八卦爆料

Phenomenal World

NY Times (12/1/2024) & Rolling Stone (12/3/2024)

NBER: Concentrating Intelligence: Scaling and Market Structure in Artificial Intelligence

Sen. Markey’s “Steward Healthcare Report” Washington Post

INET is very happy to congratulate this year鈥檚 winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics: Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson.

Smart Energy

鈥�…the prohibition on negotiating price was kind of a poison pill in the original Medicare Act.鈥�

New INET Governing Board Member Announcement

Subcommittee hearing: When Health Care Becomes Wealth Care: How Corporate Greed Puts Patient Care and Health Workers at Risk

“Failed at free enterprise? Well, try industrial policy, China style”

The Gender Pay Gap: Micro Sources and Macro Consequences

London Review of Books

Peter Coy, in an OpEd for the New York Times, cited Servaas Storm鈥檚 INET working paper criticizing Bernanke and Blanchard鈥檚 inflation explanation.

A Rolling Stone article by Andrew Perez cited Fred Ledley鈥檚 INET working paper on the NIH seed funding of pharmaceuticals.

The media coverage of the INET team’s February 2024 visit to India. Prof. Michael Spence, Chair of the Commission on Global Economic Transformation (CGET), along with INET Governing Board Chair Dr. Rohinton Medhora, and INET President Dr. Rob Johnson, took part in this visit.

Business Insider quotes and cites William Lazonick鈥檚 INET-funded research on Boeing鈥檚 stock buybacks. Cross-posted in MSN, Yahoo Finance, Business News, AOL, News Break, Star News, and Web Today.

The Economic Times quotes Rob Johnson鈥檚 presentation at the Global Business Summit in India. Cross posted in Pune Media and BM Business News

Times Now News features and quotes Rob Johnson鈥檚 presentation at the Global Business Summit in India.

The White House cited Ledley鈥檚 INET working paper on the NIH鈥檚 seed funding of FDA approved pharmaceuticals in their fact sheet on new actions to lower health care and prescription drug costs.

New INET Governing Board Member Announcement

Lynn Parramore鈥檚 INET interview with Chanos is suggested reading in the FT, and has been cross-posted or summarized in the following media outlets: Naked Capitalism, MSN, Yahoo, Business Insider, AOL, Markets Insider, Latest Finance, Trade for Profit, Tech Telegraph, Best Stocks, Motor Mouth, Trading View India, Trading View, Benzinga, Hataf News, Forex TV, Business News and WN.

Washington Monthly

The Atlantic

We heartily congratulate her on receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics.

New INET Governing Board Member Announcement

INET-funded study: Government provides early investment in pharmaceutical innovation

Ferguson et al.’s revised INET working paper on Trump and the 2016 election is temporarily available on open access from the International Journal of Political Economy.

The economist Herman Daly passed away on October 28, 2022. Read one of the last interviews he gave.

Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond, and Philip Dybvig were honored for their work on financial instability

Medhora has served on INET鈥檚 Board since 2012 and is a distinguished fellow and former president of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).

Michael Grubb appears on BBC Panorama to discuss his INET research on European energy markets

Rob Johnson joins Background Briefing with Ian Masters to discuss public concern about inflation

Ekaterina Cleary, Matthew Jackson and Fred Ledley’s INET research on government innovation in pharmaceuticals was cited in The American Prospect

Michael Greenberg’s INET working paper on derivatives regulation is featured in Salon

INET Fellow Moritz Schularick writes in The Economist that Germany should immediately cut off Russain gas

Lynn Parramore discusses her INET article on neoliberalism and mental health with The Healthcare Policy Podcast

Lynn Parramore’s INET article is cited in The New Republic

The Daily Poster cites INET research on stock buybacks

Nicholas Mangee, associate professor of finance in the Parker College of Business at Georgia Southern University, begins How Novelty and Narratives Drive the Stock Market with a statement that encompasses the problem he tackles and the compelling reason for investor interest in the new-style thinking that addresses it. This detailed stock market study attempts to extend Nobel Prize-winner Robert Shiller’s development of narrative economics, albeit Mangee’s focus is on novelty information embedded in textual news narratives. Using a set of text-based indices to capture the uncertainty and ambiguity in unscheduled news, Mangee measures the impact of news narratives on equity behavior.

鈥淲hat is the motivation for tax avoidance? To maximize profits and juice the stock price, of course. A research team led by William Lazonick at the University of Massachusetts reports in Harvard Business Review that from 2009 to 2019, S&P 500 companies spent over 90% of net income on buybacks and dividends, with the highest levels achieved after the 2017 tax cuts, in 2018 and 2019. Taking on corporate debt to finance share repurchases has become commonplace. Never mind that share buybacks deplete corporate treasuries of cash to weather setbacks and to fund productive investment in labor and R&D.鈥�

The 八卦爆料 (INET) and the Open Society Foundations (OSF) announced that OSF has made a gift of $23.5 million to INET. The grant marks the completion of the organizations鈥� 12-year collaboration.

