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 –

A world rate of profit: a new approach

Marx’s model of capitalism assumes a world economy, and starts with ‘capital in general’. It was at that level of abstraction that Marx developed his model of the laws of motion of capitalism and, in particular, what he considered was the most important law of motion in the capitalist process of production, the law of

Capital Wars

We’ve had the argument that the major global issue of the 21st century is the growing trade and technology war between the US and China.  In their book, Trade Wars are Class Wars, Klein and Pettis reckon that the trade imbalances are cause by inequality and income and consumption in the two powers: China has

Wealth or income?

Most discussions on inequality, whether between nations globally or within nations, take place around income.  Data and papers on inequality of income are profuse, particularly on the rise in most major economies since the 1980s and the cause of it.  I have covered many of these papers; the conclusions and causes; in many posts.  Related

UK: wishing for a V-shape

Last week, the Conservative Chancellor (finance minister) Rishi Sunak in the UK presented a plan to support businesses and workers as Britain emerges from the pandemic lockdown.  The financial support for workers ‘furloughed’ by their employers is being ratcheted down by the government to zero by end October.  After that, workers and employers are on

Sweatshops and monopsony power – a review

Leicester is a medium-sized city in the centre of England.  It has come into the limelight in the last few weeks because of an outbreak of COVID-19 in the city, forcing a local lockdown, while the rest of England starts to ‘come out’.  Leicester has a relatively high British Asian community and many are concentrated