Monetary Policy 101

In this podcast, Amy Goodman and Juan González explore together with Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, inequality and the state of the U.S. economy. Topics they touch upon are capitalism, taxation, powerlessness of citizens and Joseph Stiglitz's book entitled People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent.

Exploring Economics, an open-access e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to discover & study a variety of economic theories, topics, and methods.

"Bank Underground" is the staff blog of the Bank of England, founded to publish the views and insights of the people working for one of the world's oldest central banks. The blog covers a wide range of macroeconomic topics, mostly linked to the effects of monetary policy, of course, but not all the time. It provides timely, relevant analysis of contemporary challenges in economic policy and is thus often a perfect primer.

This paper investigates how the concept of public purpose is used in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). As a common denominator among political scientists, the idea of public purpose is that economic actions should aim at benefiting the majority of the society. However, the concept is to be considered as an ideal of a vague nature, which is highly dependent on societal context and, hence, subject to change over time. MMT stresses that government spending plans should be designed to pursue a certain socio-economic mandate and not to meet any particular financial outcome. The concept of public purpose is heavily used in this theoretical body of thought and often referred to in the context of policy proposals as the ideas of universal job guarantee and banking reform proposals show. MMT scholars use the concept as a pragmatic benchmark against which policies can be assessed. With regards to the definition of public propose, MMT scholars agree that it is dependent on the social-cultural context. Nevertheless, MMT scholars view universal access to material means of survival as universally applicable and in that sense as the lowest possible common denominator.

The historian Nicholas Mulder talks about the Western sanctions against Russia in the context of the Ukraine Crisis. He explains that the current sanctions are unprecedented in terms of size, speed and scope, expected consequences as well as potential drawbacks and problems.

Was sind Finanzmärkte, Hedgefonds und Schattenbanken? Über diese Fragen erläutert Brigitte Young die Funktionen von Finanzmärkten und Hedgefonds, sowie deren Dysfunktionen anhand prominenter Beispiele. Young geht zudem auf die Regulierung von Hedgefonds nach der Finanzkrise und den Zusammenhang zum Schattebankensystem ein. Zuletzt stellt sie die Frage, ob das Finanzsystem einen sozialen Nutzen hat.