The Narrow Bank would take deposits but not make loans. TEN years on from the financial crisis, the structure of American banking has not changed. At its core are government-guaranteed, and therefore cheap, deposits that banks put to work, primarily through lending. Deposits have become more important for bank funding in recent years; governments have […]
Let’s back up a step. The economic inequality data are so familiar by now that they’ve lost the ability to surprise: the world’s richest 1 percent control almost half the world’s wealth; the richest eight men have wealth equal to something like 3+ billion of the world’s poorest. But why? The most common explanation is […]
When looking at artificial intelligence from the perspective of economics, we ask the same, single question that we ask with any technology: What does it reduce the cost of? Economists are good at taking the fun and wizardry out of technology and leaving us with this dry but illuminating question. The answer reveals why AI […]
That proposition has united an ideologically diverse group of dissenters to Amazon’s grand HQ2 competition, ranging from rightwing organizations linked to the Koch brothers to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Groups and individuals that would normally agree only to mutual disdain and distrust have somehow come around to the same conclusion: that Amazon’s decision […]