鈥淣obody but those top corporate executives was really paying attention to share buybacks until the middle of the last decade, when University of Massachusetts economist William Lazonick wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review documenting the surprising and depressing fact that the companies that had belonged to the Fortune 500 during the previous decade had spent so much on share buybacks and dividends that the total was either equal to or actually exceeded their profits.鈥�

Paul Krugman links to INET article

鈥淭he most recent study, using sophisticated AI techniques, dispels 鈥渘otions that anyone鈥檚 opinion about public policy outside of the top 10 percent of affluent Americans independently helps to explain policy.鈥� Thomas Ferguson, the leading academic scholar of the power of the 鈥渢ools and tyrants鈥� of government, concludes: 鈥淜nowing the policy area, the preferences of the top 10 percent, and the views of a handful of interest groups suffice to explain policy changes with impressive accuracy.鈥� 鈥� Jared Rodriguez, Truthout

鈥淢oreover, too little government spending can increase company bankruptcies and lead to less investment in research and development, hurting the supply side of our economies 鈥� potentially exacerbating inflationary pressures. The EU has gone through a decade of demand stagnation, performing well below its productive potential. Inflationary forces of the 1970s are no longer intact, not least because of declining labour bargaining power, changing demographics, high inequality and private debt overhang. Without concerted fiscal expansion to scale-up investment and protect the vulnerable, aggregate demand will remain low and standards of living will stagnate. Instead of fetishising fiscal discipline, we should prioritise more important social, economic and environmental outcomes 鈥� like creating well-paid green jobs, lifting millions out of poverty and implementing green infrastructure projects.鈥� 鈥� From Frank van Lerven and others, Financial Times

鈥淲ell, one place to look always is: 鈥淲here鈥檚 the money? Who funds Congress?鈥� Actually, there鈥檚 a very fine, careful study of this by the leading scholar who deals with funding issues and politics, Thomas Ferguson. He and his colleagues did a study in which they investigated a simple question: 鈥淲hat鈥檚 the correlation over many years between campaign funding and electability to Congress?鈥� The correlation is almost a straight line. That鈥檚 the kind of close correlation that you rarely get in the social sciences: greater the funding, higher the electability.鈥� 鈥� Noam Chomsky in an interview with Jacobin

鈥淥vercoming the COVID-19 crisis and ensuring a rapid and equitable economic recovery are only two of the challenges we must meet in 2021. This year will also be a crucial one for achieving the goal of net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by mid-century.” 鈥� Project Syndicate

鈥淟ast year, Weil and his former top adviser, Tanya Goldman, spoke with Law360 about their “concentric circles” model, laid out in a recent working paper published by the 八卦爆料. They propose a three-tiered system that starts with a set of core rights linked to all types of work, like basic protections against unsafe conditions, discrimination and harassment, and nonpayment. The second tier of rights includes things like collective bargaining, and access to workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance, which businesses would have to provide unless they could affirmatively prove that their workers aren’t employees. The outermost tier of rights seeks to make benefits portable for workers facing uncertainty.鈥� — Mike LaSusa, Law 360

鈥淲hat is the real meaning of the return of the state in a world that after the pandemic starts a boom in the technology sector with the advantages and risks that this entails? The response of the Nobel laureate in economics Michael Spence during the discussion with Robert Johnson, president of Inet (八卦爆料) was clear: 鈥淚 believe that the return of the Statto means many things. The state is very important for social protection, to remedy the failures of the market. There will be changes in the models of globalization but people think about the state and not about globalization. And the state must be able to respond to citizens’ expectations.” And in the face of what Johnson called “growing political despair” ( even as Biden has made progress in restoring confidence in citizens after the inequalities caused by the pandemic ), a new political class is needed.鈥� -L鈥橝digetto

Melissa Hathaway joined NPR to discuss cybersecurity and the growing threat of ransomware attacks.

鈥淗ow talented is the right? Maybe not so much. The late Yale political scientist Charles Lindblom, author of the 1977 book Politics and Markets (and onetime American Political Science Association president), would have told Giridharadas that in a capitalist economy, business elites enjoy a 鈥減rivileged鈥� position. This position does not always align with party, but it alters the field of play. Lindblom鈥檚 position is backed by others. Thomas Ferguson wrote about the investment theory of politics in 1990s. In the past decade, Ben Page of Northwestern has covered similar ground.鈥� — Steve Dubb, Nonprofit Quarterly

