"$29,616,400,000,000"

- The cost of the Federal Reserve’s bail out of the US financial sector

(Source: levyinstitute.org)

2:05 Dec 12th, 2011 | 1 note

       "In four years of reflection and rather intense involvement with this financial crisis, not a single aspect of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium has seemed worth even a passing thought."

- Larry Summers—on general equilibrium theory during the financial crisis

(Source: web.mit.edu)

6:31 Nov 8th, 2011 | 3 notes

       "I have a vision – maybe just a hope—of a great revulsion: a moment when the American people look at what is happening, realize how their good will and patriotism have been abused, and put a stop to this drive to destroy much of what is best in our country. How and when this moment will come, I don’t know. But one thing is clear: it cannot happen unless we all make an effort to see and report the truth about what is happening."

- Paul Krugman - The Great Unravelling
12:06 Oct 16th, 2011 | 62 notes
12:02 Oct 3rd, 2011 | 6 notes

Dean Baker - The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive A new thought-provoking book from Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Baker’s chapters on the causes and lead up to the 2008 financial crisis are particularly excellent given that he was one of the first economist to point out that a housing bubble had emerged, way back in 2002. These chapters are very succinct, and thus make a good alternative if you do not have time to read all 348 pages of Stiglitz’s Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy (although I suggest you do read it). After being initially confronted by Baker’s claim that the Federal Reserve has maliciously ignored its employment mandate, the rest of the book goes into great detail about the broad and potentially damaging powers of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury and their sway on the economy as a whole. Best of all, the book is free. Why? Because in The End of Loser Liberalism, Baker argues that ‘copyrights are a form of government intervention in markets that leads to enormous inefficiency, in addition to redistributing income upward’. Download it here.

Dean Baker - The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive

A new thought-provoking book from Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Baker’s chapters on the causes and lead up to the 2008 financial crisis are particularly excellent given that he was one of the first economist to point out that a housing bubble had emerged, way back in 2002. These chapters are very succinct, and thus make a good alternative if you do not have time to read all 348 pages of Stiglitz’s Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy (although I suggest you do read it). After being initially confronted by Baker’s claim that the Federal Reserve has maliciously ignored its employment mandate, the rest of the book goes into great detail about the broad and potentially damaging powers of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury and their sway on the economy as a whole.

Best of all, the book is free. Why? Because in The End of Loser Liberalism, Baker argues that ‘copyrights are a form of government intervention in markets that leads to enormous inefficiency, in addition to redistributing income upward’.

Download it here.

The Tough Decision

11:26 Aug 10th, 2009 | 1 note

The economic crisis has had a huge impact on traditional journalism in Australia and across the world. Professional journalists from high end publications are being cut back in favor of gossipy, tabloid drivel machines. It’s a major sign that the economic problems we face are far reaching and that not even journalism, one of the key elements of a healthy democracy, is safe.

But you know that the world’s is in an even worse state when the editor in chief of your school paper is telling you to dumb down your content, that what you’re writing is too high brow and that you should shorten your articles because editing them gets to a stage where if anymore was cut out they would stop making sense. That’s right, the school newspaper is telling me to drop my standards.

It’s obvious to me why I’m being told this. None of my articles are anywhere near as popular as the “Caption Contest!” or the “Jokes of the Week!”. Yet my articles bring something resembling real journalism to our school publication, and that’s something I’m proud of. In the eyes of students it seams that articles on the future of technology in education, upcoming important changes to our electoral system, the place of privacy in schools and the importance of backing up school work pale in significance to the importance of what funny caption a picture of a guy falling off a bike should have.

It’s not like I’m being paid for these articles or receiving recognition for my work. I’m simply doing it because I think journalism is a vital aspect necessary to maintain a healthy community, and because I think every school should strive to engage, inform and entertain students in a way that makes them think about the world they live in instead of feeding them the lowest of the low. There is a place for “Caption Contests” and “Jokes of the Week” in our school paper, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of news and opinion that should matter to students. We shouldn’t be lowering ourselves to the lowest common denominator, we should be trying to bring the bottom up.

So now I’m faced with a decision: soldier on through this problem, lowing my tone and trying to continue as normal, or quit the publication as it’s top contributer. It’s a tough decision to make, but if my editors aren’t looking for what I have to offer, I might as well not bother.