Abenomics: a review

Over the weekend, Abe Shinzo announced that he was resigning as Japan’s prime minister.  Last November, he became the country’s longest serving premier.  He resigns amid the worst economic slump in Japan’s post-war history, caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdowns.  His popularity had plummeted due to a series of bribery and corruption scandals

The Fed in a hole

At the Kansas City Fed Jackson Hole symposium, the annual jamboree ‘think-tank’ for international central bankers, US Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell announced the end of monetary policy as a tool to control inflation.  His speech of just a few minutes completely dropped the monetarist theory of inflation as proposed by Chicago free market economist

A Marxist theory of inflation

In my previous post on inflation, I spelt out why mainstream theories of inflation have been proved wrong empirically; leaving mainstream economics in a confusion about what just does drive inflation in the prices of goods and services.  In this post, I want to argue that mainstream theories of inflation falter because they are not based

COVID and inflation

Is inflation going to rise once the lockdowns from the pandemic have been relaxed?  Mainstream economics has no idea.  For a start, the rate of inflation in the prices of goods and services in the major capitalist economies has been falling as a trend since the 1980s.  And this is despite the attempts of central

Summer economics

It’s summer in the northern hemisphere and holiday time in the year of the COVID.  So it’s an opportunity to review a few economics books published this year (but written before the pandemic and the Great Lockdown). I am not a fan of clever, trick titles; they usually overhype the content of a book itself.

Taking on the ‘fearsome foursome’ and ‘market power’

Last Thursday, the US-based global tech giants reported their quarterly earnings simultaneously.  On the same day, the US economy recorded the biggest quarterly contraction in national output ever (-9.5% yoy or -32.9% annualised). In contrast, the ‘fearsome foursome’: Alphabet (Google) – the world’s largest search engine; Amazon – the world’s largest online distributor; Apple –