鈥淚t’s interesting he [Josephus Daniels] may not have been the most die-hard racist, but he just saw that racism is how you win elections. I think we see echoes of that today. I think it’s also notable to recall that this is the only successful insurrection on U.S soil in U.S history. People started finding out a little bit about it when the capital siege occurred because people started asking, 鈥渉as an insurrection ever happened?鈥� Actually the answer is yes, and it would be Wilmington. It’s the only time this has ever happened to a municipal government and it was the state that allowed this to happen, allowed these militias to run amok. It was the state that was really responsible at the end of the day for this violence. And there have never been any reparations of any kind even though there are people living in Wilmington today who can who can say, 鈥渕y ancestor owned this plot of land that was taken.鈥� They’ve never had any reparations. If it was a white person that could prove that, I think we would be talking about justice. But it mirrors the Tulsa situation, it was the success of black people that was the problem. Not this idea of inferiority which had been the racial mythology. it was actually the fact that black people had persevered and were very successful even in the face of all of this oppression.鈥� ….It’s just happened time and time again in Wilmington, Tulsa, Detroit, elsewhere, that the American dream has just been incredibly elusive for black Americans through absolutely no fault of their own. What I think is pretty clearly structural racism.鈥�— Lynn Parramore

鈥淣ow it’s maybe particularly an Indian phenomenon because of the strong lockdown we had last year, but I think across the world what we’re seeing in fact is that people are trapped in poverty because of the lack of employment opportunities, lack of income support, they’re increase in indebtedness, and their earnings remain depressed. So in that sense the news is extremely bad. Also, we’re seeing huge dislocations in the labor market itself. People who finally came into the formal labor force and had some sort of formal protections are now becoming informalized or worse as is the case with women in India, just leaving the labor force. When one asks for example social cohesion what can one say 鈥搃t is devastating for any kind of view of an inclusive growth process where we’re trying to encourage many people into gainful employment and to actually see their welfare rise. Of course, financial vulnerabilities have risen many fold as a result of that. In addition, one ought to underline that this thing isn’t going away. Right now in India we’re in the second wave which is quite devastating. There are the very simple and awful thoughts of just basic mortality. What it’s going to do to you know many people’s indebtedness, their ability to earn incomes because this is not limited in India for example only to let’s say the relatively elderly but across the population distribution. I think we’re just at the beginning of trying to of seeing what it will do for social cohesion or destruction more likely. I think we had a mild wave last year and what we’re going to see this year as a result… we have yet to see but it will be bad.鈥� — Arjun Jayadev

鈥淩ansomware demands have increased exponentially in the last six months, according to Melissa Hathaway, president of Hathaway Global Strategies and a former cybersecurity adviser to Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The average ransom demand is now between $50 million and $70 million, Hathaway said. While those demands are often negotiated down, she said companies are frequently paying ransoms in the tens of millions of dollars, in part because cyber insurance policies cover some or all of the cost. She estimated that the average payment is between $10 million and $15 million.鈥� — Kartikay Mehrotra and William Turton, Bloomberg

鈥淭his survey gives a voice to US health care workers who have been on the frontlines of COVID-19,鈥� David Michaels, a professor of environmental and occupational health at the George Washington University and former administrator of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, said. 鈥淗ealth care workers have valuable first-hand knowledge about this pandemic and this report offers recommendations that could help keep the U.S. on a steady course now and in the future.鈥� …. Michaels and Melissa Perry, a professor and chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, provided guidance in producing the report. The McElhattan Foundation and the 八卦爆料 provided financial support for the survey and the report.鈥� — George Washington University

鈥淏ut COVID vaccines are by no means unique — most medicines developed and approved in the United States involve taxpayer investment. Between 2010 and 2019, every single new medicine approved by the Food and Drug Administration included taxpayer-funded research through NIH. Drug companies patent the drugs we pay to develop and then charge us exorbitant prices for them that increase every year — sometimes twice a year.鈥� — Terry Minow, Missoulian

鈥淸T]he U.S. Department of Justice should determine and make clear that paying a ransom is illegal,鈥� Hathaway said in an article posted May 13 by the 八卦爆料. 鈥淭his step would likely force organizations to further invest in their security and ability to withstand and recover from an incident (i.e., increase their resilience). Categorizing ransom payment as an illegal activity would also clearly remove coverage for these types of payments from insurance policies,鈥� Hathaway wrote.鈥� — Charlie Mitchell, Inside Cybersecurity

