LPE Originals
A Just Transition for Finance
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.
LPE Originals
Let Them Eat Cake: Inflation Beyond Monetary Policy
By
Devika Dutt
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.
LPE Originals
Inflation, Race, & Labor: An Interview with Darrick Hamilton
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.
LPE Originals
Monetary Power and the Core-Periphery Dynamics of Inflation
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.
LPE Originals
The Fed’s Sole Mandate
By
Lev Menand
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.
LPE Originals
Price Stability Beyond the Fed: A Symposium
Introducing a symposium on the hottest topic in macroeconomics.
LPE Originals
Metaphors, Analogies, and the Politics of Understanding
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.
LPE Originals
Interlocking Crises: Q&A on Global Debt in a Post-COVID World with Odette Lienau, Part 2
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.
LPE Originals
Interlocking Crises: Q&A on Global Debt in a Post-COVID World with Odette Lienau, Part 1
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.
LPE Originals
The Same System, the Same Results
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.
LPE Originals
When the Moral Economy Became a Political Economy
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…
LPE Originals
Making Public Debt a Public Good
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?
LPE Originals
The Bondholders’ Veto: Fiscal Federalism and Local Democracy
American cities’ reliance on municipal debt must be understood as part of a larger structural reliance on concentrated, mobile capital.
LPE Originals
Histories of Hammers
Municipal bond finance is an important technology, but is it more like a hammer or an automobile?
LPE Originals
Public Money without Public Goods
By
David Stein
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.