Who is to blame for the dramatic rise in inequality in recent years? The bankers, many people say. According to this view, the financial sector is guilty of triggering the global economic crisis that began in 2008 and still affects millions of middle-class families in Europe and the United States, who’ve seen their purchasing power … Continue reading Moisés Naím: The Problem With Piketty’s Inequality Formula – The Atlantic→
Yesterday’s productivity report for 2014q1 was predictably negative—we already knew that real GDP fell in the quarter while employment grew apace—but I don’t read much into the noisy quarterly changes. But then there’s this: year-over-year, productivity growth was up 1% last year and has averaged 0.8% since 2011. The figure below plots the yearly changes, … Continue reading Where’s the Automation in the Productivity Accounts? | Jared Bernstein (@EconJared)|→
By any normal standard, economic policy since the onset of the financial crisis has been a dismal failure. It’s true that we avoided a full replay of the Great Depression. But employment has taken more than six years to claw its way back to pre-crisis levels — years when we should have been adding millions … Continue reading Springtime for Bankers→
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