Quarterly capitalism

You see what’s wrong with capitalism is that it is short-sighted.  Apparently, corporate chiefs, investment banks and investors are just after a quick buck.  They never look to the long term, to the bigger picture, to a strategy of investment for sustained growth. This is what budding presidential candidate from the Clinton royal clan, Hillary,

Grexit, De Long and the wages of Sinn

Now that the dust has settled (for a while) in Greece, mainstream economics has been reconsidering what went wrong with Greece and what the best solution would have been.  And it now it seems that both main wings of the mainstream: neoclassical, neoliberal Austerians on one side; and Keynesian on the other side, agree.  Grexit

Paul Mason and postcapitalism: utopian or scientific?

Leftist journalist and broadcaster, Paul Mason, has a new book out at the end of this month. It’s called ‘Postcapitalism’.  I don’t have a copy but Mason has written a long article in the British newspaper, The Guardian, outlining his main arguments, http://gu.com/p/4ay9c Mason has been a doughty publiciser of labour struggles in his journalism

The euro train: going off the rails?

So the Greek parliament has submitted to the Troika ‘fiscal waterboarding’ and agreed to the terms of a new ‘bailout’ program that will tie the Greek economy to the rule of the Euro institutions and the IMF for at least three years.  And will mean that the majority of Greeks will have austerity and reduced

Profitability, crises and inequality: some heterodox views

Last weekend, I presented two papers at the conferences of the Association of Heterodox Economists (AHE) and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). The AHE paper was Revisiting a World Rate of Profit and was a follow-up to my previous paper, A World Rate of Profit, presented to the AHE conference in 2012

UK: a big business budget

UK finance minister George Osborne presented his first budget since the Conservatives won the UK general election last May.  Most readers of my blog who are not British may not find this interesting.  But in some ways it is.  That’s because the UK budget reveals the economic and ideological beliefs of a pro-capitalist government as

No! But what now?

So Greeks have voted NO by a significant majority in the referendum on the Troika conditions for bailout funds to repay Greek government debt. Given the scare tactics of the EU Commission and the German politicians, the might of Greek pro-capitalist media noise and the closure of the banks making it difficult, if not impossible,

Transhumanism, malinvestment and instability

Camp Alphaville (https://live.ft.com/Events/2015/Camp-Alphaville-2015), the FT’s one-day jamboree on all things economic and financial, had all sorts.  There was a session by Zoltan Istvan, a ‘futurist philosopher’ who has formed a party to stand in the US presidential election to promote ‘transhumanism’, using science and technology to overcome human mortality. According to Istvan, he wants to