Friday, September 9, 2011

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou on Extreme Unemployment


Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, president of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, and executive vice president and Jerome Levy Professor of Economics at Bard, shows the extreme departure of employment from the the trend and the pressing necessity to address it as the singular crisis it represents.

Together, this data makes the case that we're in a prolonged slump that's highly unusual, and requires action that's far more aggressive than the usual responses. Job creation should be the government's urgent, first priority. The nation needs to recognize just how perilous the employment disaster is — and what a marked departure this recession is from any we've seen in the modern era.

3 comments:

googleheim said...

CAN ANYONE WITH MMT PARADIGM MAKE THE CASE THAT THE BUSH WARS PUT US IN THIS PRESENT SITUATION ?

WHAT BASIC MODEL WOULD SHOW A DIFFERENT TODAY IF WE HAD NOT GONE TO WAR ?

PRICE OF OIL ? PRICE OF COMMODITIES LIKE CEMENT AND STEEL AS INPUTS FOR THE WAR, ETC ?

Tom Hickey said...

Without the increased deficit spending on the military in the Bush years, the Clinton surplus that drove down domestic private saving would have hit a lot harder. But even with the deficits in the Bush years, adds of non-government net financial assets were not enough to correct for the dissaving resulting from the surplus. This effect, was greatly magnified by the Ponzi phase of the long financial cycle that was also culminating in this period. Ponzi finance was exacerbated by the the lax policy of the Bush Administration together with the Greenspan Fed. The result was unsustainable private debt that imploded, threatening to take down the financial sector post-Lehman.

See A Minskian Explanation of the Causes of the Current Crisis By L. Randall Wray

googleheim said...

You left out how the private debt was amplified by wallstreet quant models which underlied the cdo/cds instruments right ?

what about a pig-stye area expose' showing how austrian budget balancers take subsidies ?

could we make a list ?

a. michele bachman family taking in farmer subsidies ( printed money right ? )
b. bachman's husband getting fed money for his christian counseling company ( printed money right ? )
c. corp tax subsidies
d. fed buying up Neil Bush's failed savings and loan in 1990ish
e. all the others