Podcasts about levy institute

Steve's guest is noted economist L. Randall Wray, one of the early developers of modern money theory. As many times as this podcast has talked about MMT, it's always topical. In fact, just last week, Elon Musk discovered 14 magic money computers in government agencies! So, Trump had to hire the richest man in the world who hired who knows how many hundreds of young tech kids to discover what we've been saying for 30 years, which is that Congress appropriates money, and then the computers keystroke it into people's accounts. There's no mystery about this at all, but they think they've discovered not only something that people didn't know, but something that's, oh, it's so scary. It's nefarious that the government uses computers to increase the size of people's accounts. Well, that's spending. That's the way it's done. Clearly, this is a good time to revisit the valuable insights of MMT and look at the implications for building a society that serves its people. This episode dives deep into the fundamentals, debunking misconceptions about government spending, the role of taxes, and the myth that the US government can run out of money, like a household. Randy and Steve talk about changes in the economy due to financialization, and the difference between budget constraints and inflation constraints. Randy explains why we need to look at the history of debt in order to understand money. He talks about banking, including transactions between the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. The conversation breaks down complex concepts into relatable terms, sometimes with a touch of humor. Illustrating the creation of currency, Randy describes an imaginary scenario in which the fictional characters Robinson Crusoe and Friday devise a currency to facilitate barter. Randy: So, they come up with the idea of, ‘hey, we can use seashells as a medium of exchange.' And this is where money came from. It was Robinson Crusoe and Friday. Okay, think about this a little bit. It's pretty bizarre. We've got Crusoe and Friday marooned on a desert island. I can think of two much more likely scenarios. Okay, one, Crusoe came from Europe. What do Europeans do when they come across native people? Steve: Kill them. Anyone with an interest in how the economy truly operates will learn something from this episode. L. Randall Wray is a Professor of Economics at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, and Emeritus Professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is one of the developers of Modern Money Theory and his newest book on the topic is Understanding Modern Money Theory: Money and Credit in Capitalist Economies (Elgar), forthcoming in spring 2025. Recent books on MMT include Making Money Work for Us (Polity, November 2022), a companion illustrated guide, Money For Beginners (Polity, May 2023, with Levy Institute graduate Heske Van Doornen), and the third edition of Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems (Springer, 2024). He is also the author of Why Minsky Matters (Princeton, 2015) as well as the author, co-author, and editor of many other books. Find more of his work at levyinstitute.org

L. Randall Wray is a professor of Economics at Bard College and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute who is a long-term proponent of Modern Monetary Theory, a heterodox macroeconomic theory that teaches the government should not worry about accruing debt, because it is always able to print more money to service that debt. This is one of those theories that sounds too good to be true - how could it be that there's nothing wrong with debt, and that there's nothing stopping a country like the United States from spending as much as it wants on social services and public works projects? At the heart of the theory, the piece that makes the whole thing go, is a huge shift in the way that we understand money. Instead of seeing it as an immutable unit of exchange, MMT theorists argue that money is primarily a money of account - which is simply a ledger system for keeping track of who owes what to whom. We take apart Wray's story of the history of money, with a detour into Medieval tally sticks, how barter systems evolve into monetary ones, and how central banking sealed our economic fate, and how debt is far more valuable than we realize. Sign up for our Patreon and get episodes early + join our weekly Patron Chat https://bit.ly/3lcAasB AND rock some Demystify Gear to spread the word: https://demystifysci.myspreadshop.com/ OR do your Amazon shopping through this link: https://amzn.to/4g2cPVV (00:00) Go! Who is Randall Wray? (00:05:03) Money's Origins and Importance (00:13:55) Development of Writing and Record-Keeping (00:26:00) Tribal Justice Systems (00:35:51) Ledger and Barter Systems (00:41:58) Tally Sticks and Medieval Finance (00:52:30) Transition from Tally Sticks to Central Banking (01:02:33) Central Banking and its Origins (01:19:17) The Role of Central Banks in Preventing Bank Runs (01:26:57) Tax Liabilities and Money Demand (01:37:10) Currency Redemption and Economic Circulation (01:46:08) Fiscal Policy and Future Burden (01:56:20) The Role of the Federal Reserve and Treasury (02:04:40) Bond Market and Fiscal Management (02:13:22) Government Spending and Inflation (02:20:22) Oil Price Shocks and Policy Responses (02:30:03) Dollar Dominance and Financial Trust (02:35:00) Future Economic Questions #sciencepodcast, #longformpodcast, #ModernMonetaryTheory, #EconomicsExplained, #MoneyOrigins, #CentralBanking, #FiscalPolicy, #GovernmentSpending, #DebtEconomy, #WilliamOfOrange, #BankOfEngland, #InflationControl, #FinancialHistory, #EconomicInsights, #MonetaryPolicy, #TaxSystem, #BondMarket, #TribalEconomies, #MoneyAndDebt, #Hyperinflation, #DollarDominance, #FinancialTrust Check our short-films channel, @DemystifySci: https://www.youtube.com/c/DemystifyingScience AND our material science investigations of atomics, @MaterialAtomics https://www.youtube.com/@MaterialAtomics Join our mailing list https://bit.ly/3v3kz2S PODCAST INFO: Anastasia completed her PhD studying bioelectricity at Columbia University. When not talking to brilliant people or making movies, she spends her time painting, reading, and guiding backcountry excursions. Shilo also did his PhD at Columbia studying the elastic properties of molecular water. When he's not in the film studio, he's exploring sound in music. They are both freelance professors at various universities. - Blog: http://DemystifySci.com/blog - RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/2be66934/podcast/rss - Donate: https://bit.ly/3wkPqaD - Swag: https://bit.ly/2PXdC2y SOCIAL: - Discord: https://discord.gg/MJzKT8CQub - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/DemystifySci - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DemystifySci/ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/DemystifySci MUSIC: -Shilo Delay: https://g.co/kgs/oty671

“...Because we recognize that taxes are not a funding operation, there's this myth that people who support MMT don't want to use fiscal policy to promote equity. Of course, taxes are redistribution … Things have gotten way out of hand, so taxation is also intended to promote equity, to affect distribution and allocation. Resource allocation.”Mat Forstater was on this podcast four years ago (episode 21!) recounting the history of MMT. He described his early days at Levy Institute and UMKC, his relationship with Warren Mosler and Pavlina Tcherneva, and how they established MMT as interdisciplinary, expanding into law and humanities. If you haven't listened to that episode, we urge you to check it out.This week, Mat talks to Steve about the role of taxation in the economy and its relation to government spending. It's not enough to understand how taxes create a demand for the nation's currency and give it value. Mat always reminds us to consider the total impact of any policy — from using taxation to encourage or discourage behavior, to its ripple effects and unintended consequences.They touch on the importance of decoupling taxation from federal programs and the need to design tax policies that consider the indirect effects on society. They also talk about the potential deflationary impact of programs like Medicare for All, and whether a job guarantee can address unemployment and provide quality jobs.Dr. Mathew Forstater is a professor in Economics at the University of Missouri/Kansas City and the Research Director of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. having received a Ph.D. at The New School for Social Research. His research focuses on the History of Economic Thought, Economic Methodology, Political Economy, Public Policy, Economics of Discrimination, Environmental Economics, African and African American Economic History. @mattybram on Twitter

If you've recently chatted with a well-informed liberal – the kind who reads the NY Times or watches PBS NewsHour – you've heard encouraging things about the economy. You've heard that Biden's doing a good job. Unemployment has gone down, wages have gone up. Why can't you be happy about it all?To celebrate all this good news, we brought back our friend, Yeva Nersisyan, associate professor of economics at Franklin and Marshall College, research scholar at the Levy Institute, and frequent collaborator with MMT OG Randy Wray.Yes, unemployment rates are lower, but we know those numbers don't tell the true story. Or have you already forgotten our episode with Pavlina, just two short weeks ago? Yes, wages have gone up. But so has inflation. And in the race between inflation and wages, inflation is winning. Speaking of which, our Macro N Cheese family knows that one thing worse than inflation is the Fed's cure for it.In this episode, Steve and Yeva look at the disconnect between the ongoing immiseration of the working class and the rosy scenario painted by politicians, pundits, and economists. At least one of those groups should know better. They discuss the looming student debt crisis, and the effect of the Fed's interest rate hikes on student loans.When discussing MMT-informed solutions, Yeva warns:“You have to be consistent — whether it's the Trump tax cuts, whether it's the social security question. And you have to consistently say: the question of taxes and government spending, it should not be about deficits, should not be about debt, it should be about: is this the right thing for the economy? Is this what the people want? Is this what the people need? That's what you need to start with. And just because you want to raise taxes on the wealthy, which I do too, but I don't want to tie it to things like social security, because I think that's just a losing argument, and that's just not true.”MMT points toward answers, if anyone is asking.Yeva Nersisyan is an associate professor of economics at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, and a research scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.

