Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): February 24, 2022 Christopher Leonard, author of The Lords of Easy Money, on the damage done by over a decade of hyper-easy monetary policy from the Fed • Lea Ypi, a political philsopher and author of Free, on growing up in the last days of Communist Albania and the early days of its neoliberal successor
RIP, Paul Adolph Volcker
Paul Adolph Volcker is dead at the age of 92. (Most accounts of the man suppress the middle name, though it was often pointed out with bitter glee by builders and others who were undone by his high interest rate policies in the early 1980s.) As I wrote in LBO when he left office in 1987, if capitalism gave out a Hero of Accumulation award, he would have been first on the honors list. Let’s recall what he did, because all the worshipful obits will almost certainly sanitize the history. Volcker was… Read More
PS: The Riksbank is right
I got a couple of emails asking me whether I agreed or disagreed with the passage from the Riksbank’s philosophy of money that I quoted yesterday. I agree. I guess that makes me a tough customer too—a hard-money Marxist, you might say.
Yglesias & neoliberalism
Matthew Yglesias regrets that his original commentary on monetary policy, and my disagreement with it, got hijacked by Henry Farrell and turned into an analysis of the limits of neoliberalism. (I also stand corrected that Yglesias hasn’t written in favor of a jobs program in the past—apparently he has, though there was no evidence of it in the piece I responded to.) I like what Farrell has to say, and agree with him: there’s a kind of liberal, or neoliberal technocratic approach to politics that boils down to, as Adolph Reed once put it,… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 
Posted on August 15, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, August 15, 2009
On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve completed its regular policy-setting meeting, an event that happens every six weeks or so. The communiqué they issued after this one contained few surprises. They see the economy as leveling out, and the financial markets in an improving trend, but prosperity as anything but around the corner. More precisely, they expect economic activity “to remain weak for a time,” and anticipate that they will continue to engineer a regime of “exceptionally low,” in their phrase, interest rates. They see the risks of inflation as very low too—unlike a… Read More