Institute For New Economic Thinking has just posted this 2016 interview We Were Wrong about Keynes [James Crotty].

“I discovered that the Keynes that I had been taught was not the right Keynes historically. This is one of the two or three most famous economists in history. So how could we have gotten him so wrong?”

In 2016 James Crotty (Professor Emeritus, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst) sat down with INET for a wide ranging conversation about his life and experiences becoming a professional economist.

I have never heard this story told in this way before. For a long time I have accepted the idea that government is the only entity that can make some investments that society needs that just cannot be fulfilled by the private sector. I had no idea that this matched with Keynes’ thinking so well.

Institute for New Economic Thinking has highlighted a 5 part series Inequality 101.

In this five-part lecture series from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, economists Arjun Jayadev (Azim Premji Univeristy) and Branko Milanovic (CUNY Graduate Center) break down what inequality is, how we measure it, why it exists, and how to address it.

Here is the trailer for the series.

YouTube has The Grayzone video Matt Taibbi on the Twitter files.

Matt Taibbi joins The Grayzone live for a discussion with Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté about his reporting on internal Twitter files exposing shocking levels of US government pressure on the social media giant to censor accounts dissenting against official deceptions and revealing some of the most titanic frauds of the Trump-era Russiagate drama.

I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to the Twitter files story, so this was somewhat eye-opening for me. Some of the readers of my Facebook page or this blog may be way ahead of me on this story.

I hope I remember to point to this video if anybody should question my disdain for The Dreaded New York Times (TDNYT). This video validates my skepticism of TDNYT and my skepticism of the RussiaGate narrative. I think this also validates my skepticism of the coverage in the corporate new media of the war in the Ukraine.

YouTube has the video Economists Radhika Desai & Michael Hudson explain multipolarity, decline of US hegemony.

Introducing Geopolitical Economy Hour: This is the first episode of a show being hosted every two weeks by economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson. They present the program and discuss the rise of the multipolar world and decline of US hegemony.

Finally a return to what I think is the most important topic going forward. It has been an interesting diversion to get wrapped up in the Ukraine War, but these economic issues are the ones driving everything else.

This introduction is a great summary of what Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai have been trying to explain to us for decades.

Keep in mind that they are discussing a multipolar world not a unipolar one nor even a bipolar one.

Naked Capitalism has published the article The Great Inflation Debate: Supply Shocks and Wealth Effects in a Multipolar World Economy.

Setting the record straight and identifying less destructive pathways forward than round after round of interest rate increases.

Economic history is full of episodes in which inflation triggered both intense social conflicts and heated debates among economists and policymakers over its causes. The present worldwide upsurge in prices is no exception: from the moment governments and central banks first contemplated how to protect their citizens from COVID, inflation hawks and doves divided over whether the measures would touch off an inflationary price spiral.

This contradicts many of my assumptions about the cause of the current inflation. The inflation is about supply chain problems, but the people exercising the demand that drives inflation are not the ones I suspected.

The Analysis News has the interview Time Bomb in Global Finance – Rob Johnson.

A Bank for International Settlements study says 60+ trillion dollars of off-the-books currency swaps could be a profound, systematic risk. Robert Johnson joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news.

I knew how to protect myself from the crash of 2008/2009, but I am not sure I know how to protect myself from the next disaster. What is being described here is the greatest reason why I am so angry at Obama for bailing out the Wall Street crooks and refusing to prosecute them. Remember that Obama specifically chose to go to Harvard so he could learn where the levers of power were. He learned only too well, and he refused to use that knowledge to protect the people who voted him into power.

I have already taken some more extreme measures than I took in 2008. I hope these measures are enough.

This is probably the Bank for International Settlements report that was the subject of the above video Dollar debt in FX swaps and forwards: huge, missing and growing

Fiorella Isabel of The Convo Couch has the video You Hate Russia Because They Programmed You To: My Six Months in Moscow. I haven’t watched The Convo Couch in so long, I had no idea that Fiorella was in Moscow.

The Facebook post, where I first saw this, has already been removed. I hope that does not happen here.

Naked Capitalism has the post As Crypto-Crisis Metastasizes, Big Moves Are Being Made on CBDCs.

While all this is playing out, to breathless coverage in the media, big moves are being made around the world on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). And they are receiving virtually no coverage.

I had no idea other countries were so far ahead of the USA.

Michael Hudson says that this whole area of money is beyond his expertise. I think this article explains how it is not really beyond his expertise.

If you use a credit/debit card, the issuer of that card extracts a fee for every transaction. Will the Central Bank Digital Currencies do away with that economic overhead of that fee?

I’ll save you the effort of looking up how much a crore is. 1 Crore is equal to10 Million

YouTube has the video “We are in a debt trap” – Nouriel Roubini on 10 ‘megathreats’ to our world and how to stop them.

Nouriel Roubini is an economist, a professor in New York, a global economic consultant and an author who, amongst many distinguishing things, was one of those who foresaw the 2008 credit crunch and financial crisis.

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His latest work is called ‘Megathreats’, and it details 10 trends that make it more likely than not that we are heading for a global economic crash of stagnant growth, debt crises and high inflation that will cause decades of dystopian suffering and injustice. No wonder they call him Dr. Doom.
In this episode, Nouriel joins Krishnan to talk about climate change, job-displacing artificial intelligence and our future.

Is there value in disputing conclusions that may be right but are based on the wrong reasons? I can’t tell you exactly what will go wrong when you base you predictions on the wrong reasons, but I have faith that the wrong reasoning will come back to bite you. In this case, the wrong reasoning is the refusal to differentiate private debt from the debt of a currency creator. There are some limits to how much different they are, but the differences do exist.

Here is the link to the Channel 4 News on YouTube.

Stephaie Kelton has a Substack article Policymaking in a Pan(dem)ic.

Talking about the 2020/2021 pandemic recovery, she made the following comments:

We did better this time not because we got better policy from the Federal Reserve. Indeed, we got mostly the same thing we got after 2008—i.e. zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) and massive bond-buying (QE). We did better because Congress delivered not one, not two, but three substantial pieces of legislation that actively supported the economy with around $5 trillion in additional spending.

And so, once again, Deficits Saved the World. But this time deficits didn’t increase mainly due to Congressional inaction—i.e. the automatic stabilizers—but because of the proactive—i.e. discretionary—actions of Congress and the White House.

Did they get everything right? No. Did we need all $5 trillion? Probably not. Could some of that spending have been better targeted? You bet. Should some of it have been set to phase out sooner? Probably.

But remember that the three biggest packages ($2.2 trillion in March 2020, $900 billion in December 2020, and $1.9 trillion in March 2021) were all passed in middle of a global pandemic. For better or worse (I think it was for the better), lawmakers decided it was preferable to err on the side of doing too much as opposed to doing too little.

In the future, we should try to avoid cobbling together multi-trillion dollar fiscal rescue packages in a state of panic. One way to do that is to begin to strengthen our automatic stabilizers. An old rule of thumb advised drivers to consider replacing the shock absorbers in their vehicle every 50,000 miles or so. When it comes to our economic shock absorbers, we’re long overdue for an upgrade.