At the Blog
This week, our symposium on Price Stability Beyond the Fed was operating at full capacity:
On Monday, Karina Patrício and John Hogan Morris examined the global inflationary consequences of the hierarchies embedded within the international monetary system. Peripheral states with subordinate currencies are both vulnerable to, and constrained by, monetary policy decisions at the core, an arrangement that penalizes the global periphery in ways that parallel historical patterns of uneven exchange.
On Tuesday, Raúl Carrillo spoke with Darrick Hamilton about the Fed’s approach to unemployment, the racialized harms of shifting the burden of price stability onto workers, and the long struggle for fair and full employment. According to Hamilton, “inflation in and of itself need not be a bad thing.” Instead, “we should care about and focus on who is gaining purchasing power…. Fiscal and monetary policy should aim to shift resources to the exploited and vulnerable people who have scarcely experienced a real wage raise over the last 40 odd years.”
And on Thursday, William Boyd addressed the crucial question: How do we explain what is currently happening with energy prices? While familiar narratives focus on supply shortfalls and bottlenecks, there are important aspects of these recent price shocks that stem directly from the choices governments have made about how to price energy.
In LPE Land
Need more inflation coverage? Over at the The American Prospect, they have been deep diving into how bad policy—outsourcing, financialization, monopolization, deregulation, and just-in-time logistics—broke our supply chains, raised costs, and caused shortages. From manufacturing to ports to trucks to warehouses, this special issue delivers the goods.
The University of Pennsylvania Law Review’s “The Disability Frame: Opportunities, Costs, and Constraints in the Broad Struggle for Inclusion” Symposium (led by Karen Tani and Jasmine Harris) starts today!
