It's been 11 weeks since Congress passed the CARES Act, which, among its many other provisions, established the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Nearly three-quarters of U.S. small businesses have so far availed themselves of this program. But it turns out that fewer small businesses got a PPP…
"Under the New Deal, the US economy grew at rapid rates, even for an economy in recovery." (Eric Rauchway, The Money Makers, p. 100.) Before I start telling you what "the New Deal" did and didn't do, I had better make clear what I mean by the…
(The response to a recent Twitter string of mine, concerning a column on the New Deal by Noah Smith, mentioned below, suggests that many people would like to learn more about critical assessments of the New Deal by economists and economic historians. With their interest in mind,…
In my last post, I argued that the SEC's "accredited investor" definition, which prevents investors who make less than $200,000 a year or who are worth less than $1 million from investing in private securities offerings, should be eliminated from our securities laws. Under its current definition,…
According to the FDIC, 8.4 million U.S. households lacked a bank account as of 2017, putting America behind other rich countries. Minorities and the young are heavily overrepresented among the unbanked, so addressing this problem is a matter of both financial inclusion and equal opportunity. Fortunately, the…