鈥淟arger dairy farms inevitably mean a system less geographically dispersed, larger environmental challenges with farm waste, and a less resilient system. The 八卦爆料 detailed these impacts in a recent report on the pandemic鈥檚 effects on dairy farmers, Spilt Milk: COVID-19 and the Dangers of Dairy Industry Consolidation: 鈥淭he COVID-19 pandemic led to the collapse in commercial demand as restaurants, caterers, schools and other institutional customers were forced to close. Dairy plants serving supermarkets and grocery stores were already operating at close to full capacity when the coronavirus struck. Capital equipment specialized to produce for commercial customers were incapable of producing for consumers served by supermarkets or food banks. Some farmers had no choice but to dump milk.鈥漑9] For the smaller dairy farmers, international (primarily Canadian) competition and price fluctuations are daily economic challenges.” — Charles Luke, Homeland Security Today … [9] Eileen Appelbaum and Jared Gaby-Biegle, 鈥淪pilt Milk: COVID-19 and the Dangers of Dairy Industry Consolidation,鈥� 八卦爆料 for Economic and Policy Research, August 15, 2020, /uploads/papers/WP_134-Appelbaum-and-Gaby-Biegel.pdf

“Among those contributions, recent works highlight the deep, radical revision of axioms considered cystic: that hysteresis, the permanence of high unemployment rates over time, is a basic condition to keep inflation under control. Professors Walter Paternesi, Davide Roamniello and Antonella Stirati have empirically demonstrated that this thesis is not permanent and that long-term unemployment can be reversed without a significant spike in inflation (/research/research- papers / on-the-non-inflationary-effects-of-long-term-unemployment-reductions). Another flagship of themainstream that can fall apart.” — Carles Manera, The Worker

鈥淭he former ambassadors were speaking on a panel discussion at the law economics policy conference titled 鈥淪trategic Patience and flexible policies: How India can rise to the China challenge鈥� and organized by INET.鈥� — BQ Desk, Bloomberg Quint

鈥淭he new acting Deputy Prime Minister for EU funds is called Atanas Pekanov. The young expert, who recently turned 30, is an economist at the Austrian 八卦爆料 for Economic Research (WIFO) in Vienna, Austria, and a lecturer at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien). … Member of the Young Researchers Initiative of the 八卦爆料.鈥� — Darik

鈥淧olitical scientist Thomas Ferguson has documented how U.S. big business interests poured money into local and state elections to ensure positive support for their largely unpopular policies. What Ferguson calls “political investment” is the practice of spending serious sums on party competition to keep hand-picked, docile representatives in power.鈥� — Duncan Cameron, Rabble

鈥淧andemic management will also have to overcome the knotty issue of political economy. The blame game between the Union and state governments over an essential commodity such as oxygen is visible in court proceedings. We need a transparent mechanism that is perceived to be fair and trusted by all the stakeholders. Apart from dealing with the allocation of vaccines and other essential medical supplies such as oxygen, this body could suggest the financing pattern for sharing the expenditure on Covid management, including vaccine procurement. … Far too many lives have been lost to Covid. But as a challenge to India (and to humanity), it is certainly not an impossible task to manage the pandemic. But this can only happen effectively with cooperation, coordination, empathy, humility and scientific knowledge. It is not too late.鈥� — Arjun Jayadev, Hindustan Times

鈥淛ust now read this fascinating interview by Janine Jackson of fair.org (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) with Lynn Parramore of the 八卦爆料 on how hedge fund managers are damaging American companies by pushing company managements to do stock buybacks. Basically, stock buybacks force up the price of a stock, allowing shareholders to make megabucks when they sell. Such buybacks were difficult until the Reagan administration loosened the regulations in 1982. Why are stock buybacks bad ? Because they divert money from research, from new investments and innovation, and from raising wages. The interview with Lynn Parramore goes into the details.鈥� — Daily Kos

鈥淚n their December 2017 paper, 鈥淎rtificial intelligence, worker-replacing technological progress and income distribution,鈥� the economists Anton Korinek, of the University of Virginia, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, of Columbia — describe the potential of artificial intelligence to create a high-tech dystopian future. Korinek and Stiglitz argue that without radical reform of tax and redistribution politics, a 鈥淢althusian destiny鈥� of widespread technological unemployment and poverty may ensue.鈥� — Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times

鈥淩esearchers involved in a new study from Washington University say women could be in trouble financially for years to come because of significant job losses during the crisis. “We have to be somewhat concerned that the larger inequality effects of the current crisis could have these persistent impacts on wages and on career progress in all the groups that are disproportionately affected,鈥� said Steven Fazzari, a professor of economics and sociology at Wash U who co-authored the study.鈥� — Andrea Y. Henderson, St. Louis Public Radio NPR

鈥淵et notable critics like Joseph Stiglitz and Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, see woefully insufficient production by Western drug companies as a major roadblock to universal vaccination.鈥� — Walden Bello, New York Times

鈥淩ight after the CDC made this announcement, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, sent a letter to the Biden administration, citing a study by the 八卦爆料 for Economic Thinking. … The authors of the study are Dr. Deepti Gurdasani, who did much of the research for the study and is a clinical epidemiologist and statistical geneticist and senior lecturer at the William Harvey Research 八卦爆料 in London; Dr. Phillip Alveldi, CEO and chairman of Brain Works Foundry Inc, a U.S.-based developer of artificial intelligence-enhanced health care technologies and services; and Thomas Ferguson, the director of research projects for the 八卦爆料.鈥� — Dennis Donohue, Santa Fe New Mexican