Hispanic volunteers and Bolivia attacked by the right This week on La Voz en Breve, journalist Mariel Fiori has a special show. On the Day of Service honoring Martin Luther King Jr., we met Gerson Rodríguez, Katherine Guerra and Joel Gonzalo Cac Pop, three of the Hispanic volunteers of the Ulster County Immigrant Defense Network, UIDN. What do they do? What types of help do they give? How do they do that? What are the plans and projects of this collective for Kingston and Ulster County in 2022? How can you get involved or ask for help? Today we found out about this and much more. To volunteer with UIDN, call Gerson Rodríguez at (845)706-4039, or look on Facebook for Gerson Rodriguez Katherine Guerra or Joel Gonzalo Cac Pop. UIDN Helpline 1-888-726-7276.In addition, in her column Let's talk about economics, Professor Martha Tepepa of the Levy Institute of Economics at Bard College talks about the case of Bolivia and the inveterate attack from the right. The professor said "before Evo Morales came to power, the Aymaras, Quechuas, Guarani and other original peoples, ethnic groups that make up the Bolivian universe and who saw how their simplest rights were ignored. 90% of the rural population lived in poverty. With oligarchic governments since 1952, public companies were becoming private, and all the presidents of the day made personal fortunes mortgaging the well-being of the people and the assets of the nation that they were supposed to protect. Evo Morales initiated a different direction. Social justice was the key to his presidency through the equitable distribution of the country's wealth. Power was concentrated in the communities, peoples, and indigenous, peasant, and popular organizations. The new Constitution adopted in 2009 expressed the desire for a multinational Bolivia, critical of the "colonial state" and liberal and bourgeois democracy". Los hispanos voluntarios y Bolivia atacada por la derecha Esta semana en La Voz en breve, la periodista Mariel Fiori tiene un programa especial. En el Día de servicio honrando a Martin Luther King Jr., conocimos a Gerson Rodríguez, Katherine Guerra y a Joel Gonzalo Cac Pop, tres de los voluntarios hispanos de la Red de Defensa de los Inmigrantes del Condado de Ulster, UIDN. ¿Qué hacen? ¿Qué tipos de ayuda dan? ¿Cómo lo hacen? ¿Cuáles son los planes y proyectos de este colectivo para Kingston y el condado de Ulster en 2022? ¿Cómo te puedes involucrar o pedir ayuda? Hoy nos enteramos de esto y mucho más.Para hacerse voluntario con UIDN, llamar a Gerson Rodríguez al (845)706-4039, o buscar en Facebook a Gerson Rodriguez Katherine Guerra o Joel Gonzalo Cac Pop Linea de ayuda de UIDN 1-888-726-7276.Además, en su columna Hablemos de economía, la profesora Martha Tepepa del Instituto Levy de Economía en Bard College habla del caso de Bolivia y el ataque empedernido de la derecha. Dijo la profesora “antes de la llegada de Evo Morales al poder, los aymaras, quechuas, guaraníes y otros pueblos originarios, etnias que conforman el universo boliviano y que veían cómo eran ignorados sus derechos más simples. El 90 % de la población rural vivía en la pobreza. Con gobiernos oligarcas desde 1952, empresas públicas se fueron convirtiendo en privadas, y todos los presidentes

In this episode of Keiser Report, Max and Stacy look at Biden letting it rip: inflation, that is. They examine San Francisco, where squalor is luxury and progress is squalor. In the second half, Max continues his conversation with Marshall Auerback, a market analyst and Levy Institute researcher, about the economy in a post-pandemic world of inflation, shortages and money printing.

In this episode of Keiser Report, Max and Stacy look at the economics of rug pulls and what that may look like on a global economy wide scale. In the second half, Max chats to market analyst and Levy Institute researcher Marshall Auerback about inflation, shortages, and money printing.

Nesse Sistema Financeiro Em Debate, Luiz Macahyba e Norberto Martins, acompanhados do professor Ernani Torres (IE/UFRJ), receberão o professor Leonardo Burlamaqui (UERJ e Levy Institute) para discutir a crise da Evergrande, a organização do sistema financeiro chinês e as perspectivas para o crescimento e desenvolvimento do gigante asiático.

