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.
Muscles and arteries. Hammers and parasites. Addictions and complexes. Destin Jenkins concludes our Bonds of Inequality symposium by reflecting on the political implications of the metaphors we use to describe municipal debt.
The second part of our Q&A with Odette Lienau, discussing global debt relief, corruption and waste, and the possibility of a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism.
The LPE Blog asks Odette Lienau some questions about global debt in the wake of COVID-19, recent international initiatives to provide debt relief, and the rise of China as a major lender to sovereign states.
Every year, governments and public entities wrestle with tough decisions about how they will fund their communities, and every year we absolve Wall Street of its role in siphoning money away from our public budgets. Enough is enough.
History shows that the standards by which societies judge economic activity change over time. As these moral frameworks evolve—or devolve—many of the changes make their way into law. For example, modern anti-trust law is grounded in the widely accepted belief that monopolies depress competition and growth and encourage unscrupulous behavior. However, in the sixteenth and…
Dependence on public debt is a hallmark of democratic capitalist governance. How, then, can we ensure that the interests of private investors do not overtake the needs of the people that debt is meant to serve?
American cities’ reliance on municipal debt must be understood as part of a larger structural reliance on concentrated, mobile capital.
Municipal bond finance is an important technology, but is it more like a hammer or an automobile?
By documenting how public debt produced our present nightmare, Destin Jenkins allows us to dream about using public money to mend the ills of our era.
Los Angeles’s King-Drew Medical Center, a public hospital originally intended to provide Black residents with quality healthcare, is a cautionary tale about using bond financing to advance racial equality.
In the two decades before the Hepburn Act’s enactment, two entities vied for the right to coordinate the price and distribution of coal. The first—a group known as the Joint Conference of Miners and Operators of the Central Competitive Field—was the child of the United Mine Workers.The second—a group of coal-hauling railroads known as the Seaboard Coal Association—was the child of J. P. Morgan and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Understanding their struggle for power (and why capitalists rather than workers won), can help us better understand the stakes of antitrust.
One of the key theses of Marx’s Capital is the primacy of production over circulation. But there is ample reason to believe this is a false dichotomy: exploitation and surplus value creation happen both in the spheres of production circulation. So where does that leave us?