“Polluting companies tell us every day how they鈥檙e invested in the future; we鈥檝e heard corporations en masse say, 鈥淧rofits, what? We鈥檙e all about the people now!鈥� There鈥檚 a certain amount of people-who-make-the-problem-pretending-they鈥檙e-the-solution that we can see through, but there鈥檚 still plenty going on behind the scenes. We鈥檒l talk with Lynn Parramore, senior research analyst at the 八卦爆料, about how hedge funds get in the way of the big changes all kinds of companies need to make to fight climate disruption.鈥� — CounterSpin

鈥淭oday joined by Dr Arjun Jayadev, who is a Professor of Economics at the School of Arts and Sciences at Azim Premji University in Bangalore, India. He was previously Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is also closely involved with the 八卦爆料. I speak to him about the basic links between IPRs and the pandemic; the long-held orthodoxy in economic theory on the importance of IPRs, especially in areas like health; how IPRs lead to suboptimalities like hoarding of knowledge, vaccine grabs and other global inequalities; the relationship between public funding and vaccine production; whether private profits being produced from public investments; and finally, the problem of vaccine nationalism.鈥� — Chayakkada Chats

鈥淭o do this properly, we need to understand the structure of markets for knowledge-based products like new vaccines. Currently, we do not: the 鈥渕arket鈥� is a mishmash of competition and side deals. According to a recent paper from the 八卦爆料, governments and pharmaceutical companies last year concluded 44 bilateral COVID-19 vaccine deals, many of which have undisclosed details and poorly understood escape clauses. Poor countries were, by and large, left out.鈥� — Kaushik Basu, Project Syndicate

鈥淏ut ultra-low interest rates may be doing more harm than good, economist William White says in a working paper published last month by the 八卦爆料. White, a former economic adviser at the Bank for International Settlements, has a number of arguments against this central bank policy. First, while lower borrowing costs do initially accomplish their goal of spurring spending, much of it is on 鈥渦nproductive purchases鈥� by both households and corporations that only wind up increasing the debt burden. Second, low interest rates can actually destabilize financial markets and the institutions surrounding them, either through inflated prices, encouraging fund managers to take on riskier investments, or hindering how banks and lenders are supposed to do business, White argues. And then there鈥檚 the exit problem. Once central banks lower interest rates, it鈥檚 very hard to tighten the flow of easy money. 鈥淓ach cycle of monetary easing contributes to a buildup of undesired side effects that raises the likelihood of future instability,鈥� White writes. 鈥淐entral banks are then lured into a 鈥榙ebt trap鈥� where they refrain from tightening, to avoid triggering the crisis that they wish to avoid, but that restraint only makes the underlying problems worse.鈥� — Diccon Hyatt, The Balance

鈥淪ome authors argue that the German export success has nothing to do with wage or unit labour cost moderation and is instead due to the country鈥檚 high non-price competitiveness.鈥� — Lucio Baccaro and Tobias Tober, LSE

鈥淭he much-touted 鈥渘ew thinking鈥� on fiscal policy and debt is actually very thin and little of it is new. In the 1990s, economist Luigi Pasinetti clarified the folly of the proposed Maastricht criteria for public finances and forecast the coming disaster with those. Subsequently, many economists, including more than a few working with the 八卦爆料, showed in detail how austerity reduces potential output over time and how absurd theories about Phillips Curve trade-offs lead to big underestimates of real rates of unemployment. Running below full employment for long periods blows big holes in public finances and thus piles on debt.鈥� 鈥� Thomas Ferguson

鈥淎 study by Nobel Laureate James Heckman found that every dollar invested in a high-quality, birth to five program for the most economically disadvantaged children resulted in $7.30 in benefits as children grew up healthier, were more likely to graduate high school and college, were less likely to be involved in crime, and earned more as adults.鈥� — The White House

鈥淔or more on this methodology, see Wolff鈥檚 National Bureau of Economic Research paper Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962-2013鈥� — Chuck Collins

