Building a New Economics

1 week ago | profstevekeen.substack.com | Steve Keen

Ted Cruz has claimed that the Federal Reserve should stop paying banks interest on Reserves:The Federal Reserve pays banks interest on reserves. For most of the history of The Fed, they never did that. But for a little over a decade, they have. Just eliminating that saves $1 trillion. (YouTube video embedded below)Figure 1: Cruz interviewed on CNBCWith a few caveats, Cruz is right. And the story of how The Fed got itself into this situation is a tale of gross incompetence.

2 weeks ago | profstevekeen.substack.com | Steve Keen

Sorry Phil is a little out of focus (visually). There’s an irony that the UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves has imposed an inheritance tax on farmers, whilst a trade agreement with the US could see Britain selling-the-farm on a farm grander scale. Phil argues that some sort of tax on the inheritance of farms makes sense kif its only used as a tax dodge.

2 weeks ago | profstevekeen.substack.com | Steve Keen

This book was initially targetted at someone who had influence over US economic policy. Whether that's the case now is moot: we'll have to see how the Musk-Trump drama unfolds over the next few months/weeks/minutes/milliseconds (chose your preferred unit of time--the old saying that "a week is a long time in politics" is clearly passe!).

2 weeks ago | profstevekeen.substack.com | Steve Keen

I haven’t published a post here (apart from my podcast with Phil Dobbie) for a few weeks. There are several reasons, not least the circus of Musk’s falling out with Trump—and we’re still in the middle of that act. I had just finished writing a book for Musk on economics before the Trump-Musk spat began, and … it was just deflating. I put in all this work to attempt to influence someone with Trump’s ear, and suddenly he was holding another bit of Trump’s anatomy.

3 weeks ago | profstevekeen.substack.com | Steve Keen |Phil Dobbie

Blil Gates has predicted that within 10 years we’ll be working a two-day week, thanks to advances in AI. He says it’ll mean a vast rethinking of the workplace. It’s not too dissimilar to Keynes’s prediction in the 1930s that wed al be working 15-hour weeks, with more time to enjoy the good things in life. Of course, Keynes was wrong.