BERKELEY – By any economic measure, we are living in disappointing times. In the United States, 7.2% of the normal productive labor currentl…

BERKELEY – A government that does not tax sufficiently to cover its spending will eventually run into all manner of debt-generated trouble. …

BERKELEY – In the 12 years of the Great Depression – between the stock-market crash of 1929 and America’s mobilization for World War II – pr…

BERKELEY – On the back left corner of my desk right now are three recent books: Arthur Brooks’ The Battle, Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, an…

BERKELEY – Across the North Atlantic region, central bankers and governments seem, for the most part, helpless in restoring full employment …

BERKELEY – Unless something unexpected happens, the United States’ many legislated reductions in taxes over the past 12 years – all of which…

BERKELEY – The odds are now about 36% that the United States will be in a recession next year. The reason is entirely political: partisan po…

BERKELEY – We are not newly created, innocent, rational, and reasonable beings. We are not created fresh in an unmarked Eden under a new sun…

BERKELEY – The first two components of the euro crisis – a banking crisis that resulted from excessive leverage in both the public and priva…

BERKELEY – When the French politician and moral philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of his Democracy in America in …

BERKELEY – However bad you think the global economy is today in terms of the business cycle, that is only one lens through which to view the…

BERKELEY – We economists who are steeped in economic and financial history – and aware of the history of economic thought concerning financi…

BERKELEY – The S&P stock index now yields a 7% real (inflation-adjusted) return. By contrast, the annual real interest rate on the five-…

BERKELEY – On my desk right now are reporter Timothy Noah’s new book The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We C…

BERKELEY – Four times in the past century, a large chunk of the industrial world has fallen into deep and long depressions characterized by …

BERKELEY – Across the Euro-Atlantic world, recovery from the recession of 2008-2009 remains sluggish and halting, turning what was readily c…

BERKELEY – Neville Chamberlain is remembered today as the British prime minister who, as an avatar of appeasement of Nazi Germany in the lat…

BERKELEY – In 1950, finance and insurance in the United States accounted for 2.8% of GDP, according to US Department of Commerce estimates. …

BERKELEY – Via a circuitous Internet chain – Paul Krugman of Princeton University quoting Mark Thoma of the University of Oregon reading the…

BERKELEY – When the European Central Bank announced its program of government-bond purchases, it let financial markets know that it thorough…

BERKELEY – Former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers had a good line at the International Monetary Fund meetings this year: governments,…

BERKELEY – US Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke is not regarded as an oracle in the way that his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, was …

BERKELEY – It is hard right now to write about American political economy. Nobody knows whether the debt-ceiling tripwire will be evaded; if…

BERKELEY – Back in the late 1990’s, in America at least, two schools of thought pushed for more financial deregulation – that is, for repeal…

BERKELEY – In the mid-2000’s, the United States had a construction boom. From 2003-2006, annual construction spending rose to a level well a…