鈥淭o go back a little bit, Covid is possibly the first global event that we鈥檝e actually seen. One year after it really started, we are seeing all these vaccines. It is really quite incredible when you think about the scientific advancement, it has really been something quite extraordinary. But our systems of management globally of knowledge and health are weak and counterproductive and in adequate. I鈥檇 say they鈥檙e probably best described as unjust and incompetent. Let鈥檚 start with this whole question of patent rights. Right from the outset it became quite clear that it was hindering the fight against covid. From the early days if you remember N95 masks we鈥檙e a concern, then treatments like remdesivir, so it鈥檚 not only a vaccine issue. This was the basis for last years鈥� call for the Covid technology access pool, which was rebuffed despite widespread support. It was rebuffed by the advanced countries. It鈥檚 hard to imagine why this should be the case because such technologies for public health are massive and have positive spill over benefits. Moving now to vaccines, I think the system is even more inefficient when one considers the fact that many companies across the world received significant subsidies for vaccines. Estimates range from about $100 billion and in some cases the entire cost; Moderna and Johnson and Johnson vaccines that were paid for by a public set of money. Such is the case for having patent rights to allow for innovation completely disappears. Now the debate has moved, that it is not actually IP which is the restriction, it鈥檚 the ability to produce and manufacturing capacity. But remember eight months ago that did not exist in developed economies. People like the Moderna chief chemist said it takes about three to four months to actually set up these factories. What we should鈥檝e had was a massive transfer in technology to places that could actually do this, completely open access to technology of all sorts, and ramping up production on a sort of global war scale. That has not happened and is it鈥檚 still not happening because of these limitations and unfortunately despite India and South Africa making the case in the WTO and despite some better noises from the Biden administration we鈥檙e really not seeing much movement.鈥� 鈥� Arjun Jayadev

鈥淭here is a lot to like about with this infrastructure plan from what we already know and there seems to be a historical opportunity to get things right. Before answering your question, let me bring us to three trends just for context. Firstly, for decades we’ve had an economic model that benefited a small number of people tremendously and left behind the majority of Americans, resulting in widening inequality and decline in the middle class. The fact that a zip code could predict a lot of things; your health outcome, your lifespan, your success in life is an extremely telling example. Secondly, we’ve had the digital revolution which spanned a good part of the last 15 years that further demonstrated a lot of displacing and polarizing tendencies. If you’re in the wrong parts of the economy so to speak, it really didn’t work that much for you. Thirdly of course, we had the Covid crisis which turbocharged a lot of these trends. A lot of this is to say that sure there’s a lot of roads and bridges to fix and as well as fiscal infrastructure, but how to productively engage more Americans in the economic process through like you said job training and education, through better child care, invest in green recovery, and climate resilience these are paramount tasks.鈥� — Jack Gao, 八卦爆料

鈥淪o these companies have been hamstrung by these hedge fund activists that are only interested in making a buck as quickly as possible. And they really don鈥檛 care about the long-term sustainability or health of the company. Or is it anything the company might want to do in the way of making products in the future? They鈥檙e all about the short term. So they are holding American companies back.鈥� — Lynn Parramore

鈥淭he economists 脪scar Jord脿, Moritz Schularick, and Alan Taylor studied the sensitivity of house prices to interest rates across 14 countries and 140 years of history. They found that a 1 per cent rise in interest rates reduces the ratio of house prices to incomes by about 4 per cent. In New Zealand, for example, that ratio has risen by about half in a decade, implying a double-digit rise in interest rates to stabilise it.鈥� 鈥� Robin Harding, FT

Lynn Parramore appeared on Ian Masters to discuss Biden鈥檚 stimulus package and the 鈥淣ew Koch Brothers鈥� wrecking America鈥檚 green new deal.

鈥淚n 鈥淧rivate Equity鈥檚 Engagement With Health Care: Cause for Concern?鈥� a report to the 八卦爆料, researchers Eileen Applebaum and Rosemary Batt found that wages dropped at urgent care centers after acquisitions by private equity companies. They were 9 to 12 percent lower than hospital wages. More consolidation and Amazon鈥檚 relentless drive to suppress costs bode more of the same.鈥� 鈥� Brian Alexander, Boston Globe

鈥淎s consumers become richer, they spend more on services such as health and education, the demand for which is much more income elastic, and less on agriculture and manufactured goods, according to a recent study, co-led by Diego Comin, a professor of economics. The results are published in Econometrica. Until now, productivity has often been considered at least as important, if not more, than preferences, in shaping the sectoral composition of the economy. Politicians and business leaders often make claims about why certain sectors in the economy are shrinking, such as the decline in U.S. manufacturing is due to robotics or trade with China. Such assessments are flawed, as the sectoral composition of the economy is mostly driven by preferences and not by productivity, according to the study, which models long-run structural change in the economy.鈥� 鈥� Amy Olsen, Darmouth News

鈥淔rom 2010 to 2019 the FDA approved 356 drugs. Recent research from Bentley University finds that NIH funding contributed to every single new drug approved. At a cost to the tax payer of roughly $230 billion dollars. In spite of this contribution the NIH is listed on only 27 of those patents. This suggests that while tax payers provide funding for the bulk of the early stage research they do not get patent protections supposedly secured by the by dole act. In essence American tax payers are paying the highest prices in the world for drugs they already paid to help develop.鈥� — Senator Tammy Baldwin

