Professor Terry McDonough made an interesting point at the recent TASC conference when he pointed out, using the US experience during the Great Depression, that a statistical end to economic decline doesn’t mean an end to the recession. Let’s chart this and see what it might mean for the Irish economy. But first, let’s nail [...]

I think - but would be happy to be corrected - that one of the weaknesses with the Left is a shortage of ambitious and feasible policy ideas to change a key source of inequality in Western economies: the scale of the inequality in the income that those who are in employment receive for their [...]

TASC, the think tank that I’m sure many readers are familiar with from our regular links to posts on Progressive Economy, are organising an economics conference this weekend which is open to the public.
The overall theme is Towards a Progressive Economics, which reflects the attempts by the speakers to provide an alternative economic perspective to [...]

Origins of Casino Capitalism[1]
When capitalism first began to emerge as the dominant economic system around the turn of the 19th century in Western Europe and North America, the role of the financial sector in the system was simple and straightforward.  When individuals or groups wished to set up a new company, they sold shares in [...]

The nature of crises is a multi-faceted one; they seem, at first, to come from nowhere yet they are the unfolding of underlying laws of motion to their ultimate and destructive conclusion; they are both a moment of great catastrophe but also one of great opportunity; they are, so to speak, the end of one [...]

The Commission on Taxation is about to descend upon us – six hundred pages worth, apparently. The Commission report is of a different order than the McCarthy report. The latter was set up to find ‘savings’ in order to reduce the high borrowing requirement (it failed to do this as we discussed previously – the [...]

Over on Progressive Economy Michael Taft provides his second thorough examination of the data on social welfare and the arguments behind the demands for cuts in the forthcoming budget (part one here). He looks beyond the payments themselves and includes the other benefits in kind, including rent supplement, school and clothing allowances, and medical cards [...]

On the One News at One, RTE’s business editor David Murphy concluded his piece on the National Treasury Management Agency’s Annual Report:
‘The other problem is that the credit rating agencies have downgraded Ireland’s debt. International markets will want to see serious spending cuts so the country can stop bleeding money day after day.’
There are three [...]

Micheal Taft of Notes on the Front (and ILR) was taking part in a Prime Time panel discussion last night about our ever increasing deficit and whether we have reached the bottom. Also on the  panel were Dan O’Brien, Senior Economist, Economist Intelligence unit, and Jim Power, Chief economist, Friends First.
Visit the Prime Time home [...]

Tony Judt, writing in 2006 used the phrase ‘useful idiots’ to describe a new cohort of American liberals who were happy to use their considerable intellectual reputations to endorse the morally repugnant actions of the US Administration in the Middle East. The phrase came to mind, perhaps uncharitably, while reading Sli Eile’s response in the [...]