Michael Hudson, American economist and author of Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1972) discusses the rentier economy that accounts for the growing disparity in wealth due to finance capitalism. Giving a history of the the polarisation of the US economy since the 1960s through the present, Hudson discusses how the high costs of education and housing have led to a growing problem of student debt, higher costs of living and increasing austerity. Noting how 80% of bank loans are made for real estate in the US, Hudson expounds upon how loans and exponentially growing debts outstrip profits from the economy proving disastrous for both the government and the people who are paying increasing amounts on housing with little to no money left to spend on goods and services. Hudson contends that finance capitalism is a “self-terminating” oligarchical system leaving workers traumatised, afraid to strike or react to working conditions, while they are pushed towards serfdom as US and Europe are heading towards a debt crisis on par with that of Argentina and Greece.TranscriptIntroduction: Welcome to Savage Minds. I'm your host, Julian Vigo. Today's show marks the launch of our second season with a very special guest: Michael Hudson. Michael Hudson is a financial analyst and president of the Institute for the Study of long term economic trends. He is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City, and the professor at the School of Marx studies, Peking University in China. He's also a research fellow at the Levy Institute of Bard College, and he has served as an economic adviser to the US Canadian, Mexican, and Latvian governments. He's also been a consultant to UNITAR, the Institute for Research on Public Policy and the Canadian Science Council, among other organisations. He holds a BA from the University of Chicago and an MA and PhD in economics from New York University. Professor Hudson is the author of Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy (2015), and most recently, J is for junk economics, a guide to reality in an age of deception. His super imperialism, the economic strategy of the American Empire has just been translated into German after its appearance in Chinese, Japanese and Spanish. He sits on the editorial board of lap times quarterly and has written for the Journal of International Affairs, Commonweal, International Economy, Financial Times, and Harper's, and he's a regular contributor to CounterPunch. I welcome Michael Hudson, to Savage Minds.Julian Vigo: Class analysis in the United States is rather subterfuge amidst all these other narratives of the American dream as it's framed—that being the right to own one's home. In the UK, that became part of the Trojan horse, that Thatcher built to win her election. It was a very smart move. She won that election—she won her elections—by the reforms in the “right to buy” scheme as I'm sure you know. I t was really clever and disastrous for human rights in the country. I've spent quite a bit of my life in the UK and to see that in 1979 was, I believe, 49% of all residential housing was council housing. And when I wrote a piece on this for the Morning Star about eight, nine years ago, that rate was reduced to under 11%. So we're seeing the haves- and have-nots. And this is where your work really struck a chord for me. And let's kick into the show at this point. I have written over the years, about rentier capitalism, a term that is increasingly used to describe economies dominated by rentier, rents and rent-generating assets. And you discuss this quite a bit in your work, more recently, your article from July, “Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover.” And in this article, you discuss how today the finance, insurance and real estate sectors have regained control of government creating a “neo-rentier” economy as you put it, while you note—and I quote you: “The aim of this postindustrial finance capitalism is the opposite of industrial capitalism as known to nineteenth-century economists: it seeks wealth primarily through the extraction of economic rent, not industrial capital formation.” Unquote. I was wondering if we might begin our talk by branching out from this piece you wrote in July. And if you could explain for our listeners why discerning rentier capitalism is essential for understanding the global push to privatise and financialise those sectors that formerly existed in the public domain such as—and we see this everywhere, including in the EU—transportation, health care, prisons, policing, education, the post office, etc.Michael Hudson: Well, most textbooks depict a sort of happy world that almost seems to exist in the 1950s. And this “happy world” is when wealthy people get money, they build factories and buy machinery and hire workers to produce more goods and services. But that's not what the credits created for today, it's the textbooks that pick the banks that take in people's deposits and lend them out to people who build industrial production, and you'll have a picture of workers with lunchboxes working in. But actually, banks only lend money against assets. And the main assets do not make a profit by employing people to produce things there. They simply are opportunities to extract rent, like real estate 80% of bank loans are made for real estate. And that means they're made against primarily buildings that are in land that are already there. And the effective more and more bank credit is to raise the price of real estate. And in the United States, in the last year, housing prices have gone up 20%. And typically, in America, if you go to a bank and take out a loan, the government is going to guarantee the bank that you will pay the loan up to the point where it absorbs 43% of your income.So here's a big chunk of American income going to pay simply for housing, those price increases, not because there's more housing, or better housing. But in fact, the housing is built worse and worse every year, by lowering the standards, but simply inflation. There are other forms of rent, other people pay, for instance, 18% of America's GDP is healthcare, much higher than the percentage in any other country for much lower quality of service. So you know, that's sort of taken out of people's budgets. If you're a worker in the United States, right away, you get your paycheque 15%—a little more, maybe 16% now—is deducted for Social Security and medical care for when you're older. They also need up to maybe 30%, for income tax, federal, state and local income tax before you have anything to spend. And then you have to spend for housing, you have to pay for transportation, you have to pay for your own medical insurance contributions, your own pension contributions. So there's very, very little that is left over in people's budgets to buy goods and services. Not only have real wages in the United States, gone down now for three decades, but the disposable income that people and families get after they meet their sort of monthly “nut,” what they can spend on goods and services is shrunk even more. So while they're getting squeezed, all this money is paid to rentiers as at the top. And because of the miracle of compound interest, the amount that the 1% of the economy has grows exponentially. Any rate of interest is a doubling time. And even though people know that there's only a 0.1% rate of interest, now for the banks, and for large wall firms, it's about 3% if you want to buy a mortgage. and so this, the 0.1% is lent out to large companies like Blackstone that are now buying up almost all of the housing that comes onto the market in the United States. So in 2008, 69% of homeowners of Americans own their own homes. Now it's fallen by more than 10%. It's fallen to about 51%. All this difference has been basically the financial sector funding a transformation away from home ownership into landlordship—into absentee ownership. And so the if you're part of the 1%, the way that you make money is by buying stocks or bonds, or corporate takeovers, or buying real estate and not building factories. And that's why the factories and the industry have been shifting outside of the United States over to China, and other countries. So, what we're having is a kind of…I won’t say its post-industrial capitalism, because people thought that the what was going to follow industrial capitalism was going to be socialism. They thought that there will be more and more government spending on providing basic needs that people had. And instead of socialism, and a more, egalitarian distribution of wealth and income, you've had a polarization of wealth and income, you've had the wealthy people making money financially, and by real estate, and by rent seeking, and by creating monopolies, but not by building factories, not by producing goods and services. And that is why the economy's polarizing, and so many people are unhappy with their conditions. Now, they're going further and further into debt and their student debt. Instead of education here being a public utility that's provided freely, it's become privatised at NYU, it's now $50,000 or $60,000 a year. There is no way in which the United States can compete industrially with other countries when they've loaded down new entrants into the labor force with huge housing costs, student debt, huge taxes have been shifted off the 1% onto the 99%. So in the United States, finance capitalism basically is self-terminating. It leads to a polarised economy, it leads to austerity. And it leaves countries looking like Greece looked after 2015, after its debt crisis, it looks like Argentina is trying to struggle to pay its foreign debts. And that seems to be the future in which the US and Europe are moving towards.Julian Vigo: I posted on my Facebook wall about this about maybe five weeks ago, that the rentier class, I'm not just including the likes of Blackstone, but the middle class that are multiple home dwellers. I noted that during the lockdown, I was reading through accounts on social media of people who were being threatened by landlords, landlords, who actually had no mortgage to pay. And I had to wonder at that point, what is the input of the rentier class by the landowning class who are not necessarily part of the 1%. These are people who, as some of these people came on my wall and said, “I worked hard to buy my second and third houses!” And I thought, “Well, let me pull out my violins.” One thing that really alerted me during lockdown was the lack of sympathy for renters. And I don't just mean in the US, in fact, I think the US had a kinder response to renting in some sectors such as New York state where there has been—and still—is a massive pushback against any form of relaxation of rent forgiveness, since lockdown in the EU and Italy and France. It's appalling the kind of treatment that renters received here. I spoke to people in Bologna, who were doing a rent strike, but fearful of having their name mentioned. I ended up not being able to run the piece because of that. And there are so many people who don't have money to pay their rent in the EU, in the UK, and yet, we're somehow focusing oftentimes on these meta-critical analyses of the bigger corporations, the 1%. But where does the middle class fit into this, Michael, because I do have to wonder if maybe we should be heading towards the model I hold in my mind and heart is St. Ives in Cornwall, which about eight years ago set a moratorium saying no second homes in this city. Now, they didn't do it because of any allegiance to Marxism or socialism. They did it in part because of that, and because of a left-leaning politics, but mostly because they didn't want to have a ghost town that when the summer was over, you had very few people living in town. What are the answers to the rentier class that is also composed of people who consider themselves hard-working people who just want someone else to pay for their house, as one person on Twitter, put it.Michael Hudson: This is exactly the problem that is plaguing left wing politics, from Europe to America in the last fifty years.Julian Vigo: Exactly. It's astounding because there was a lot of debate on Twitter around last summer, when one woman wrote, I just did the math, I'm almost 29 years old, and I paid and she listed the amount in rent, I have just bought my landlord a second house. And people are adding it up that we are back to understanding. And I think in terms of the medieval period, remember in high school in the US when you study history, and you learn about feudalism, and the serfs coming in from far afield having to tend to the Masters terrain. And I think, are we heading back to a kind of feudalism under a new name? Because what's dividing those who can afford rents and those who can, it's not only your eligibility to receive a bank loan in this climate, which is quite toxic in London. I know many architects, lawyers, physicians who cannot get bank loans. Ironically, the bar is being raised so high that more and more people in London are moving on to the canal system—they're renting or buying narrowboats. The same is happening in other parts of the world where people are being barred out of home ownership for one reason or another and at the same time, there's a class of people often who got loans in a period when it was quite easy in the 80s and early 90s, let's say and they hold a certain control over who's paying—43% of income of Americans goes on housing. And as you know, in New York City that can be even higher. How can we arrive at a society where there's more equality between these haves and have-nots? Because it seems that the middle class is playing a role in this. They're trying to come off as being the hard-working schmoes, who have just earned their right to own their second or third