鈥淎s William Lazonick and other analysts have pointed out, stock buybacks artificially inflate executive pay and drain capital that could be put to productive purpose. .[xxv] 鈥� Sarah Anderson, Counter Punch [xxv] William Lazonick, 鈥淧rofits Without Prosperity,鈥� Harvard Business Review, September 2014.鈥�

鈥淭he issue is important because it tends to conflict with a hugely influential study published in 2017, called The Rate of Return on Everything, by Oscar Jorda, Katharina Knoll, Dmitry Kuvshinov, Moritz Schularick, and Alan M. Taylor. This was a mightily ambitious piece of financial archaeology covering 17 countries, and it rendered the startling result that housing performed virtually as well as equities over time, but with much less volatility. The result held true for every country that Jorda and his colleagues examined.鈥� 鈥� John Authers, Bloomberg

鈥淚 believe they mostly got this right. Just before President Biden took office, I presented some thoughts on what a rescue plan should include to deal with the macroeconomic challenges of the pandemic. I emphasized four broad areas: public health spending, enhanced unemployment benefits, assistance to state and local governments, and so-called 鈥渟timulus checks鈥� to households. The legislation the president has signed does a pretty good job in all four areas.鈥� 鈥� Sara Savat, Washington University News Room

鈥淗edge fund managers are torpedoing chances for a successful Green New Deal, according to Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst for the 八卦爆料. In her recent article 鈥淢eet the 鈥淣ew Koch Brothers鈥� 鈥� the Hedge Fund Activists Wrecking America鈥檚 Green New Deal鈥�, she talks about how corporate raiders are turning the direction of 鈥済reen鈥� corporate partners of battery development, software, wind turbines, and more away from long term energy conservation projects toward short-term money-making projects to increase the hedge fund shareholder returns.鈥� 鈥� WORT 89.9 FM

鈥淗edge fund managers are torpedoing chances for a successful Green New Deal, according to Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst for the 八卦爆料. In her recent article 鈥淢eet the 鈥淣ew Koch Brothers鈥� 鈥� the Hedge Fund Activists Wrecking America鈥檚 Green New Deal鈥�, she talks about how corporate raiders are turning the direction of 鈥済reen鈥� corporate partners of battery development, software, wind turbines, and more away from long term energy conservation projects toward short-term money-making projects to increase the hedge fund shareholder returns.鈥� 鈥� WORT 89.9 FM

It is an attitude typical of conventional economists that sees the claim to qualify as technicians who deal with “social engineering”, on the basis of a “true” economic theory. Disrespectful of the epistemological (i.e. research methods) and even ontological principles (concerning the conception of the world). 鈥� Riccardo D’Orsi, Econopoly 鈥�. Citation: Lawson, T. (2010). Really Reorienting Modern Economics . 八卦爆料 (INET), April 10.

鈥淎nd what if there is a stock buyback during the period the share price is inflated? Does that harm shareholders because the company is spending money to repurchase its stock, or does it actually further benefit them by potentially raising earnings per share (EPS)?鈥� 鈥� Citation: William Lazonick, The Financialization of the U.S. Corporation: What Has Been Lost and How It Can Be Regained, 36 Seattle U. L. Rev. 857, 859 (2013) (noting that trillions of dollars are spent on share buybacks and that 鈥渃orporate executives who make these decisions are themselves prime beneficiaries of this focus on rising stock prices as a the measure of corporate performance鈥�)

The Political Movement That Dared Not Speak its Own Name: The Neoliberal Thought Collective Under Erasure Philip Mirowski [八卦爆料, August 2014] 鈥�.consider the question: how should we approach the construction of a reliable history of a group of intellectuals who have managed to turn their meditations into a political movement on a global scale? Of course this raises timeworn problems of the relationship between theory and practice; but the Neoliberal case sports a further thorny complication: while we can fairly comprehensively identify the roster of whom should be acknowledged as a part of the movement, at least from its beginnings in the 1930s until the recent past, we are confronted with the fact that, in public, they themselves roundly deny the existence of any such well-defined thought collective, and stridently denounce the label of Neoliberalism. Not only do they wash their hands of most of the documented activities of the Neoliberal Thought Collective 鈥� think of Hayek and Friedman and their denials concerning the Pinochet interlude in Chile— but their plaint is that their opponents the socialists have always gotten the better of them, and thus their political project has never enjoyed any real successes, ever, anywhere, contrary to all evidence brought to the table. They are forever the bridesmaid of conservative parties, never the bride, to hear them tell it. Given the sheer numbers of people involved, and the really astronomical sums of money, and the cultural dominance of the airwaves, this sad sack victimhood is really quite remarkable, and itself calls for serious examination. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that a political movement that dare not speak its own name has intellectual contradictions that it dare not air openly.

