J. Bradford DeLong
J. Bradford DeLong, a former assistant secretary of the US Treasury, is Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley and a research associate at the National Bureau for Economic Research.
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2012-01-30
| Relatively soon after the start of the Great Depression, the British economy was rapidly returning to its previous level of output, thanks to Neville Chamberlain’s reliance on fiscal stimulus to restore the price level to its pre-depression trajectory. Unlike today's British leaders, he did not appease flawed economic theories.... read |
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2011-12-30
| Today, finance and insurance in the US account for 8.4% of GDP, up from 2.8% in 1950 and 6% in 1990. So why has the devotion of a great deal of skill and enterprise to finance and insurance sector not paid obvious economic dividends?... read |
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2011-11-30
| Today's super rich command and control over resources that they are effectively satiated. So, when we calculate what their tax rate should be, we should not consider the effect on their happiness, but rather on the well-being of everyone else.... read |
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2011-10-31
| When the European Central Bank announced its program of government-bond purchases, it let financial markets know that it thoroughly disliked the idea, was not fully committed to it, and would reverse the policy as soon as it could. But the ECB's refusal to accept responsibility for financial stability flies in the face of the history of central banking.... read |
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2011-09-29
| The US government can currently borrow for 30 years at a real interest rate of 1% per year. Given this, an additional $500 billion in infrastructure spending would yield enormous benefits – and virtually no costs.... read |
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2011-08-30
| Ben Bernanke's recent claim that the US economy's “growth fundamentals" apparently have not permanently altered by the shocks of the past four years” is simply not credible. Worse still, it sanctions a hands-off approach to economic depression that threatens to undermine US and global growth for years to come.... read |
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2011-07-29
| During the run-up to World War II, Winston Churchill, speaking in Parliament, lamented “the years that the locusts hath eaten” – the period during which preparatory action to face the great crisis of his day (the rise of Continental fascism) could have been taken, but was not. America's debt-ceiling debate has put the US in a similar position.... read |
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2011-06-30
| Back in the late 1990’s, in America at least, support for financial deregulation was widespread, and the entire experiment turned out to be woefully misguided. But if it all looks like such a bad idea now, why didn’t it then?... read |
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2011-05-25
| In 2007, it was reasonable to expect that construction spending in the US would be depressed for some time to come. But the extent of the subsequent fall-off in construction spending relative to long-run trends has dwarfed the level of excess spending in 2003-2006.... read |
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Economics in Crisis
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J. Bradford DeLong 
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Asked recently to name where to turn to understand what was going on in 2008, former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers cited three dead men, a book written 33 years ago, and another written the century before last. Economists today, by contrast, have allowed themselves to be continually distracted, confused, and in denial.... read
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2011-06-30
| Back in the late 1990’s, in America at least, support for financial deregulation was widespread, and the entire experiment turned out to be woefully misguided. But if it all looks like such a bad idea now, why didn’t it then?... read |
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2010-10-27
| Britons are willing to lend to their government on an enormous scale – and on terms that are more generous than the IMF's. But that hasn't stopped the Cameron government from forcing through fiscal cuts that will cost a half-million public-sector jobs – and cause the loss of another half-million private-sector jobs – at a time when no sources of expanding demand exist to pick up the slack.... read |
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2008-12-26
| A decade ago, the 2008 Nobel laureate in economics, Paul Krugman, wrote a little book entitled The Return of Depression Economics. It sank like a stone, but now it's back – in a revised and expanded edition – and, sadly, this time Krugman's timing is perfect.... read |
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2008-08-28
| The Federal Reserve and other central banks are coming under growing pressure to rein in rapid price growth. But headline inflation numbers are the only indication that rising inflation is a problem, or even a reality, and there is no sign anywhere of a wage-price spiral.... read |
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2008-07-29
| The fact that the US has not slid into a full-blown recession proves that the late Rudi Dornbusch was right that macroeconomic imbalances can last for longer than economists believe possible. But, given the magnitude of the chaos on the financial side of the US economy, widespread nationalization and liquidations are inevitable if confidence is not restored soon.... read |
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2005-08-24
| Over the past six months, attention and worry have shifted from America’s enormous trade deficit to its surging property markets and real-estate bubble. At least two of the reasons for high – and rising – home prices in the United States are well understood. What remains highly uncertain, however, is whether an obviously overheating market can be cooled without sending America, and its main trading partners around the world, into an economic tailspin.... read |
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2005-09-16
| I recently learned something interesting: American international finance economists and American domestically oriented macroeconomists have very different – indeed, opposing – views of the likely consequences of America’s huge current-account deficit. International finance economists see a financial crisis as likely, followed by a painful and perhaps prolonged recession in the United States. Domestically oriented macroeconomists, by contrast, see a forthcoming fall in the value of the dollar not as a crisis, but as an opportunity to accelerate growth.... read |
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2005-05-17
| Most academic economics rely on concepts laid down at the beginning of the twentieth century by the British economist Alfred Marshall, who said that “nature does not make leaps.” Yet we economists find ourselves increasingly disturbed by the apparent inadequacy of the neo-Marshallian toolkit that we have built to explain our world. ... read |
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2005-10-26
| These days the Chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, Ben Bernanke, likes to talk about a “global savings glut” that has produced astonishingly low real interest rates around the world. But that is the wrong way to look at it. ... read |
2011-05-25
