Tuesday, October 16, 2018

23. Prof. Stephanie Kelton on MMT and the myth of budget deficits

Stephanie Kelton is a leading American economist and a Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Stony Brook University. Kelton was Chief Economist on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee and Economic Advisor to the Bernie 2016 presidential campaign. She's best known for being a pioneer of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).


22. Keynes v Hayek - LSE Lecture (Nicholas Wapshott)

Speaker(s): Nicholas Wapshott | Eighty years ago at the LSE, Friedrich Hayek launched an assault upon the new economic thinking of John Maynard Keynes. The clash was so bitter and vituperative that it scandalized the cloistered world of academia. Eighty years on, the differences between the two men have still not been finally resolved and their conflicting approaches to the economy continue to define the profound chasm between politicians of left and right. Nicholas Wapshott is a columnist for Reuters and regular contributor to Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He is the author of Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics and Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage. He is a former senior editor for The Times and the New York Sun and editorial consultant to Oprah Winfrey.


21. Keynes v Hayek - LSE Debate

Speaker(s): Professor George Selgin, Professor Lord Skidelsky, Duncan Weldon, Dr Jamie Whyte | How do we get out of the financial mess we're in? Two of the great economic thinkers of the 20th century had sharply contrasting views: John Maynard Keynes believed that governments could create sustainable employment and growth. His contemporary and rival Friedrich Hayek believed that investments have to be based on real savings rather than fiscal stimulus or artificially low interest rates. BBC Radio 4 will be recording a debate between modern day followers of Keynes and Hayek. George Selgin is Professor of Economics at The Terry College of Business, University of Georgia. Selgin is one of the founders of the Modern Free Banking School, which draws its inspiration from the writings of Hayek on the denationalization of money and choice in currency. He has written extensively on free banking, the private supply of money and deflation. George Selgin is the author of The Theory of Free Banking: Money Supply under Competitive Note Issue (1988), Less Than Zero: The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing Economy (1997), and Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage (2008). Robert Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. His three-volume biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes (1983, 1992, 2000) received numerous prizes, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations. He is the author of The World After Communism (1995) (American edition called The Road from Serfdom). He was made a life peer in 1991, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1994. His latest book is Keynes: The Return of the Master. Duncan Weldon is a former Bank of England economist and currently works as an economics adviser to an international trade union federation. He has a long standing interest in and admiration for Keynes but also a respect for Hayek. He blogs at Duncan's Economic Blog. Jamie Whyte was born in New Zealand and educated at the University of Auckland and then the University of Cambridge in England, where he gained a Ph.D. in philosophy. Jamie remained at Cambridge for a further three years, as a fellow of Corpus Christi College and a lecturer in the Philosophy Faculty. During this time he published a number of academic articles on the nature of truth, belief and desire, and won the Analysis Essay Competition for the best article by a philosopher under the age of 30. Jamie then joined Oliver Wyman & Company, a London-based strategy consulting firm specialising in the financial services industry, for which he still works, as the Head of Research and Publications. Jamie has published two books: Crimes Against Logic (McGraw Hill, Chicago, 2004) and A Load of Blair (Corvo, London, 2005). Jamie is a regular contributor of opinion articles to The Times (of London), the Financial Times and Standpoint magazine. In 2006 he won the Bastiat Prize for journalism.He is on the advisory board of The Cobden Centre. The debate will be chaired by Paul Mason, economics editor of BBC 2's Newsnight and author of Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed.


Sunday, October 7, 2018

20. Making Money (Fran Boait on money creation) - BBC Radio 4

David Grossman asks how and when money is created in the modern economy, how that influences asset prices and financial stability and hears about a radical Swiss idea for monetary reform. Joining the debate are Positive Money director Fran Boait and Professor Sir Charles Bean, former chief economist and deputy governor for monetary policy at The Bank of England.


19. How Money Works (Ben Dyson) - BBC Radio 4

Ben Dyson, founder and director of Positive Money, tells how his disillusionment with mainstream economics led him to campaign for a proper understanding of how money works as the first step in fixing a failed banking system.


18. Cassandras of the crash (the people who predicted it) - BBC Radio 4

Ten years ago, in autumn 2008, the world watched as the biggest financial meltdown in history unfolded. The crash plunged the world into recession, lost millions of families their homes and its shadow still hangs over our politics today. And when the Queen went to the London School of Economics, she asked the question everyone wanted the answer to: why did no one see it coming?

In this programme Aditya Chakrabortty, senior economics commentator at the Guardian newspaper, chairs a discussion between four economists who can claim they did: Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India; Steve Keen, professor of economics at Kingston University in London; Ann Pettifor, director of PRIME, Policy Research in Macroeconomics and council member of the Progressive Economy Forum; and Peter Schiff, American stockbroker and investor. They warned financial crisis was imminent, they wrote books and papers, they even told the powerful to their faces - and they got nowhere. They showed intellectual bravery of a kind that isn't often celebrated, and it cost some of them dearly.

Call them four "Cassandras" - cursed, as Greek myth has it, to utter prophecies that were true but never believed. Had they been heeded we may have averted what the then chief US central banker, Ben Bernanke, calls "the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression".How did they see it when no one else did? Why didn't others listen? And what happens next?