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In day-to-day life any kind of price rise is blamed as infla­tion (or price gou­ging!). But this is tech­nic­ally incor­rect. A price rise on any one thing is just a price rise, it is not infla­tion. Strictly, the text­book defin­i­tion of infla­tion is “a sus­tained increase in the gen­eral level of prices”. There is no easy way […]

Eco­Soc invited Ross Gittins to speak at an event at USyd on Thursday, where he presen­ted a series of reas­ons on the topic of why neo-classical eco­nom­ics is flawed. He was quick to point out that he still fun­da­ment­ally sub­scribes to neo-classical eco­nom­ics, but that it neg­lects (what he thinks are) import­ant con­sid­er­a­tions. My imme­di­ate impression […]

The Eco­nom­ist Robin Hood movie The Pun­isher move has an inter­est­ing art­icle moot­ing the pros and cons of a delib­er­ately engin­eered reces­sion in the United States. From a purely tech­nical point of view, there is no reason why this is incon­sist­ent with the Fed­eral Reserve’s man­date. Cent­ral banks these days work on the prin­ciple of infla­tion tar­get­ing to ensure […]

As I men­tioned briefly in my spiel on interest rates Monster’s Ball trailer , the global sav­ings glut pro­duced some rather lop­sided out­comes, many of which are now com­ing home to roost. The ready avail­ab­il­ity of credit and basic greed fuelled the Amer­ican sub-prime mar­ket, and now the world’s stock mar­kets and cur­ren­cies are pay­ing for it. […]