Jeff Madrick - economic history; from1970 to the economic crisis today
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this is a reshare from my friend Joe Friendly´s channel. i encourage you to visit and subscribe this channel http://www.youtube.com/user/joefriendly About the lecture : A lecture and book signing by noted economist Jeff Madrick "Greed will always be with us," he writes, "but it rises and falls with the times." In Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, Madrick brings a narrative history of how greed bred America's economic ills over the past forty years—and in so doing tells us how we got to the crisis of 2008 and to the perilous situation we now face. He talks about the impact of the 1970s—a decade of punishingly high inflation and unemployment.. . . . Madrick addresses how tax and economic policies contributed to the nation's ills. A 50-year-old, free-market economic theory was resurrected to justify weakening or eliminating government regulation and social programs. Businesses organized aggressive, well-financed lobbying efforts to support such views. The single-minded pursuit and justification of self-interest has risen to levels of increasing destructiveness. Age of Greed is a history of this era, told through the lives of the individuals most responsible for it. . . . .Jeff Madrick is a professor of economics at Cooper Union, contributor to The New York Review of Books and former economics columnist at the New York Times. Event at Cooper Union Rose Auditorium June 2, 2011. Camera Joe Friendly NEW our community pages on facebook and google+ join and share cutting edge lectures and debates http://www.facebook.com/pages/DebatesAndLectures/116019611819249 or https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/117772575137150380936/
Comments
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You mention Milton Friedman. It is worth noting that Milton Friedman embraced Henry George's proposal for changing the way government raises its revenue.
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Of course, people do make history. We create the socio-political arrangements and institutions under which we live. And, one part of our nature is to seek privilege under our systems of law (particularly property law) and taxation.
What we learned how to do during the 1930s and after was to mitigate some of the destructive outcomes associated with our systems. The fundamental flaws were never addressed. This was brought out very clearly in the writings of Henry George in the late 19th century. He explained why we have periods of boom and bust, tracing the fundamental cause to the private appropriation of the rent of nature, building on the writings of the early political economists (Richard Cantillon, Adam Smith, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, and others).
Throughout the 20th century there were many economists and other objective analysts who continued to hold to the analysis provided by Henry George. Included in this group were economists such as Scott Nearing, John R. Commons, Harry Gunnison Brown, Paul Douglas, Glenn Hoover, C. Lowell Harriss and William Vickrey. Several others economists warned continuously of the crash that came in 2008. This group included Fred Foldvary, Mason Gaffney and Fred Harrison. Harrison's book, "Boom-Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010" was published in 2005.
The delicate balance of public policies that had mitigated earlier downturns (and there have been many since the 1930s) began to unravel at the end of the 1970s when OPEC was formed as the world's great "rentier" elite, claiming an increasing share of what others produced. In the U.S. the process of deregulation began as early as 1973 with the creation of the first money market funds. By the mid-1980s the funds had drained the thrifts of assets, leaving them with portfolios of fixed-rate mortgage loans with negative yields. Financial regulation that followed created the environment for bank mergers and acquisitions, ostensibly to diversify geographical and other risks. The eventual result was the pouring of hundreds of billions of dollars into bank purchases of finance companies and second mortgage firms, the infusion of financial reserves provided the credit to fuel growth of the sub-prime mortgage market (characterized by extensive predatory lending practices and outright fraud) upon which Wall Street built the private label MBS market into a force that overwhelmed the conventional MBS markets dominated by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. -
This guy sure sounds smart but he loses a lot of credibility early on when he claims that nobody saw the housing crash coming. That, s just plain false. The problem was that he and his Keynesian buddies didn't understand what was happening just like they didn't understand what was happening in the 70's. Ben Bernanke (the fed chair) didn't even know we were in a recession until well after it had started even though he was in charge of the money supply should tell you everything you need to know about what sort of thinking created the problem.
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Rare that you get such an, intelligent perspective.
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Wow My age allows me to comprhend what this man is saying I agree ...with what i have heard so far. It is laggy... prolly my fault or tablets DMAXWELL
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All systems require balance to survive. Fact of nature.
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