Purpose – This paper seeks compare the current financial and economic problems with the problems facing the world economy in the 1930s. Design/methodology/approach – The paper argues that the Great Depression and the current problems have similar causes – excessive speculation, leading to...

This paper focuses on two books that Robert Heilbroner wrote with Peter Bernstein on public finance – A Primer on Government Spending (1963) and The Debt and the Deficit (1989). It also discusses how the economic world changed between the early 1960s and the late 1980s, and how these changes...

1. Introduction - Pressman and Smithin -- I. Budget -- 2. Keynes after Piketty: Some Unsettling Questions Regarding Government Budget Deficits - Steven Pressman -- 3. Some Unsettling Questions Regarding Government Budget Deficits: The National Debt is Irrelevant - David Barrows -- II. Trade --...