homes, and then the others who will never have a foot on that ladder, especially given the crash?Michael Hudson: Well, I think you've put your finger on it. Most people think of economies being all about industry. But as you've just pointed out, for most people, the economy is real estate. And if you want to understand how modern economies work, you really should begin by looking at real estate, which is symbiotic with with banking, because as you pointed out that in a house is worth whatever a bank will lend. And in order to buy a house, unless you have an enormous amount of savings, which hardly anyone has, you'll borrow from a bank and buy the house. And the idea is to use the rent to pay the interest to the bank. And then you end up hoping late hoping with a capital gain, which is really land price gain. You borrow from the bank hoping that the Federal Reserve and the central bank or the Bank of England is going to inflate the economy and inflate asset prices and bank credit is going to push prices further and further up. As the rich get richer, they recycle the money in the banks and banks lend it to real estate. So, the more the economy is polarised between the 1% and the 99%, the more expensive houses get the more absentee landlords are able to buy the houses and outbid the homebuyers, who as you pointed out, can't get loans because they're already loaned up. If they can't get loans in England to buy a house, it's because they already owe so much money for other things. In America, it would be because they own student debt or because they own other bank loans, and they're all loaned up. So the key is people are being squeezed more than anywhere else on housing. In America, it rents care too and on related sort of monopoly goods that yield rent. Now the problem is why isn't this at the centre of politics?Is it because— and it's ironic that although most people in every country, Europe and America are still homeowners, or so they only own their own home—they would like to be rocky as a miniature? They would like to live like the billionaires live off the rents. They would like to be able to have enough money without working to get a free lunch and the economy of getting a free lunch. And so somehow, they don't vote for what's good for the wage earners. They vote for well, if I were to get richer, then I would want to own a house and I would want to get rent. So I'm going to vote in favour of the landlord class. I'm going to vote in favour of banks lending money to increase housing prices. Because I'd like to borrow money from a bank to get on this treadmill, that's going to be an automatic free lunch. Now, I not only get rent, but I'll get the rising price of the houses that prices continue to rise. So somehow, the idea of class interest, they don't think of themselves as wave generators, they think of themselves as somehow wouldn't be rentiers in miniature without reaising that you can't do it in miniature. You really have to have an enormous amount of money to be successful rentier.So no class consciousness means that the large real estate owners, the big corporations like Blackstone, that own huge amounts can sort of trot out a strapped, homeowner and individual, and they will sort of hide behind it and say, “Look at this, poor family, they use their money to buy a house, the sort of rise in the world, and now the tenants have COVID, and they can't pay the rent. Let's not bail out these, these landlords.” So even though they're not getting rent, we have to aid them. And think of them as little people, but they're not little people. They're a trillion dollar, money managers. They're huge companies that are taking over. And people somehow personify the billionaires and the trillion dollar real estate management companies as being small people just like themselves. There's a confusion about the economic identity.Julian Vigo: Well, certainly in the United States, we are known to have what's called the “American dream.” And it's, it's quite interesting when you start to analyse what that dream has morphed into, from the 1960s to the present, and I even think through popular culture. Remember Alexis, in Dynasty, this was the go-to model for success. So we've got this idea that the super rich are Dallas and Dynasty in the 80s. But 20 years after that, we were facing economic downfalls. We had American graduates having to go to graduate school because they couldn't get a job as anything but a barista. And the model of getting scholarships or fellowships, any kind of bursary to do the Masters and PhD. When I was doing my graduate work, I was lucky enough to have this, but that was quickly disappearing. A lot of my colleagues didn't have it. And I imagine when you went to school, most of your colleagues had it. And today, and in recent years, when I was teaching in academia, most of my students doing advanced degrees had zero funding. So, we've got on the one hand, the student debt, hamster wheel rolling, we have what is, to me one of the biggest human rights issues of the domestic sphere in countries like the US or Great Britain, frankly, everywhere is the ability to live without having to be exploited for the payment of rent. And then we have this class of people, whether they're Blackstone, and huge corporations, making billions, or the middle class saying, “But I'm just living out the American dream.” How do we square the “American dream,” and an era where class consciousness is more invisible than ever has it been?Michael Hudson: I think the only way you can explain that is to show how different life was back in the 1960s, 1950s. When I went to school, and the college, NYU cost $500 a semester, instead of 50,000, that the price of college has gone up 100 times since I went to college—100 times. I rented a house in a block from NYU at $35 a month on Sullivan Street. And now that same small apartment would go for 100 times that much, $3,500 a month, which is a little below the average rent in Manhattan these days. So, you've had these enormous increases in the cost of getting an education, they cost of rent, and in a society where housing was a public utility, and education was a public utility, education would be provided freely. If the economy wanted to keep down housing prices, as they do in China for instance, then you would be able to work if the kind of wages that Americans are paid today and be able to save. The ideal of China or countries that want to compete industrially is to lower the cost of living so that you don't have to pay a very high wages to cover the inflated cost of housing, the cost of education.If you privatise education in America, and if you increase the housing prices, then either you're going to have to pay labor, much higher rates that will price it out of world markets, at least for industrial goods, or you'll have to squeeze budgets. So yes, people can pay for housing, and education, but they're not going to buy the goods and services they produce. And so and that's one of the reasons why America is not producing industrial manufacturers. It's importing it all abroad. So the result of this finance capitalism that we have the result of the rent squeeze, that you depict, and the result of voters not realising that this is economic suicide for them is that the economy is shrinking and leaving people basically out in the street. And of course, all of this is exacerbated by the COVID crisis right now. Where, right now you have, especially in New York City, many people are laid off, as in Europe, they're not getting an income. Well, if your job has been closed down as a result of COVID, in Germany, for instance, you're still given something like 80% of your normal salary, because they realise that they have to keep you solvent and living. In the United States, there's been a moratorium on rents, they realise that, well, if you've lost your job, you can't pay the rent. There's a moratorium on evictions, there's a moratorium on bank foreclosures on landlords that can't pay their mortgage to the bank, because their tenants are not paying rent. All of that is going to expire in February, that’s just in a few months.  So they're saying, “OK, in New York City, 50,000 tenants are going to be thrown out onto the street, thousands of homes are going to be foreclosed on.” All over the country, millions of Americans are going to be subject now to be evicted. You can see all of the Wall Street companies are raising private capital funds to say, “We're going to be waiting for all this housing to come onto the market. We're going to be waiting for all of these renovations to take place. We're going to swoop in and pick it up.” This is going to be the big grab bag that is going to shape the whole coming generation and do to America really what Margaret Thatcher did to England when she got rid of—when she shifted from housing, the council housing that you mentioned, was about half the population now dow to about 1/10 of the population today.Julian Vigo: This is what I wonder is not being circulated within the media more frequently. We know that major media is not...[laughts] They like to call themselves left-of-centre but they're neoliberal which I don't look at anything in the liberal, the neoliberal sphere, as “left.” I look at it as a sort of strain of conservatism, frankly. But when you were speaking about paying $35 a month for an apartment on Sullivan Street, get me a time machine! What year was that? Michael?Michael Hudson: That was 1962.Julian Vigo: 1962 And roughly, the minimum wage in New York was just over $1 an hour if I'm not mistaken.Michael Hudson: I don't remember. I was making I think my first job on Wall Street was 50 to $100. A year $100 a week.Julian Vigo: So yes, I looked it up because I was curious when you said 100 times certainly we see that. If the tuition at New York when and New York University when I left was $50,000 a year you were paying $500 a semester. This is incredible inflation.Michael Hudson: And I took out a student loan from the state because I wanted to buy economic books. I was studying the history of economic thought and so I borrowed, you know, I was able to take out a loan that I repaid in three years as I sort of moved up the ladder and got better paying jobs. But that was the Golden Age, the 1960s because in that generation there was the baby boom that just came online. There were jobs for everybody. There was a labor shortage. And everybody was trying to hire—anyone could get a job. I got to New York and I had $15 in my pocket in 1960. I'd shared a ride with someone, [I] didn't know what to do. We stayed in a sort of fleabag hotel on Bleecker Street that was torn down by the time you got there. But I,  took a walk around and who should I run into that Gerde's Folk City, but a friend of mine had stayed at my house in Chicago once and he let me stay at his apartment for a few weeks till I can look around, find a place to live and got the place for $35 a month,Julian Vigo: When there was that debate on Twitter—there were many debates actually about renting on Twitter—and there were a few landlords who took to Twitter angry that they learned that their renters had received subsidies in various countries to pay their rent. And instead of paying their rent, the people use this to up and buy a downpayment on a home. And they got very upset. And there was a bit of shadow on Friday there with people saying, “Well, it's exactly what you've done.” And I find this quite fascinating, because I've always said that the age of COVID has made a huge Xray of our society economically speaking. And it's also telling to me that in countries that I would assume to be more socialist leaning, if not socialist absolutely, in the EU, we saw very few movements against rent. Very few people or groups were calling for a moratorium on rent. It's ironic, but it was in the US where we saw more moratoria happen. What is happening where—and this reaches to larger issues, even outside of your specialty of economics and finance—but why on earth has it come to be that the left is looking a lot more like the right? And, don't shoot me, but you know, I've been watching some of Tucker Carlson over the past few years, someone who I could not stand after 9/11. And he has had more concern and more investigations of the poor and the working class than MSBC or Rachel Maddow in the biggest of hissy fits. What is going on politically that the valences of economic concern are shifting—and radically so?Michael Hudson: Well, the political situation in America is very different from every other country. In the Democratic Party, in order to run for a position, you have to spend most of your time raising money, and the party will support whatever candidates can raise the most money. And whoever raises the largest amount of money gets to be head of a congressional committee dealing with whatever it is their campaign donors give. So basically, the nomination of candidates in the United States, certainly in the Democratic Party, is based on how much money you can raise to finance your election campaign, because you're supposed to turn half of what you raised over to the party apparatus. Well, if you have to run for an office, and someone explained to me in in the sixties, if I wanted to go into politics, I had to find someone to back up my campaign. And they said, “Well, you have to go to the oil industry or the tobacco industry.”And you go to these people and say, “Will you back my campaign?” And they say, Well, sure, what's your position going to be on on smoking on oil and the the tax position on oil, go to the real estate interest, because all local politics and basically real estate promotion projects run by the local landlords and you go to the real estate people and you say, “Okay, I'm going to make sure that we