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Can central banks save us? No, not completely. But they hold part of the key to solving the current crisis. Let’s start from the beginning. There have always been two ways for governments to get money: impose taxes or create currency. Generally speaking, it’s infinitely preferable to impose taxes. …

And despite persistent beliefs to the contrary, “printing money” doesn’t translate into massive inflation: when you’re on the edge of a depression, the main problem is avoiding a deflationary spiral. Between September and December 2008, the ECB and the Fed created nearly €2 trillion in new money (1…

Obviously, this kind of metaphor, based on the morality of the household and family (sloth versus work, the prodigal child versus the good father), is a classic trope of reactionary rhetoric. The rich have been stigmatizing the poor this way since time immemorial. There’s nothing new under the Gree…

That doesn’t mean the central banks did the wrong thing: the new liquidity undoubtedly helped us avoid a cascade of bankruptcies and prevented the recession from becoming a depression. That is, provided governments now manage to impose strict financial regulations that prevent such disasters from r…

[...] if Barack Obama found himself caving in to the lobbyists and watering down his reform of the health care system, it’s because his preelection promises were not sufficiently specific. He hadn’t really been elected on a program, hence his current weakness. Looking on from Europe, where we’re mo…