Social Europe articles on the economy

A definition of chutzpah is murdering your parents and then claiming social benefits as an orphan. It is not widely recognised, but the IMF illustrates similar brazenness in the current debate on Greece’s debt burden. While not exactly pretending to be an orphan, the IMF is currently getting a lot of sympathy for its position: […]

As a biographer and aficionado of John Maynard Keynes, I am sometimes asked: “What would Keynes think about negative interest rates?” It’s a good question, one that recalls a passage in Keynes’s General Theory in which he notes that if the government can’t think of anything more sensible to do to cure unemployment (say, building houses), burying […]

A new agreement has been reached between Greece and its creditors regarding its bailout program. Jeroen Dijsselbloem, president of the Eurogroup, has described it as “ambitious” and a “major breakthrough”. However, a look at the details shows that it’s anything but. This agreement follows the Eurogroup’s time-honored tradition of kicking the can down the road […]

What do people mean when they criticize generals for “fighting the last war”? It’s not that generals ever think they will face the same weapon systems and the same battlefields. They certainly know better. The error, to the extent that the generals make it, must operate at a more subtle level. Generals are sometimes slow to get […]

If we cannot puncture some of the mythology around austerity … then we are doomed to keep on making more and more mistakes. Barack Obama, New York Times, April 2016 I have just completed a working paper based on my talk to the Royal Irish Academy at the end of last year. (Yes, I know, that was six months ago […]

Those campaigning for Britain to exit the European Union claim that doing so would make their country both freer and richer. They assert that after “Brexit”, the UK could quickly negotiate a bespoke agreement with the EU that offers all the benefits of free trade without the costs of EU membership; strike better trade deals […]

It looks like Greece may get some debt relief. There is as yet no certainty about this because some German politicians continue to conduct rear-guard battles to prevent it. What is certain, however, is that all Eurozone countries, with the exception of Greece, have been enjoying debt relief since early 2015. That may seem surprising to the […]

The case for or against a British exit from the EU – #Brexit – is headline news. For the moment the earlier quarrel about a possible Greek exit from the Eurozone – #Grexit – seems to have taken the back seat – with one or two exceptions such as Christian Lindner, leader of Germany’s liberal […]

Times have surely changed: as little as three years ago, Quantitative Easing was considered a remote hypothesis, EU inflation was well over 2% and only a small fraction of “heretics” (including myself) dared to discuss “helicopter money” as a measure to revive the economy. The “money from helicopters”, dubbed complete madness by Milton Friedman from […]

For 200 years, there have been two schools of thought about what determines the distribution of income – and how the economy functions. One, emanating from Adam Smith and nineteenth-century liberal economists, focuses on competitive markets. The other, cognisant of how Smith’s brand of liberalism leads to rapid concentration of wealth and income, takes as […]

Faced with a slowing global economy, a number of observers – including former US Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke and Berkeley economist Brad DeLong – have argued that money-financed fiscal expansion should not be excluded from the policy toolkit. But talk of such “helicopter drops” of newly printed money has produced a strong counterattack, including from Michael Heise, the chief […]

The outcome of the most recent Eurogroup meeting was a positive step towards the conclusion of the first review of the Greek program. The large-scale reform agenda of the government was endorsed by the institutions, paving the way for the long-awaited discussion on public debt. In this respect, the orchestrated efforts by the main (conservative) […]