In the context of economics there are two major things that the GFC proved to the world. Firstly, global financial regulatory frameworks are woefully inadequate and, secondly, very few of the ruling class of economists have any idea what is going on. These two things alone have lead to a massive loss of wealth and well-being across the globe over the last five years, yet very little has been done to deal with them.
Some, however, have taken the pain of the GFC as an opportunity to attempt to address these and many other issues, and one of the leading entities in that regard is the institute for new economic thinking.
If you aren’t sure what this is here is their thought provoking introductory video containing many famous economic faces explaining the issues.
The major backer of INET is George Soros, who together with Bill Janeway, just pledged an additional $75million to continue the INET program.
Over the last few days INET has been running their latest conference entitled “Paradigm Lost: Re-thinking economic and politics” in Berlin and ,as you can see from the conference schedule , many famous names spoke including one of my own favourites Michael Hudson.
This event, much to the disgust of many mainstream economists, was invitation only. Luckily for the rest of us INET has created a channel on Youtube containing most of the conference along with supplemental material including some intereviews with Steve Keen. ( Day 3 is missing from the list for some reason)
There is lots to see on the Channel, and I certainly haven’t been through it all but I will endeavour to over the next few weeks. Given Mr Hudson is one of my favourites I got to him first, so below is his presentation. The transcript is here: