BERKELEY: Across the Euro-Atlantic world, recovery from the recession of 2008-2009 remains sluggish and halting, turning what was readily curable cyclical unemployment into structural unemployment. And what was a brief hiccup in the process of (...)
BERKELEY: Neville Chamberlain is remembered today as the British prime minister who, as an avatar of appeasement of Nazi Germany in the late 1930's, helped to usher Europe into World War II. But, earlier in that fateful decade, relatively soon after (...)
BERKELEY: When the European Central Bank announced its program of government-bond purchases, it let financial markets know that it thoroughly disliked the idea, was not fully committed to it, and would reverse the policy as soon as it could. Indeed, (...)
BERKELEY: US Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke is not regarded as an oracle in the way that his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, was before the financial crisis. But financial markets were glued to the speech he gave in Jackson Hole, Wyoming (...)
BERKELEY: It is hard right now to write about American political economy. Nobody knows whether the debt-ceiling tripwire will be evaded; if so, how; or what will happen if it is not.
If no deal to raise the debt ceiling is reached by August 3, (...)
BERKELEY: Back in the late 1990s, in America at least, two schools of thought pushed for more financial deregulation — that is, for repealing the legal separation of investment banking from commercial banking, relaxing banks' capital requirements, (...)
BERKELEY: The most interesting moment at a recent conference held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire — site of the 1945 conference that created today's global economic architecture — came when Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf quizzed former United (...)
BERKELEY: Between 1950 and 1990 — the days of old-fashioned inflation-fighting downturns engineered by the United States Federal Reserve — America's post-recession unemployment rate would fall on average 32.4 percent over the course of a year from (...)
BERKELEY: As Stephen Cohen, with whom I wrote The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money, likes to say, economies do not evolve; they are, rather, intelligently designed. He also likes to say that, though there is an (...)
BERKELEY: The central insight of macroeconomics is a fact that was known to John Stuart Mill in the first third of the nineteenth century: there can be a large gap between supply and demand for pretty much all currently produced goods and services (...)
BERKELEY: One disturbing thing about studying economic history is how things that happen in the present change the past — or at least our understanding of the past. For decades, I have confidently taught my students about the rise of governments (...)
BERKELEY: At the end of 2008, as the financial crisis hit with full force, the countries of the world divided into two groups: those whose leaders decided to muddle through, and China. Only the Chinese took seriously Milton Friedman's and John (...)
BERKELEY: It is said that the early nineteenth-century British economist J.R. McCulloch originated the old joke that the only training a parrot needs to be a passable political economist is one phrase: “supply and demand, supply and demand.” Last (...)
BERKELEY: We hear from surprisingly many quarters these days that governments in Europe and North America, and their central banks, should give up on the expansionary policies they have pursued to try to create jobs. The high unemployment currently (...)
BERKELEY: One of the dirty secrets of economics is that there is no such thing as “economic theory.” There is simply no set of bedrock principles on which one can base calculations that illuminate real-world economic outcomes. We should bear in mind (...)
BERKELEY: I had always thought that Barack Obama made a significant mistake in naming the Republican ex-senator Alan Simpson to co-chair the president's deficit-reduction commission. Simpson was a noted budget arsonist when he was in the Senate. (...)
BERKELEY: In late May, the yield to maturity of the 30-year United States Treasury bond was 4.07 percent per year — down a full half a percentage point since the start of the month. That means that a 30-year Treasury bond had jumped in price by more (...)
BERKELEY: Despite the frequent cries of American Republicans that Barack Obama is trying to bring European-style socialism to the United States, it is now very clear that the US president wishes to govern from one place and one place only: the (...)
BERKELEY: In the United States, we sit in the midst of 10 percent unemployment. In some countries, fiscal policy is crippled by legitimate fears that more deficit spending will trigger government-debt crises. In many other countries, fiscal policy (...)
The Harvard economist Robert Barro, writing in The Wall Street Journal, recently made an intelligent argument against America's fiscal stimulus. After wading through the drivel of ethics-free Republican hacks and knowledge-free academic hacks who (...)
BERKELEY: There are always two paths to boost employment in the short term. The first path is to boost demand for goods and services, and then sit back and watch employment rise as businesses hire people to make the goods and services to meet that (...)
BERKELEY: Perhaps the best way to view a financial crisis is to look at it as a collapse in the risk tolerance of investors in private financial markets. Maybe the collapse stems from lousy internal controls in financial firms that, swaddled by (...)
BERKELEY: From the day after the collapse of Lehman Brothers last year, the policies followed by the United States Treasury, the US Federal Reserve, and the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been sound and helpful. (...)
BERKELEY: In America today - and in the rest of the world - economic-policy centrists are being squeezed. The Economic Policy Institute reports a poll showing that Americans overwhelmingly believe that the economic policies of the past year have (...)
BERKELEY: If you asked a modern economic historian like me why the world is currently in the grips of a financial crisis and a deep economic downturn, I would tell you that this is the latest episode in a long history of similar bubbles, crashes, (...)