鈥淲ith all of that said, The 八卦爆料 (INET) recently published a study casting doubt about the methodology BLS uses to tabulate its unemployment data, especially when it comes to Black people. INET suggested that BLS鈥� data is inaccurate and downplays Black unemployment. On average, Black men鈥檚 unemployment rate is 2.8 percentage points higher than BLS data shows,鈥� according to INET鈥檚 study, entitled, 鈥淢asking Real Unemployment: The Overall and Racial Impact of Survey Non-Response on Measured Labor Market Outcomes.鈥� The same was true for BLS鈥� unemployment rate for Black women, which INET found was, on average, about 2.4 percentage points lower than its actual rate. The differences grow for younger Black males from 16 to 34 years old. INET鈥檚 findings lend some credence to a tweet from the Center for American Progress after January鈥檚 jobs report was published that said Black women, in particular, 鈥渁re still being left behind by the recovery.鈥� 鈥� Bruce C.T. Wright, News One

鈥淢aking matters worse, the Black unemployment rate might be much higher, according to a new analysis by the 八卦爆料. The unemployment rate is calculated using data from the Current Population Survey. But that survey has a much lower response rate from Blacks than from white Americans, leading to more misclassifications in the official unemployment rate. For Blacks, the response rate is 72%, while the response rate is 90% for whites. Factoring that in, the unemployment rate for Black workers could be at least 2.6 percentage points higher than the monthly rate by the BLS, leaving it at 12.5% in February, the analysis found. For whites, the increase is much smaller at 0.7 percentage point. “The Current Population Survey has been missing a larger share of the population over time, particularly among Blacks,” said Baker, who is also an author of the analysis. “You have to ask what’s the situation for the people they’re not talking to.” 鈥� Denitsa Tsekova, Yahoo Money

鈥淭he piece gives a series of case studies. Parramore summarized the problem: 鈥淧layers on Wall Street have been torpedoing our chances of averting environmental catastrophe for years. A group of billionaire financiers has made sure the companies the government must partner with to fight climate change are focused on one thing only 鈥� making these men (they all seem to be men) even richer. Instead of leading the world in climate change technology, firms like Apple, GE, and Intel have been pressured to become the personal piggy banks of powerful moneymen 鈥� known as hedge fund activists 鈥� who can鈥檛 see beyond the next quarterly report.鈥� 鈥� 八卦爆料 for Public Accuracy

鈥淧ressley鈥檚 resolution builds upon the academic intellectual framework developed by advocates like Dantas and Wray, as well as the ongoing civil rights demand for federally guaranteed jobs, which can be seen in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his 鈥淚 have a dream鈥� speech) and indeed long before that. It also draws on the work of Sadie Alexander, recognized as the nation鈥檚 first Black woman economist. Speaking at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1945 (as noted by Professor Nina Banks, blogging at the 八卦爆料), Alexander described full employment as a way to address the nation鈥檚 economic and racial imperatives.鈥� 鈥� Marin Levine, Nonprofit Quarterly

Rob Johnson appeared on the Background Briefing with Ian Masters to discuss working with Trumpsters, the source of their anguish, and important pathways to healing

Two separate INET funded research articles are cited; first from Schularick, Jord脿, & Taylor on leveraged bubbles followed by Bao, Hommes, & Makarewicz on bubble formation. 鈥淪ince their inception, financial markets, and to a lesser extent some real markets, have been subject to bubbles. … More recently, stock prices, but also credit, real estate, commodities, bond markets, and famously, bitcoin, are all assets that have experienced bubble episodes. Regarding cryptocurrencies, many economists also defend a permanent bubble, their fundamental value being theoretically non-existent.鈥� …. In fact, the presence of bubbles in the markets (financial and real) seems to stem from the persistent behavior of economic agents. Experimental studies, controlling exactly the actual value, showed that participants tended to set up a bubble-like operation, with price surges and collapses very similar to real economy situations, and in no way related to a change in the market.

鈥淭exas鈥� leaders knew as of 2011 … when the state went through a short severe freeze, that the system was radically unstable in extreme weather,鈥� wrote James K. Galbraith, of the University of Texas at Austin, in the 八卦爆料. 鈥淏ut they did nothing,鈥� he wrote. 鈥淭o do something, they would have had to regulate the system. And they didn鈥檛 want to regulate the system, because the providers, a rich source of campaign funding, didn鈥檛 want to be regulated and to have to spend on weatherization that was not needed 鈥� most of the time.鈥� That鈥檚 what happens when the private sector calls the shots. Money first.鈥� — Richard Gross, Counterpunch

鈥淓conomic opportunity was further restricted by individual and institutionalized racism and political disenfranchisement. Discrimination in hiring by employers and intimidation of black workers through violence placed black workers at a direct disadvantage in the labor market,鈥� Trevon Logan Peter Temin wrote in 鈥淚nclusive American Economic History: Containing Slaves, Freedmen, Jim Crow Laws, and the Great Migration,鈥� a working paper written for the 八卦爆料.鈥� — Coastal Review