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Michael Heller

Michael G. Heller, author of Capitalism, Institutions, and Economic Development, has taught Southeast Asian and Latin American political economy in the UK, Argentina, and Australia.

Michael G. Heller, author of Capitalism, Institutions, and Economic Development, has taught Southeast Asian and Latin American political economy in the UK, Argentina, and Australia.

This author's latest blog posts

  • 21st Century Risk and Danger

    It seems inevitable that any system set up to deal with risk in the end becomes a source of danger. Or risk. Or danger. What’s the differenc…

  • The Structural Problem of Depression

    In 1934, shortly after Keynes’s breezy and confident letter to President Roosevelt which demanded the United States (a) control the dollar e…

  • The End Of The Welfare State

    What happens in the OECD countries when as a group their general government expenditures have exceeded 50 percent of GDP, when government ex…

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Recent comment received by Michael Heller

  • 21st Century Risk and Danger

    Shane Beck: Or you can indulge in risky behavior and have the taxpayer bail the institution out as which happened in the GFC both in the US and Europe (admittedly in Europe it was whole countries that had to be b…

  • The End Of The Welfare State

    Jim Dwyer: Living where I do in a small west european economy it certainly feels like we already live in a Welfare state. Generous social welfare coupled with weak activation measures (per the IMF) mean that the…

Recent comments by Michael Heller

  • The Austerity Pandemic

    It's interesting to see the faces of two detached cloud cuckoo land leftwing bureaucrats whose phenomenally high UN salaries we support through taxation dollars. This utopian international bureaucracy has been a leech on the world for far too long. If they would update their outlooks and read a little outside of their internal memorandums, all to the good. Otherwise, what pressure can be exerted?

  • Quantitative Quicksand

    Craig, Allan Meltzer does offer the alternative here, but it’s implicit and hardly involves the Fed at all because instead of or in addition to monetary policy he's suggesting “policies for the real economy”, which above all are the policies to get the existing pools of money (currently ‘sensibly saved’ or ‘selfishly hoarded’ depending on your viewpoint) moving through the economy into investment, i.e. policy positions that are market-friendly, predictable, permanent and non-discretionary in order that investors, savers, tax payers will believe they remain true-for-the-future. The two books naturally are Meltzer’s own ‘Why Capitalism’, and also John B. Taylor’s ‘First Principles’.

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