politics, economy and employment & labour
Social Europe is an award-winning digital media publisher. We use the values of freedom, sustainability and equality as the foundation on which we examine society’s most pressing challenges. We are committed to publishing cutting-edge thinking and new ideas from the most thought-provoking people. This archive page brings together Social Europe articles on the economy.
Since its most recent low of $1.20, reached in the heat of the summer of 2012, the euro has appreciated by 15 percent against the US dollar and by more than 10 percent in inflation-adjusted terms against a broad basket of currencies representative of the euro area’s main trading partners. Amounting to a significant loss […]
“What a commentary on the state of twentieth-century capitalism,” mused “motivational speaker” Jordan Belfort as he looked back on his life of fraud, sex, and drugs. As head of the brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont, he fleeced investors of hundreds of millions of dollars in the early 1990’s. I saw Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall […]
Now that the pace of the US Federal Reserve’s “tapering” of its asset-purchase program has been debated to death, attention will increasingly turn to prospects for interest-rate increases. But another question looms: How will central banks achieve a final “exit” from unconventional monetary policy and return balance sheets swollen by unconventional monetary policy to “normal” […]
I grew up in Texas where state and local judges are elected, not unusual in the United States. In most states minimum legal qualifications are required for a person to stand for judge. Not so in Texas, where we had the saying: in some places you need a law degree to run for judge, but […]
It’s a well-known fact that since the financial crisis the Fed and the ECB have pursued rather different monetary policies: the Fed has engaged in large amounts of quantitative easing (QE) –purchases of mortgage-backed securities and other securities such as government bonds –, while the ECB has relied on more conventional monetary policies (the lowering […]
It is quite interesting to see how popular myths can live on in the public’s mind and continue to cause harm and irritation even when the facts speak to totally different language. How can education fail so badly? The particular example I have in mind here is Germans’ supposed exceptionalism in matters of inflation hyper-sensitivity. […]
After taking a short breather in late January-early February, the markets now seem to be back in ‘happy mode’. Whether the news on the economic recovery is good or bad doesn’t really matter. The current convention is that growth acceleration is under way. That emerging markets had become key drivers of global growth was yesterday’s […]
If you ever wonder what’s fueling America’s staggering inequality, ponder Facebook’s acquisition of the mobile messaging company WhatsApp . According to news reports yesterday, Facebook has agreed to buy WhatsApp for $19 billion. That’s the highest price paid for a startup in history. It’s $3 billion more than Facebook raised when it was first listed, and more […]
Emerging markets are back in the spotlight. Investors and banks are suddenly unwilling to finance current-account deficits with short-term debt. South Africa, for example, has had to increase interest rates, despite slow economic growth, to attract the funding it needs. Turkey’s rate increase has been dramatic. For these and other emerging countries, 2014 may prove to […]
The US Federal Reserve is being widely blamed for the recent eruption of volatility in emerging markets. But is the Fed just a convenient whipping boy? It is easier to blame the Fed for today’s global economic problems than it is to blame China’s secular slowdown, which reflects Chinese officials’ laudable efforts to rebalance their […]
Soon after the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, I warned that unless the right policies were adopted, Japanese-style malaise – slow growth and near-stagnant incomes for years to come – could set in. While leaders on both sides of the Atlantic claimed that they had learned the lessons of Japan, they promptly proceeded to […]
The Euro area is suffering from insufficient macroeconomic stabilisation At the end of 2009 the unemployment rates of the Euro area and the United States had reached a level of 10%. Since then, unemployment in the US has fallen to 7.3% while in the Euro area it has climbed to 12.0%. This is not surprising […]
In his pathbreaking 2005 book On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins proposed an alternative paradigm of how the human brain works. In his view, the brain is not a Turing machine that manipulates symbols according to a table of rules, which is the model on which computers and artificial intelligence have been based. Instead, the brain is a giant hierarchical […]
Recent months have seen President Obama make a renewed push to address inequality in the U.S., especially via one policy lever he has focused on previously- raising the minimum wage. For many, conventional economic wisdom states that raising the minimum wage costs jobs, as employers are less willing to take on staff at higher rates […]
Everyone has heard of neoliberalism, but not many outside Germany have heard of ordoliberalism. I’m hardly an expert on it either, and in particular I know very little about the particular thinkers involved and the many varieties of each concept. However as an economist it seems to me that ordoliberalism is much closer to economics […]
The World Trade Organization’s ministerial conference in Bali in December produced a modest package of encouragements to global trade. More broadly, the WTO’s multilateral approach has shown its worth by preventing a massive increase in trade barriers, unlike in 1929-1930, when protectionism helped deepen and broaden the Great Depression. But the main question – whether globalization is […]
Pope Francis warned in November that “ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace” are driving rapid growth in inequality. Is he right? In one sense, Francis was clearly wrong: in many cases, inequality between countries is decreasing. The average Chinese household, for example, is now catching up with the average American household (though still with a […]
Inequality Nightmare – “The poor cannot sleep, because they are hungry,” the Nigerian economist Sam Aluko famously said in 1999, “and the rich cannot sleep, because the poor are awake and hungry.” We are all affected by deep disparities of income and wealth, because the political and economic system on which our prosperity depends cannot continue enriching some […]
Germany is now producing more coal than for twenty years. This has occurred in a society that prides itself on its concern about climate change and has the largest Green party in Europe. Underlying this evident disconnection between concern and behaviour is an international failure to link the challenge of tackling climate change to big, […]
New inequality – From the start, policy responses to the 2008 financial crisis were colored by memories and interpretations of the Great Depression. The conventional wisdom now holds that the world avoided a repeat of the interwar catastrophe, largely because policymakers made better decisions this time around. But, while there is plenty of room for […]
Some ideas are intuitive. Others sound so obvious after they are expressed that it is hard to deny their truth. They are powerful, because they have many nonobvious implications. They put one in a different frame of mind when looking at the world and deciding how to act on it. One such idea is the […]
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