South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Finance As A Driver Of Inequality

In the video presentation below, James Galbraith of the University of Texas at Austins argues that changes in financial regimes have helped to drive increases in inequality.

Around The Dial – May 10, 2012

Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:

• The News & Record reports on the growth in manufacturing employment.
• National Public Radio reports on the employment prospects of college graduates.
• Simon Johnson call for “breaking up four big banks.”
• Robert Reich says the election should be about what happens in America’s boardrooms.

Job Openings In March 2012

From the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis of the March version of the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) …

… Though there has been steady improvement in the last two-and-a-half years in the odds of finding a job, the odds are still stacked against job seekers. Furthermore, there is no major sector in which the odds for job seekers are strong. The number of unemployed workers outnumbers job openings across the board, underscoring that the main issue in the labor market is a broad-based lack of demand for workers, not workers being in the wrong sectors or having the wrong skills.
…
The increased job openings did not translate into increased hires in March, as hires dropped slightly by 88,000 as compared with the previous month. Looking at the data over time, however, hires nevertheless are on a slow upward climb, up 18.4 percent since the official start of the recovery in June 2009. But hiring still has a long way to go before it is back to healthy levels. For example, hiring is still 16.1 percent below its 2007 average.

Understanding Financial Instability

A mini-documentary produced by the Institute for New Economic Thinking explores the sources of modern financial inability and explains how traditional economic models limit understanding of those causes.

Around The Dial – May 9, 2012

Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:

• Econbrowser decries “the war on data collection.”
• Joseph Sitglitz wonders what comes “after austerity.”
• Working Economics rounds up data on the long-term unemployed.
• Martin Wolf imagines what France should tell Germany.