Nordic differences My Swedish friend Torbjörn just sent me a paper clip containing a notice of a Swedish economics professor commenting on the economic situation in Norway. Lars Calmfors in DN 22 feb 2021. The notice is triggered by his involvement in a Norwegian Green Paper Commision on Labour and Income Policy. NOU 2019:7. The Commision shouldpropose new measures to increase labour participation in Norway. Internationally the Nordic (sometimes only Scandinavian) countries are mostly treated as fairly much of the same under the heading of ‘The Nordic Model’....

Some Time Soon - things will be the same, but different. However, we did not notice the emerging change? - or did we? David Roberts tweet the day after the Trump-mob storm on Capitol: Feels like we’re trapped in a script, a play, that has been performed several times around the world recently. And even though we know exactly how the fall-of-democracy script plays out – every beat, every chapter – we’re just trapped, helpless, watching it play out...

“The Climate Crisis is Capitalism’s Waterloo” (Yanis Varoufakis) “Black Swan” is a label for highly upredictable events with extreme impacts. The concept was made popular by Nassim Nicholas Taleb with his 2007 book of the same title. Some will say the Financial Crisis in 2008 was a black swan. As Queen Elizabeth famously asked the community of Britsish Economists: “Why did nobody see this coming?” - Although some saw it coming, but not among the mainstream scholars....

The Bruegel blog of September 4, 2018 reports from the annual Jackson Hole gathering of central bankers. This year the focus was on implications for central banks of the rise of superstar firms and changing market structure. Of particular interest I found the contribution of Antoinette Schoar (MIT Sloan) - as refered by Bruegel: Antoinette Schoar looks at the financial market, argues that the rapid growth of new digital technologies has created a market dynamic, where many institutions outside the central bank system might soon have much more comprehensive, more accurate and also more timely information than the regulators....

Mainstream economics failure to ‘see the crisis coming’ in 2008 is broadly regarded as a deficiency of the theory. However, Paul Krugman now argues that the theory was - and is - ‘good enough for government’. The failure of 2008 was not in the theory, but rather in deficient data collection. Macroeconomists “overlooked” the institutional changes in the financial sector and did not record appropriate data. The “New Keynesians” - i....