have public improvements that will make your land more valuable, but you won't have to pay taxes on them.” So, if you have people running for office, proportional to the money they can make by the special interests, that means that all the politicians here are representing the special interests that pay them and their job as politicians is to deliver a constituency to their campaign contributors. And so the campaign contributors are going to say, “Well, here's somebody who could make it appear as if they're supporting their particular constituency.” And so ever since the 60s, certainly in America, the parties divided Americans into Irish Americans, Italian Americans, black Americans, Hispanic Americans. They will have all sorts of identity politics that they will run politicians on. But there's one identity that they don't have—and that's the identity of being a wage earner. That's the common identity that all these hyphenated Americans have in common. They all have to work for a living and get wages, they're all subject to, they have to get housing, they have to get more and more bank credit, if they want to buy housing so that all of the added income they get is paid to the banks as mortgage interest to get a home that used to be much less expensive for them. So basically, all of the increase in national income ends up being paid to the campaign contributors, the real estate contributors, the oil industry, the tobacco industry, the pharmaceuticals industry, that back the politicians. And essentially, you have politics for sale in the United States. So we're really not in a democracy anymore—we're in an oligarchy. And people don't realise that without changing this, this consciousness, you're not going to have anything like the left-wing party.And so you have most Americans out wanting to be friendly with other Americans, you know, why can't everybody just compromise and be in the centre? Well, there's no such thing as a centrist. Because you'll have an economy that's polarising, you have the 1% getting richer and richer and richer by getting the 99% further and further in debt. So the 99% are getting poorer and poor after paying their debts. And to be in the centre to say, and to be say, only changes should be marginal, that means—a centrist is someone who lets this continue. With that we're not going to make a structural change, that's radical, we're not going to change the dynamic that is polarising the economy, between creditors at the top and debtors is at the bottom, between landlords at the top and renters at the bottom between monopolists and the top and the consumers who have to pay monopoly prices for pharmaceuticals, for cable TV, for almost everything they get. And none of this is taught in the economics courses. Because you take an  economics course, they say, “There's no such thing as unearned income. Everybody earns whatever they can get.” And the American consciousness is shaped by this failure to distinguish between earned income and unearned income and a failure to see that dynamic is impoverishing them. It's like the proverbial frog that's been boiled slowly in water. So, with this false consciousness people have—if only they can save enough and borrow from a bank—they can become a rentier in Miniature. They're just tricked into a false dream.Intermission: You're listening to savage minds, and we hope you're enjoying the show. Please consider subscribing. We don't accept any money from corporate or commercial sponsors. And we depend upon listeners and readers just like you. Now back to our show.Julian Vigo: I don't know if you saw the movie called Queen of Versailles. It was about this very bizarre effort to construct a very ugly Las Vegas-style type of Versailles by a couple that was economically failing. And it spoke to me a lot about the failings of the quote unquote, “American dream.” And I don't mean that dream, per se. I mean, the aspiration to have the dream, because that is, as you just pointed out, unearned income, that is the elephant in the room. And it almost seems to be the elephant maybe to keep using that metaphor, that the blind Sufi tale: everyone's feeling a different part of it, but no one is naming it. And I find this really shocking, that we can't speak of unearned income and look at the differences as to which country's tax inheritance and which do not—this idea that one is entitled to wealth. Meanwhile, a lot of US institutions are academically, now formally, being captured by the identity lobbies and there are many lobbies out there—it's a gift to them. They don't have to work on the minimum wage, they don't have to work on public housing, they don't have to work on housing.They can just worry about, “Do we have enough pronoun badges printed out?” And I find this really daunting as someone who is firmly of the left and who has seen some kind of recognition have this problem bizarrely, from the right. We seem to have a blind spot where we're more caught up in how people see us, rather than the material reality upon which unearned and earned income is based. Why is it that today people are living far worse than their grandparents and parents especially?Michael Hudson: Well, I think we've been talking about that, because they have to pay expenses as their parents and grandparents didn't have to pay, they have to pay much higher rent. Everybody used to be able to afford to buy a house, that was the definition of “middle class” in America was to be a homeowner. And when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, everybody on the salary they were getting could afford to buy their house. And that's why so many people bought the houses with working class sell rates. As I told you, I was getting $100 a week. At least if you were quiet you could do it. If you were black, you couldn't do it. The blacks were redlined. But the white people could buy the houses. And that's why today, the white population has so much more wealth than the black population, because the white families would leave the house to the children and housing prices have gone up 100 times. And because they've gone up 100 times, this is endowed with a whole white hereditary class of kids whose family own their own homes, send them to schools. But America was redlined. Now Chicago was redlined, blacks were redlined. In New York City, the banks would not lend money to black neighbourhoods or to black borrowers. I was at Chase Manhattan and they made it very clear: they will not make a loan to a mortgage if they're black people living in my block. And they told me that when I was on Second Street and Avenue B. I won't repeat the epithet racist epithets they used. But what has caused the racial disparity today is what we've been talking about: the fact that whites could buy their own homes, blacks could not.And the reason I'm bringing this up is that if—we're working toward a society where white people are now going to be reduced to the position that black people are in today: of not having their own homes, of not being able to get bank credit. One friend of mine at the Hudson Institute, a black economist, wanted to—we were thinking of cowriting a book, The Blackening of America. The state of, well, the future of the whites, is to become blacks if you don't solve this situation. And I've been unable to convince many black leaders about reparations—that the reparations, very hard to get reparations for slavery, which was to their grandparents, their reparations are due to the blacks today who do not have housing, their own homes, because of the redlining that they have been experiencing right down to today.So, you have this, you do have a separation in this country. But this is not the kind of hyphenated politics that the politicians talk about. Not even the black politicians, the fact that if you're going to hyphenated American, how did this hyphenisation affect the real opportunities for real estate, for homeownership, for education, and all of these other things. I think maybe if people begin to think as to how there is a convergence of what was diverging before—now you're having the middle class pushed down into its real identity which was a dependent wage-earning class all along—you're going to have a change of consciousness. But we're still not to that. People don't realise this difference.And at the top of the pyramid, at New York University, for instance, where we both went to school, I have professor friends there and there was recently an argument about getting more salaries for professors, because they're hiring adjunct professors at very low prices instead of appointing them full time. And one professor turned to my friend and said, “They’re treating us like wage earners.” And my friend said, “Yes, you are a wage earner. You’re dependent on the wage you get from New York University.” And he said, “But I’m a professor,” as if somehow being a professor doesn't mean that you're not a wage earner, you're not dependent on salary, you're not being exploited by your employer who's in it to make money at your expense.Julian Vigo: Oh, absolutely. We've got the push from NYU in the 1990s by adjunct professors to get health insurance, and to have a certain modicum of earnings that would allow them to pay rent in an extremely expensive city. I find it amazing how many of my students at the time had no idea how much I was being exploited at the time, I was at lunch after the graduation of two of my students, they invited me to lunch, and they were having a discussion about how well we must be paid. And I laughed. I didn't go into the details of my salary. But later in later years, they came to understand from other sources, how exploitation functions within the university where they were paying almost quarter of a million to go to school, and graduate school, and so forth. So it's quite shocking that even though we have the internet and all the information is there, anyone can see precisely how much NYU or Columbia cost today, or how much the cost of living is, as opposed to 1961, for instance, that people are still not putting together that when you have housing, that is like income. For most of us, if housing is affordable, the way one lives, the efficiency to live, the ease, the mental health, and physical health improves. And it's fascinating to me that during lockdown, people were told, just to bite the bullet, stay inside, and how many publications, how much of the media went out to discover the many people being locked down in extremely small hovels? Multiple families living in three bedroom houses, even smaller. And I just kept thinking throughout these past 20 months or so that the media has become complicit in everything you've discussed, we've seen an extra tack added on where the media is another arm of industry and the 1% they are able sell lockdown stories: stars singing, Spaniards singing, accordionists from Neapolitan balconies, everyone's happy. But that was a lie. And that was a lie being sold conveniently.I regularly post stories from CNN, where their recent yacht story—they love yachts—their recent yacht story from about five or six days ago was how the super-rich are “saving” the world's ecology. And it was a paid advertisement of a very expensive yacht that uses nuclear power, what you and I hope: that all the rich people are running around with little mini nuclear reactors on the seas. And I keep thinking: what has happened that you mentioned campaign financing? Remember what happened to Hillary Clinton when she suggested campaign finance reform? That went over like a lead balloon. And then we've got CNN, Forbes, all these major publications that run paid sponsored news articles as news. It's all paid for, they legally have to see it as but you have to find the fine print. And we're being sold the 1% as the class that's going to save the planet with this very bizarre looking yacht with a big ball on it. And another another CNN article about yacht owners was about how it's hard for them to pay for maintenance or something and  we're pulling out our tiny violins.And I keep wondering, why is the media pushing on this? We can see where MSNBC and CNN and USA today are heading in a lot of their coverage over class issues. They would much rather cover Felicity Huffman, and all those other stars’ children's cheating to get into a California University scandal which is itself its own scandal, of course. That gets so covered, but you rarely see class issues in any of these publications unless it refers to the favelas of Brazil or the shanty towns of Delhi. So, we're sold: poverty isn't here, it's over there. And over here, mask mandates, lock up, shut your doors stay inside do your part clap for the cares and class has been cleared. Cut out. Even in the UK, where class consciousness has a much more deeply ingrained fermentation, let's say within the culture, it's gone. Now the BBC. Similarly, nightly videos at the initial part of lockdown with people clapping for the cares. Little was said about the salaries that some of these carriers were getting, I don't mean just junior doctors there, but the people who are cleaning the hallways. So, our attention has been pushed by the media away from class, not just the politicians doing the dirty work, or not just the nasty finance campaign funding that is well known in the US. What are some of the responses to this, Michael, that we might advance some solutions here? Because my worry, as a person living on this planet is enough is enough: Why can't we just try a new system? Is it that the fall of the Berlin Wall left a permanent divide in terms of what we can experiment with? Or is there something else at play?Michael Hudson: Well, recently, Ukraine passed a law about oligarchs, and they define an oligarchy as not only owning a big company, but also owning one of