Reading about the crisis in Greece these past weeks has often reminded me of a 2010 book by Australian economist John Quiggin, provocatively titled Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us. If you haven’t read it yet, you should. In the book, Quiggin chronicles the ‘birth’, ‘life’, ‘death’, and ‘reanimation’ of several influential ideas in macroeconomics…
Greece: A ponzi scheme with no end in sight (Eric Reguly, The Globe and Mail). Reguly provides a succinct summary of Greece’s economic death spiral: They are drifting from bailout loan to bailout loan from the IMF, the European Union (EU) and the European Central Bank (ECB). Each loan comes with conditions requiring Greece to put in place further…
From Matt: ‘A triumph of tax madness’. The federal Conservatives are announcing an election-year budget containing a large number of bad economic policies, as well as balanced-budget legislation – rightly called ‘bonehead economics’ by The Globe and Mail Editorial Board. Jeffrey Simpson surveys the wreckage. Simpson draws parallels between Harper’s fiscal policy to that of George W. Bush – politically-targeted but expensive and economically-distortionary…
The Tête-à-Tête 