal Reserve? To paraphrase Irving Fisher’s famous quote about the stock market just before it crashed in 1929, we’ve reached a permanently high plateau of Fed mismanagement, Fed worship and Fed failure. The…
A number of systemic, structural forces are intersecting in 2016. One is the failure of high finance to fix the global economy’s systemic problems. The operative conceit of the past 7 years has been that high finance can fix whatever’s…
Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote that Hell is other people. While this is undoubtedly true in cocktail party and workplace settings, in socioeconomic terms,Hell is a scarcity of positive social roles–the sources of positive identity, pride, purpose, community and meaning. Since…
Blowing speculative bubbles cannot possibly lead to organic growth because speculative bubbles fatally undermine the real economy. An astute reader recently posed an insightful question: we all know who benefits from asset bubbles in stocks, bonds and real estate–owners of…