the big media outlets. And the oligarchy in every country owns the media. So, of course, CNN, and The New York Times and The Washington Post, are owned by the billionaire class representing the real estate interests and the rentier interests. They're essentially the indoctrination agencies. And so of course, in the media, what you get is a combination of a fantasy world and Schadenfreude—Schadenfreude, when something goes wrong with people you don't like, like the scandal. But apart from that, it's promoting a fantasy, about a kind of parallel universe about how a nice world would work, if everybody earned the money that they had, and the wealth they had by being productive and helping society. All of a sudden, that's reversed and [they] say, “Well, they made a lot of fortune, they must have made it by being productive and helping society.” So, everybody deserves the celebrity, deserves the wealth they have. And if you don't have wealth, you're undeserving and you haven't made a productivity contribution. And all you need is to be more educated, managerial and intelligent, and you can do it. And it doesn't have anything to do with intelligence. As soon as you inherit a lot of money, your intelligence, your IQ drops 10%. As soon as you don't have to work for a living and just clip coupons, you write us down another 30%. The stupidest people I've met in my life are millionaires who don't want to think about how they get their money. They just, they're just greedy. And I was told 50 years ago, “You don't need to go to business school to learn how to do business. All you need is greed.” So what are all these business schools for? All they're doing is saying greed is good and giving you a patter talk to say, “Well, yeah, sure, I'm greedy. But that's why I'm productive.” And somehow they conflate all of these ideas.So, you have the media, and the educational system, all sort of combined into a fantasy, a fantasy world that is to displace your own consciousness about what's happening right around you. The idea of the media is that you don't look at your own position, you imagine other people's position in another world and see that you're somehow left out. So, you can say that the working class in America are very much like the teenage girls using Facebook, who use it and they have a bad self image once they use Facebook and think everybody else is doing better. That's the story in Congress this week. Well, you can say that the whole wage earning class once they actually see how awful the situation is they think, “Well, gee, other people are getting rich. Other people have yard spots, why don't I have my own house? Why am I struggling?” And they think that they're only struggling alone, and that everybody else is somehow surviving when other people are struggling just the way they are. That's what we call losing class consciousness.Julian Vigo: Yes, well, we're back to Crystal and Alexis wrestling and Dynasty’s fountain. Everyone wants to be like them. Everyone wants a car. You know, I'll never forget when I lived in Mexico City. One of the first things I learned when you jumped into one of those taxis were Volkswagen beetles,  Mexicans would call their driver “Jaime.” And I said to them, why are you guys calling the taxi drivers here “Jaime”? And they said, “We get it from you.” And I said, “What do you mean you get it from us? We don't call our taxi drivers Jaime.”And then I thought and I paused, I said,  “James!” Remember the Grey Poupon commercials? That's what we do—we have James as the driver in a lot of these films that we produced in the 1970s and 80s. And the idea became co-opted within Mexico as if everyone has a British driver named James.Now, what we have turned into from this serialised, filmic version of ourselves to the present is dystopic. Again, you talked about the percentage of rent that people are paying in the US, the way in which people are living quite worse than their parents. And this is related to student debt, bank debt, credit card debt, we've had scandals directly related to the housing market. We saw that when there were people to be bailed out, they had to be of the wealthy class and companies to be bailed out. There was no bailout for the poor, of course. I was in London during the Occupy Wall Street. In London, it was “occupy the London Stock Exchange” (Occupy LSX) right outside of not even the London Stock Exchange. It was outside of St. Paul's Cathedral. And there was a tent city, and people were fighting ideological warfare from within their tents. There wasn't much organising on the ground. It was disassembled months later. But I wonder why Americans, even with what is called Obamacare, are still not pushing for further measures, why Hillary Clinton's push for or suggestion merely of finance reform within the campaigning system, all of this has sort of been pushed aside.Are there actors who are able to advance these issues within our current political system in the United States? Or will it take people getting on the streets protesting, to get housing lowered to maybe have national rent controls, not just of the form that we have in New York, which, before I got to New York in the late 80s, everyone was telling me how great rent control was. Now it's all but disappeared? What is the answer? Is it the expropriation of houses? Is it the Cornwall style, no owning more than one house type of moratorium on homeownership? What are the solutions to this, Michael?Michael Hudson: There is no practical solution that I can suggest. Because the, you're not going to have universal medical care, as long as you have the pharmaceuticals. funding the campaign's of the leading politicians, as long as you have a political system that is funded by campaign contributors, you're going to have the wealthiest classes, and decide who gets nominated and who gets promoted. So, I don't see any line of reform, given the dysfunctional political system that the United States is in. If this were Europe, we could have a third party. And if we had an actual third party, the democratic party would sort of be like the social democratic parties in Europe, it would fall about 8% of the electorate, and a third party would completely take over. But in America, it's a two-party system, which is really one party with different constituencies for each wing of that party, and that one party, the same campaign contributors funds, both the Republicans and the Democrats. So it's possible that you can think of America as a failed state, as a failed economy. I don't see any means of practical going forward, just as you're seeing in the Congress today, when they're unwilling to pass an infrastructure act, there's a paralysis of change. I don't see any way in which a structural change can take place. And if you're having the dynamics that are polarising, only a structural change can reverse this trend. And nobody that I know, no politician that I know, sees any way of the trends being reversed.Julian Vigo: The funny thing is that scandal, quote-unquote, scandal over Ocasio Cortez's dress at the Met Gala was quite performative to me. It's typical that the media does. “Tax the rich,” as she sits at a function that I believe cost $35,000 to enter. And she socialised the entire night even if she allegedly did not pay either for her dress nor for the entrance. And I'm thinking, isn't this part of the problem: that we have so much of our socio-cultural discourse wrapped up in politics in the same way that Clinton's suggestion that campaign finance reform disappeared quite quickly? Is there any hope of getting campaign finance reform passed in the States?Michael Hudson: No. Because if you had campaign finance reform, that's how the wealthy people control politics. If you didn't, if you didn't have the wealthy, wealthy people deciding who gets nominated, you would have people get nominated by who wanted to do what the public ones, Bernie Sanders says, “Look, most of them are all the polls show that what democracy, if this were a democracy, we would have socialised medicine, we'd have public health care, we would have free education, we would have progressive taxation.” And yet no party is representing what the bulk of people have. So by definition, we're not a democracy. We're an oligarchy, and the oligarchy controls. I mean, you could say that the media play the role today that the church and religion played in the past to divert attention away from worldly issues towards other worldly issues. That's part of the problem.But not only the pharmaceutical industries are against public health care, but the whole corporate sector, the employer sector, are against socialised medicine, because right now workers are dependent for their health insurance on their employers. That means Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve Chairman said, this is causing a traumatised workers syndrome, the workers are afraid to quit, they're afraid to go on strike. They're afraid of getting fired because if they get fired, first of all, if they're a homeowner they lose their home because they can't pay their mortgage, but most importantly, they lose their health care. And if they get sick, it wipes them out. And they go broke and they lose their home and all the assets.Making workers depend on the employer, instead of on the government means you're locked into their job. They have to work for a living for an employer, just in order to survive in terms of health care alone. So the idea of the system is to degrade a dependent, wage-earning class and keeping privatising health care, privatising education, and moving towards absentee landlordship is the way to traumatise and keep a population on the road to serfdom. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Mayor Steve Noble: "We can't prevent hate crimes" This week in La Voz en Breve, journalist Mariel Fiori has a show on business and well-being. She spoke with the Mayor of the City of Kingston, Steve Noble about the latest news from the city, such as the meeting this Wednesday at Everette Hodge from 5-7 pm to discuss the Franklin Street renovation project, with Spanish interpretation. The mayor also invites city businesses to say what they need to grow and recover from the pandemic, as the city has $17 million of federal stimulus to invest in businesses. There will be two meetings in late October, for Hispanic businesses. One of the main topics of today's interview had to do with the third act of vandalism against a poster that Radio Kingston has at a bus stop where the phrase: We believe that black lives matter was crossed out with red paint, for the third time. The radio sent letters to the mayor, city police chief and Ulster County District Attorney on all three occasions asking for something to be done about it. The mayor said that the three of them will come to the radio to make a special program to discuss this type of crime and send a message saying that these crimes are not tolerated. When asked what is being done specifically to prevent these types of crimes (which according to Noble also unfortunately occur in all parts of the city, uptown, midtown and downtown), he said that "we cannot prevent crimes, people who have hatred are going to commit hate crimes." He also said that by January 1 more video cameras are expected to be installed in hot spots in the city, but he did not know if there would be one at the bus stop in question. In her column Let's Talk about Economics, Professor Martha Tepepa from the Levy Institute of Economics at Bard College spoke about the importance of immigrant women in the economy and about a recently released book, Women Who Dare and Overcome Limits, Inspirational Stories In difficult Times. Alcalde Steve Noble: "No podemos prevenir los delitos de odio" Esta semana en La Voz en Breve, la periodista Mariel Fiori tiene un programa de negocios y bienestar. Conversó con el alcalde de la ciudad de Kingston, Steve Noble sobre las últimas noticias de la ciudad, como la reunión de este miércoles en el Everette Hodge de 5 a 7pm para hablar del proyecto de reformas de la calle Franklin, con interpretación al español. El alcalde también invita a los negocios de la ciudad a que digan qué necesitan para crecer y recuperarse de la pandemia, ya que la ciudad tiene $17 millones del estímulo federal para invertir en los negocios. Habrá dos reuniones a fines de octubre, para negocios hispanos. Uno de los temas principales de la entrevista de hoy tuvo que ver con el tercer acto de vandalismo contra un cartel que tiene Radio Kingston en una parada de autobús donde la frase Creemos que las vidas negras importan fue tachado con pintura roja, por tercera vez. La radio envió cartas al alcalde, al jefe de policía de la ciudad y al fiscal de distrito del condado de Ulster en las tres ocasiones para que se haga algo al respecto. El alcalde dijo que van a venir los tres a la radio a hacer un programa especial para dialogar sobre este tipo de delitos y mandar un mensaje diciendo que estos delitos no son tolerados. Al preguntarle qué se está haciendo específicamente para prevenir este tipo de delitos (que según Noble también ocurren desafortunadamente en todas las partes de la ciudad, uptown, midtown y downtown), dijo que “no podemos prevenir delitos, las personas que tienen odio van a cometer crímenes de odio”. También dijo que para el 1 de enero se espera que estén instaladas más cámaras de video en puntos calientes de la ciudad, pero no sabía si habría una en la parada de autobús en cuestión. En su columna Hablemos de economía, la profesora Martha Tepepa del Instituto Levy de Economía en Bard College, habló de la importancia de las mujeres inmigrantes en la economía y de un libro recientemente lanzado, Mujeres que se atreven y superan límites, historias de inspiración en tiempos difíciles.

