Even as the Supreme Court seeks to squelch legal creativity in support of progressive causes, their power to do so only extends so far. We cannot let them define the terms of the debate.
Due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, food prices are higher in real terms today than at any point since the early 1970s. Yet it is the underlying political economy of the global food system that has created the conditions where hundreds of millions of people don’t get enough to eat.
By paying greater attention to who files bankruptcy, we can learn a great deal about the social and economic disparities that plague our society. By reforming and expanding access to bankruptcy, we can chip away at some of these disparities.
The existing system of international economic law is under great strain. This post offers a reading of the problem and proposes alternative directions for the future. In brief, the system has evolved from what John Ruggie called “embedded liberalism” to what David M. Trubek and I describe as “embedded neoliberalism.” The past couple of decades have witnessed something of a truce between those who designed the system and those who now are actors within it. But today this truce is largely crumbling.
Companies and their investors extract large amounts of wealth from people’s data. Yet because tax law treats users of digital platforms as consumers, rather than producers, neither these users nor their home countries receive any compensation in return. How might international tax law be used to mitigate the harms of this exploitative arrangement?
Between 1942 and January 1946, national output more than doubled, unemployment dipped below 2 percent, and real civilian consumption increased by 50 percent. Yet thanks to an across-the-board price freeze, prices rose merely 3.3 percent per year. What lessons can we draw from the initial failures and ultimate success of this stabilization program?
Hot dogs are not sandwiches, work meetings are not retreats, and shareholders are not investors. Yet only one of these conceptual mistakes illicitly lends support to the idea that all corporate activity should benefit shareholders.
Financial regulation lies at the core of sound inflation management. Accordingly, progressives seeking to turn the page on the past few decades of failed macroeconomic policymaking should not hesitate to bring the full scope of financial regulatory tools to bear in the pursuit of just price stability.
Shelter is one of the largest items in a person’s budget, and among the most rigid. How can the state ensure that renters don’t get crushed as workers during a recession, and then crushed again with housing costs as the economy recovers?
The quest for “non-extractive finance” is filled with legal hurdles. This post examines how lawyers can support organizers working to imagine and build a better financial system.
In developing countries, inflation is often driven by the failure of the food supply chain. While economists are well-aware of this, they do not adequately value policies other than monetary policy for responding to inflation. It is time to discard this short-sighted approach.
Raúl Carrillo interviews 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.
How inflation affects a country depends on how its currency is situated within the global monetary order. 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.
The Fed was not designed to fight inflation, nor is it well equipped to do so. It is time for legislators to expand the macroeconomic policy toolkit.
Introducing a symposium on the hottest topic in macroeconomics.
