From Federal Disintegration through Community QE to Central Bank Decentralization In the post immediately preceding this one, I observed that the twinned histories of American ambivalence toward centralized political governance on the one hand and central banking on the other place recent development in the realms of both pandemic response and American public finance into…
Central banking and finance in the US have a curiously ‘dialectical’ history – a history mirroring, in interesting ways, that of our federal union itself. Both histories reflect ambivalence about, and hence oscillation both toward and away from, collective agency and its political manifestation in centralized governance. Tracing these parallel trajectories can shed helpful light upon certain features of American monetary history, finance-regulatory tendencies, and of course public finance.
The price of food increased 2.6% in April, the largest single-month increase since 1974, but food industry executives are insisting that the country has enough food. So why are prices going up? The explanation provided by the industry is that consumers are buying more than they need, creating shortages. But a shortage is not a…
To combat the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government has enacted relief packages totaling nearly $2.5 trillion, with more aid likely to come. The fourth and latest effort contains $75 billion in grants for hospitals, and $25 billion to improve coronavirus testing. As economist Austan Goolsbee has rightly noted, “the number one rule of virus economics…
In an interview, Michel Foucault said that when “actually existing” socialism was put in scare quotes, as if it were not exactly “real,” the only thing the scare quotes revealed was the strength of an abstract ideal that theorists invariably used as a measuring stick to evaluate, and theoretically marginalize, whatever was actually happening on the ground. What if we were to apply such an ironic qualification to neoliberalism?
Ken Loach’s 2016 film I Am Daniel Blake (2016) depicts post-crash austerity in all of its bleak barbarity. The plot revolves around the film’s protagonist, a middle-aged carpenter, who attempts to navigate the British welfare system after a heart attack makes it hard for him to work. The message the system sends to our unlucky hero is that he is not worthy: of the state’s resources, of an employer’s goodwill, of anyone’s sympathy, of his own basic humanity. On Michel Feher’s assessment, we might add another shortcoming: he isn’t creditworthy, either.
Mutant Neoliberalism is an excellent collection of essays canvassing what editors William Callison and Zachary Manfredi rightly diagnose as the changing face of neoliberalism – really, the multiplicity of national, transnational and post-national neoliberalisms – evolving in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Instead of a mortal wounding, the crisis generated the paradox, as several authors in the collection note, that neoliberalism’s failures led to more, not less, neoliberalism.
Dear Readers, Today we’re bringing you a special Saturday edition of our ongoing covid-19 series. Take care, LPE Blog Your first stop after reading this post should be here, to listen to Amy Kapczynski and Gregg Gonsalves on The Dig podcast. They talk about how to survive this plague – the politics of public health and…
This is the second post on ‘Money in Context.’ You can read the first post here. The observation with which I closed Part 1 implicates a challenge – or perhaps better put, it extends an invitation. In light of the inherently infrastructural role played by payment systems and their associated monies in any ‘exchange economy’…
This is the first of two posts on Money in Context. Read Part II here. We’ve all heard the adage. ‘Time is money.’ The utterer usually means that time can be spent earning money, so that to ‘waste time’ is to incur a pecuniary opportunity cost. But there’s another sense in which money is time – or…
People claim to be worried about stock buybacks. In fact, the buybacks are a stand-in for what we can all see: business in this country works for wealthy shareholders, not workers, customers, or communities.
Marshall Steinbaum and Andrew Hart argue that Professor Markovits’ The Meritocracy Trap omits capitalists from the story in part by relying too heavily on the flawed theory of human capital.
Inspired by Anne Alstott & Ganesh Sitaraman’s The Public Option, this post suggests that it is time to tell new stories about the nature and purpose of economic institutions, and that infrastructural investments should be put to work to ensure there is a world we can retire into.
This post explores the “money view,” which demystifies financial economies by conceptualizing money as the way in which humans manage ongoing promissory relations in a world of uncertainty.
If “law and political economy” examines the role of law in constituting and regulating marketcraft and statecraft, one way of “doing” LPE is to look for the role of law in managing the processes by which capitalists extract value from activity putatively outside “the economy.”