Canadian investment manager and Levy Institute fellow Marshall Auerback surveys the current political and economic landscape, from the pandemic bailouts to climate change and the changing role of politicians

This week in La Voz en Breve, journalist Mariel Fiori has a show on education and family. In her column Let’s Talk about Economics, Professor Martha Tepepa of the Levy Institute of Economics at Bard College continued her analysis of what the... Read More ›

This week in La Voz en Breve, journalist Mariel Fiori has a show on education and family. In her column Let’s Talk about Economics, Professor Martha Tepepa of the Levy Institute of Economics at Bard College continued her analysis of what the... Read More ›

Professor Jeffrey Miron and Professor Michael Hudson discuss the merits and shortcomings of capitalism.  Jeffrey Miron is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Economics at Harvard University, as well as a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. His field of expertise is the economics of libertarianism; he has advocated for many libertarian policies, including legalizing all drugs and allowing failing banks to go bankrupt. He has written four books including "Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition" and "Libertarianism, from A to Z." Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a scholar at the Levy Institute, a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and professor at the School of Marxist Studies, Peking University, in China. He is also the author of J is for Junk Economics (2017), Killing the Host (2015), The Bubble and Beyond (2012), Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971), amongst many others.

COVID-19's Economic Holocaust Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD Progressive Radio Network, April 27, 2020   For all the uncertainties the COVID-19 pandemic poses to the world, especially in the US, one thing seems evident.  Our neoliberal capitalist civilization has proven itself to be unprepared for unexpected crises and catastrophes. For decades, the US has been falling behind other developed nations to infuse economic resiliency in society. Not only has the American medical system and federal health agencies been shown to be naked, we are also discovering we cannot rely on epistemological statistics and computer modeling alone to account for our flawed health policies. Aside from the pandemic's toll on people's lives, there is also its impact upon the national economies and the global economy at large that is barely being discussed in any depth. Rather, hopes and wishes are being directed towards life returning to normal.  We are expected to believe that our addiction to unconscionable consumerism will return, employment will rise and the American dream can again be mentally photo-shopped on the horizon. In short, we are persuaded that the comfort of our illusions and denial of harsh realities will return.  However, if a past Nobel laureate of economics, Joseph Stiglitz, is correct, then "if you leave it to Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell we will have a Great Depression." Likewise, former Federal Reserve chair Jenet Yellen has also warned that the 30% GDP decline is leading us towards Depression. In fact, we may already be there. As of today, the federal government has guaranteed $5.2 trillion dollars to keep the economy afloat as a depression worse than 1932 looms overhead. Some economists believe that this massive bailout is insufficient and upwards to $10-15 trillion may be necessary.  In 2008, with one broad stroke the Obama administration rescued Wall Street.  What was believed to be just the TARP bailout of $700 billion was in fact over $4 trillion worth of outlays, including TARP and other FED and Treasury expenditures.  The Levy Institute at Bard College calculated the outlays may have been as high as $29 trillion, a number the Sanders' campaign had quoted. Obama's bailout was to assist the incompetency and corruption of Wall Street and the financial industry. Today it is a submicroscopic organism, approximately 120 nanometers (one nanometer is one billionth of a meter or about 20 oxygen atoms lined up), that threatens the financial well being of most Americans. However before the COVID-19 reached our shores, the US was already in a horrible debt crisis. Fiscal conservatives are angered that the US National Debt has reached $24.5 trillion while at the same time adamantly ignoring that the US Total Debt now hovers above $77 trillion. Neither party shows concern about Americans' increasing personal debt (mortgage, credit card, auto, student loans, etc), nor the rise in corporate, state and city debts. When we take into consideration $144.6 trillion in US Unfunded Liabilities, $20.4 trillion in Social Security Liability, and $31.6 trillion in Medicare liability, the nation lingers on the precipice a total collapse. Before the pandemic, Trump boasted an unemployment level as low as 3.6 percent. But in the US, there are different ways to calculate unemployment figures. There is the official figure (U-3) that Wall Street and presidential administrations rely upon and then a more realistic statistic or U-6 that includes those underemployed and those only marginally attached to the work force.  Before the pandemic the "real" or U-6 employment was 6.9 percent.  Finally there is the shadow statistic, which adds the millions of Americans who have dropped out of the work force because their benefits ceased or because they are homeless or unaccounted for by the Labor Bureau.  When those adjustments are made, the shadow unemployment is likely around 23 percent. Now, unemployment is skyrocketing.  The most recent estimate is that over 26 million people lost work during the past month and, according to Fortune magazine, the official unemployment rate may be as high 18 percent.  Consequently a more accurate unemployment figure would be approximately 32 percent or almost a third of population. This is far worse than at the height of the Great Depression when unemployment stood at 25 percent.  The dark side of American jobs has been decades of large layoffs, workers being replaced by automation, downsizing, corporate consolidation due to equity partnerships, mergers and off shoring of manufacturing. In addition, tens of thousands of foreign professionals have received work visas and are eager to take the place of middle seniority positions in firms for lower salaries and without full benefits.  The system is so corrupt that the millions of people who work full time for less than a living wage are completely ignored. Hence most Americans are deep in debt and frequently live paycheck to paycheck. The fact of the matter is that there is no security whatsoever for millions of people who may not find work for a very long time. Even if the lockdown were to end tomorrow, the lights would not immediately switch back on.  Throughout the financial news, we are reading headlines of companies eyeing bankruptcy as credit ratings are being rapidly downgraded.  Retail stores are being especially hit badly. According to Global Data Retail, over 190,000 retail stores have closed, accounting for nearly 50 percent of the nation's retail square footage. Forbes has listed Dillards, JC Penny, Kohl's, Levi Strauss, Macy's, Nordstrom, and Signet to likely go under.  Others include Pier 1 Imports, Rite Aid, J Crew that is loaded up with private equity debt, Fairway supermarkets, and niche organic grocer Lucky's. Macy's capital alone dropped from $6 billion to $1.5 billion since February. This trend had already been rising since Trump came to office with large chain companies increasingly closing outlets including Walgreens, Gap, GNC, H&M and Victoria's Secret. For sure, when and if the pandemic ends, there will be far less retail stores. The New York Times predicts very few are likely to survive. And we are not even looking at the hundreds of their vendors that are also being affected. With 60 percent of Americans eating regularly outside the home, the restaurant industry is also being hit fiercely. Restaurants employ more minority managers than any other industry -- approximately 60% -- and employs almost 16 million people. Between 2010 and 2018, it represented the largest number of low middle class jobs ($45,000 to $75,000), 300 percent more than the overall economy. Now a restaurant apocalypse is underway, with an estimated 20 percent of restaurant operations going under. Larger chains are far better equipped. They are simply closing down dining room facilities and only offering carryout, pickup, delivery or drive-thru. Smaller independent restaurants are at the greatest risk. Then there are the farms, the concentrated agriculture feeding organizations (CAFOs) and food chain suppliers. In the past it was very rare to enter a large grocery store and find empty shelves. Now it is a common sight because the food supply chain has been upended. Pork and other meat suppliers such as Smithfield Foods, Tyson and Cargill are forced to close plants. Due to Trump's draconian position on immigration of foreign workers, farm produce will not be harvested. Niv Ellis at The Hill reports that "some $5 billion of fresh fruit and vegetables have already gone to waste."  The pandemic, therefore, is contributing to rising food insecurity throughout the nation. Before the pandemic, Ellis notes, 37 million Americans were already food insecure.  The additional 26 million unemployed will increase that number, and it is sure to continue to climb. Finally, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization expects that the frantic efforts underway by countries to import basic staple foods may launch global food inflation. We are also facing "the quickest and deepest oil demand crash in history," says Richard Heinberg from the Post Carbon Institute. Oil prices plunged to an inconceivable negative minus $37 a barrel last week as global fossil fuel demand dropped roughly 30 percent.  "The entire petroleum industry," writes Heinberg, "is teetering."  Natural gas producers relying on hydrofracking shale, which had already been burdened with high debt from private equity, are scrambling for bankruptcy protection. According to Reuters, "numerous midstream companies [in the energy sector] backed by private equity are in danger of bankruptcy." With the collapse of hydrofracking companies, the pipeline firms have also entered troubled waters. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City predicts that 40 percent of energy producers may be insolvent "if oil prices remain around $30 a barrel" for the year. Then consider the larger picture of the impact this has on the 6.4 million people working in the energy sector. Also we might consider the future of 15 million Americans who work in the tourism industry, including hotels, entertainment, parks, museums, etc. It is estimated that 96 percent of global tourism has vanished in the blink of an eye. State and local city governments are also "staring at budget shortfalls that will substantially exceed what they faced during the great recession." States are reporting significant gaps in their capacity to remain fiscally afloat. The Republican Senate led by Mitch McConnell seems determined to withhold $150 billion of emergency funds to the states in the CARES Act before Congress -- less than half of the $300 billion to $1 trillion state legislators are demanding. Consequently, states are staring into a deep abyss. Americans who will either return to a job or seek work when the pandemic slows will be further imprisoned by an economy buried in greater debt. Downsizing will accelerate along with borrowed money to continue operations while the White House refuses to pass a rent holiday, forgive student loans and other debts, cease payday loans, reduce interest rates on credit nor provide free healthcare for those infected with COVID-19;   The average person without a steady paycheck is living off savings and credit cards. Therefore, when the economy reopens, large numbers of people will be unable to return to the marketplace to circulate dollars;   As corporate debt mounts, the most insidious truth are the vultures of capitalism who will profit. These are the great white sharks in the finance industry that smell blood. For the trillions of dollars Trump is dishing out to the 1 percent, these are the first to get the lion's share of the quarry. Nobody in the mainstream media has properly criticized the huge monetary allocations being made for the pandemic. The FED is buying corporate debt in order for companies to off load their mistakes and receive fresh, new money. But the average small business receives the left over pennies.  The virus is teaching us the harsh reality about Washington pervasive culture of corruption. On this account both parties have no empathic regard for average citizens and small business owners.  Even the money from Trump's and Mnuchin's stimulus package given to citizens can be confiscated by debt collectors. Imagine if you are an average citizen, not an insider, at the conference table with executives from Facebook, Google, the major banks and mega-corporate industries. You have no income or savings and no health insurance. If you are hungry, where do you get money for food? Where do you get money if you are sick or gas for your car?  The unintended consequences of Trump's and the Congress' irresponsible and inhumane policies are literally bankrupting the nation. By extension the millennial and iGen generations are the victimized recipients of this debt bequeathed to them by older generations. They are further compromised with the inability to secure jobs equal to their educational level nor secure a satisfying living wage. They are burdened with high interest student loans. They also are far more aware of the impact climate change will have on their futurs. Therefore, millions of young adults are rapidly losing faith in America's neoliberal capitalist system and our self-centered culture of predation. Similar to waking up the day following September 11, 2001, we will be emerging into a new world after the COVID19 pandemic subsides. It is now being called the "shut-in economy." The pandemic is not solely a health crisis; it is equally an existential crisis, an impasse in the global civilization that is forcing us to realize that our over dependence and perverse reliance upon natural resources, such as fuel, energy, food and corrupt banking and healthcare services, is fragile. We are learning that at every level there are numerous cracks in our structures of governance and our economic and social bases.  Yet the virus did not break the nation; it has been broken for a long time. Only now more people are waking up from their dream. Furthermore, few people, including the mainstream media, now believe there will ever be a return to the normalcy of life that ended after Wuhan had its first patient infected with the virus. It is time for every individual to reassess her or his priorities. A life full of well-being is more possible today if we realize the virus has also been our teacher. But it is living a life that is founded upon simplicity, insight and wisdom, and community rather than consumption and competitive power. 

Carlos Pinkusfeld entrevista Luiza Nassif, que alerta para o fato de que a tragédia da pandemia do coronavírus não atinge a todos da mesma forma. A pandemia tem um recorte de classe, raça e gênero muito forte, com os grupos mais frágeis e marginalizados sendo aqueles fortemente atingidos. Essa discussão é particularmente importante para o caso brasileiro, uma sociedade ainda mais desigual e com maior precariedade em vários indicadores sociais e que ainda se encontra num estágio anterior da curva de contaminação da Pandemia. Luiza Nassif é graduada e mestre pelo IE/UFRJ e PhD pela New School for Social Research e vem desenvolvendo no Levy Institute uma pesquisa sobre o tema (http://multiplier-effect.org/we-need-... ). Carlos Pinkusfeld é professor associado do Instituto de Economia da UFRJ.

Today in La Voz with Mariel Fiori, Professor Martha Tepepa, from the Levy Institute of Economics at Bard College, talked about women in the economy and the still unresolved problem of the wage gap between men and women. And what... Read More ›

In this episode, Front Running takes a look at the policies for criminal justice reform. The US incarcerates more of its population than any other developed nation, and the new generation of voters have had enough of it. For this episode of Front Running, Max and Stacy are joined by guests Sinclair Skinner, a bitcoin entrepreneur and former mechanical engineer, and Marshall Auerback, a market analyst and Levy Institute researcher. As the boomer generation dies off and the Millennials take their place as the largest voting block, attitudes toward mass incarceration are also changing. The massive increase in locking up the population coincided not only with the Civil Rights era, but also with the emergence of the boomers as the largest voting block back in the late 60s and early 70s. The explosion of the prison population also happened along with an all fiat currency world where such decadence seemed possible. Can the millennial generation, which is weighed down by household debts, even afford such vengeful policies even if they wanted to? They look at one of the more radical platforms which was that of candidate Julian Castro, who may have exited the race early, but has left behind the very interesting ‘First Chance Plan,’ a direct attack on the Joe Biden backed 1994 Crime Bill. They also examine the role of Black Lives Matter in bringing criminal justice reform to the forefront of a multitude of election platforms. Tune in to hear what Front Running has to say about ending mass incarceration as a political idea whose time has come.

This week in La Voz en Breve, journalist Mariel Fiori has a show on history and economics. In her column, Let’s Talk about the Economy, Professor Martha Tepepa, from the Levy Institute of Economics at Bard College, speaks about the... Read More ›

Weekly Toronto Blue Jays Talk Join host Adam Corsair with guest Marshall Auerback of Levy Institute as they break down the latest regarding the Toronto Blue Jays, with topics including: Nate Pearson’s Promotioon Bo’s Tear 2020 Needs Predictions … and so much more!  It’s a Blue Jays show that you won’t want to miss! Follow Marshall on Twitter: @Mauerback Follow Host Adam Corsair on Twitter: @AdamCorsair Follow South of the 6ix on Twitter: @SouthOfThe6ix Visit Our Affiliates: Stadium Scene & Overtime Media Music: Scott Holmes - “Mountains All Around Us” Written, Produced, & Edited: Adam Corsair #SOT6 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There was a time when Mathew Forstater & Warren Mosler would conduct regular counts of MMT believers. There were 11 or 12, and they knew them all well. In this interview, Forstater takes us back to the late 1990s, when Modern Monetary Theory first took root in academia.   Today he is Research Director of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, but his story begins with his first post-doctorate teaching job. He secured a summer internship for an undergrad named Pavlina Tcherneva. Her assignment: write a critical review of Mosler’s first book.   The relationships they formed resulted in the creation of a research institute, the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability at the Levy Institute. Randall Wray and Stephanie Kelton descended upon it. After a couple of years, the MMT nucleus moved to UMKC, where they established an interdisciplinary program. Today it’s an international movement with a reach into other disciplines and far beyond the walls of universities.    Forstater emphasizes the importance of keeping policy discussion on the table. What distinguishes them from mainstream economics is they recognize the need to be grounded in reality. MMT is not just theoretical.   Steve asks him to talk about some of the specific policies associated with MMT. Forstater believes that the Job Guarantee should be a central piece of Green New Deal by demanding only sustainable jobs, or jobs with minimal negative effect. The federal government isn’t subject to the pressures of the private sector which, by the very nature of the capitalist economy, must minimize production costs regardless of environmental impact. The JG can be a vehicle for other policies as well, establishing a minimum wage and standards for health care coverage.   Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity   http://www.global-isp.org/research-director/

This latest baseball round table includes guests Jesse Golderberg-Strassler (@jgoldstrass; author and voice of the Lansing Lugnuts), Marshall Auerback (@Mauerback; writer and research analyst at the Levy Institute), and Jason Woodell (@JasonAtTheGame; co-founder of Prospects Live and host of The Scouts Have Eyes podcast). We discussed: Anthony Alford's great and final crusade, the sumptuous reclamation projects that is Teoscar Hernandez, a strange recurrence of the Shapiro vs. Anthopoulos paradigm, what Alex and his legacy was truly all about, Woodell's favourite under-the-radar Jays prospects, dreaming of 200+ innings from Stroman and Sanchez, why the most important rookie on the team isn't a player, how to properly grade the efforts of Charlie Montoyo, and the power of self-prescribed intellectual exercises in management versus old-school vanilla rebuilds. Be sure to check out jaysjournal.com and arishapiro.ca for all the latest news, insights, and editorials on all things Toronto Blue Jays. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This latest baseball round table includes guests Jesse Golderberg-Strassler (@jgoldstrass; author and voice of the Lansing Lugnuts), Marshall Auerback (@Mauerback; writer and research analyst at the Levy Institute), and Jason Woodell (@JasonAtTheGame; co-founder of Prospects Live and host of The Scouts Have Eyes podcast). We discussed: Anthony Alford's great and final crusade, the sumptuous reclamation projects that is Teoscar Hernandez, a strange recurrence of the Shapiro vs. Anthopoulos paradigm, what Alex and his legacy was truly all about, Woodell's favourite under-the-radar Jays prospects, dreaming of 200+ innings from Stroman and Sanchez, why the most important rookie on the team isn't a player, how to properly grade the efforts of Charlie Montoyo, and the power of self-prescribed intellectual exercises in management versus old-school vanilla rebuilds.Be sure to check out jaysjournal.com and arishapiro.ca for all the latest news, insights, and editorials on all things Toronto Blue Jays.

This week, in La Voz en Breve, journalists Mariel Fiori y Antonio Flores-Lobos interview Jan Kregel (Director of Research at Bard College’s Levy Institute of Economy) and Martha Tepepa (Senior recruiter for the institute’s graduate program). The scholars analyze the new Mexican president’s upcoming challenges.

Jays Journal Podcast - April 23. "The Value of April Perspectives."Ian Hunter (@BlueJayHunter; writer and blogger with Sporting News MLB & Blue Jays Nation) addresses the issue of fans rationalizing early season success with RISP and clutch hitting, along with his candid thoughts on Jose Bautista joining the Braves and what impact the Josh Donaldson DL stint will have on the team moving forward. (4:51-14:22)Tony Ambrogio (@Tony_Ambrogio; sportscaster with TSN & TSN Radio) offers his take on the legitimacy of the Blue Jays as a contending team, how John Gibbons is treating this team differently with his aggressive posture, and what exactly is the glue that's keeping everything together to reflect a palpable sense of baseball chemistry and clubhouse camaraderie. (15:17-20:41)Marshall Auerback (@Mauerback; market practitioner and analyst with The Levy Institute) drops by to tackle the emotions behind a quick start in April, why it's a challenge to accommodate Teoscar Hernandez in this lineup, and his impressions on the ignominy that Bautista experienced in taking a minor league contract to continue his flagging baseball career. (21:51-28:07)Richard Birfer & Dan Seguin (@richardbirfs & @danseguin23) are on the scene to offer their latest minor league perspective on behalf of the CBBSN (@CBScoutingNet) regarding the progress of Vlad Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette down in New Hampshire. (28:55-32:58)Craig Borden (@Craigers1221; minor league guru at the Jays Journal) brings us an exclusive interview with Blue Jays farmhand Patrick Murphy (@patrickmurphyy) drafted in the third round of the 2013 MLB draft. (34:01-58:29)

The Toronto Blue Jays began their transitional 2018 season by demonstrating the kind of resolve normally associated with playoff contenders; aggressive base-running, timely pitching, and precisely the kind of joie de vivre that was missing in its entirety last year. Four wins and three losses to begin a difficult campaign that will undoubtedly test the resolve of players, management and fans alike.Laura Armstrong (@lauraarmy; beat writer and sports journalist with The Toronto Star) offers her insightful thoughts on what could happen if the Jays end up struggling in April and why Teoscar Hernandez is buried in the minors while Morales sits on the bench. We also discuss if Vlad Guerrero's heroic spring training moment might end up hindering rather than helping the franchise. We also touch on the Maple Leafs and Raptors as having both a positive and negative influence on the future of baseball in this city.Marshall Auerback (@mauerback; market researcher with The Levy Institute) drops by to offer his thoughts on 2018 as a potential "write-off" year and his inquisitive perspective on scalpers and how the team is collaborating with the grim reality of greedy ticket monetization. He also offered us his candid thoughts on Roy Halladay's number retirement and how it was handled.Jason Woodell (@JasonAtTheGame; writer with Baseball Prospectus) visits the show to offer his take on what a dead arm really is in the sport of baseball and how it will affect Josh Donaldson moving forward. Chris Henderson (@Baseball4Brains, Site expert at Jays Journal) rounds out the show with his authoritative look at long-term contract commitments and if an aura of secrecy exists between the player and management when it comes to disclosing injuries.

Jays Journal Podcast - March 26. "Fighting For Relevance."One final trip to Montreal before the Blue Jays embark on their 2018 vaunted regular season campaign amidst a (suddenly) world class Toronto sports market dominated by hockey/basketball visions of grandeur. As a result, the baseball club finds itself fighting for relevance during an off-season rife with punishing fan expectations and hardened pundits at every turn dismissing any hopes of tangible success for the summer.Naturally, I'd be remiss if I didn't assemble an intrepid group of baseball writers, bloggers, and podcasters capable of turning around any doom and gloom with their views on what the future holds for this team. I'm pleased to be joined by Adam Corsair (@Corsair21) host of the critically-acclaimed South of the Six podcast (@SouthOfThe6ix), Richard Birfer (@richardbirfs) of the dynamic Collegiate Baseball Scouting Network, and Marshall Auerback (@Mauerback) from the erudite Levy Institute.Together we discuss: if 87 wins this year is a realistic projection, the real truth behind Curtis Granderson, how much do intangibles play a role with this club, on the emergence of Vladdy Jr. & Bo, if the concept of baseball courtship is over when it comes to newfound frugality, and why it's crucial for the Shapiro-Atkins regime to establish a culture of winning. (5:21-49:15)Later, Richard & Dan Seguin (@danseguin23) of the Collegiate Baseball Scouting Network (@CBScoutingNet) are back on the show for their excellent prospect analysis and insights; this week they take a closer look at Lourdes Gurriel and Rowdy Tellez. (50:01)

Marshall Auerback is a Market practitioner/analyst and Research Associate at the Levy Institute for Economics. We discuss Bankster scandals, income inequality and the Democrats that walk in lock step with the GOP on these issues. His recent peice in Alternet exposes the Crapo bill that is endemic of the relationship.We also take a deep dive into the LIBOR, Adam Smith, and the embedded moral decisions in positive economics. The conversation is both educational and accessible. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Jays Journal Podcast - December 6. "Perception is Reality."  As we approach the dead of winter mired in what has been an off-season of general confusion, growing uncertainty, and profound sadness, it's comforting to know that with the winter meetings only days away, we'll finally get a chance to see what this Toronto Blue Jays front office is prepared to do next. With the future of the club's ownership ambitions now up in the air, one wonders what 2018 holds in store for a much maligned leadership group desperate to instill confidence in their increasingly embittered and largely cynical fanbase.On tonight's episode we're thrilled to be joined by Ainka Jess (@justbeingaj) of She's 4 Sports (@Shes4Sports), Marshall Auerback (@Mauerback) from the Levy Institute, and our very own Jays Journal site expert and resident country music star, Chris Henderson (@Baseball4Brains). Together, they huddle around host Ari Shapiro and fearlessly tackle the following streams of baseball consciousness:On the recent Stroman tweet regarding the departure of Goins (3:19), why the franchise seems to be struggling mightily when it comes to public relations and fan perception 101 (8:15), what needs to happen for Mark Shapiro to make this his team (13:01), on the issue of club likeability and how the Blue Jays are perceived relative to other Toronto pro sports franchises (19:41), the manner in which the club pursued the Japanese Babe Ruth (26:16), on the health of Tulowitzki and Travis (29:18), what if Guerrero Jr., Bichette and Alford stumble along the way to expected stardom (37:08), and how the Rogers brand has been weakened by the Gregg Zaun firing (44:01).

Joerg Bibow (Skidmore College and Levy Economics Institute) Abstract: The history of the global monetary order seems to rhyme: there appears to be a cycle featuring periods of relative order or disorder. The global financial crisis of 2007/9 appears to have ended what may be described as a neoliberal order of U.S. dollar supremacy and globalized finance. Today’s world economy features a global monetary order that does not really seem to suit all that many countries. Taking my theoretical cue from Keynes of the General Theory, I will explore the evolution of global monetary relations since the Bretton Woods order that Keynes helped to establish. How does today’s global monetary order differ from Keynes’ original vision, as captured by his early Bretton Woods drafts, and how we got here? I will also dare a peek into the future and speculate whether the chances for realizing his vision may be getting any better. 80 years after the publication of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, are Keynes’ ideas, specifically his vision for the global monetary order, still relevant to the contemporary world? Speaker biography: Jörg Bibow is a professor of economics at Skidmore College. His main research areas are international finance and European integration, as well as international trade and development and the history of economic thought. A particular research focus is central banking and financial systems and the effects of monetary policy on economic performance, especially the monetary policies of the Bundesbank and the European Central Bank. This work builds on his earlier research on the monetary thought of John Maynard Keynes. Bibow has lectured at the University of Cambridge, University of Hamburg, and Franklin University Switzerland on central banking and European integration, and was a visiting scholar at the Levy Institute. He received a bachelor’s degree with honors in economics from the University of the Witwatersrand, a diplom-volkswirt from the University of Hamburg, and MA and Ph.D. degrees in economics from the University of Cambridge. Speaker(s): Joerg Bibow (Skidmore College and Levy Economics Institute), Jan Toporowski (SOAS) Event Date: 19 October 2017 Released by: SOAS Economics Podcast