In his column in yesterday's NYT, Professor Paul Krugman rose to the defense of Paul Samuelson. He argued that Michael Hudson's piece, originally published in 1970, not only misunderstood Samuelson's theories but also wrongly asserted that he was not deserving of a Nobel. Krugman's main argument was that Samuelson's version of "Keynesian" economics offered a solution to depressions that pre-existing "institutionalist" theory did not have:

In the Eye of the Storm: Updating the Economics of Global Turbulence, an Introduction to Robert Brenner's Update

http://www.japanfocus.org/-R_Taggart-Murphy/3265

by R. Taggart Murphy

Introduction

Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-breakup24-2009nov24,0,2069502.story
In the U.S. and abroad, support grows for giving regulators the
authority to preemptively dismantle giant financial institutions
whose collapse could cripple the economy.

And here's Jamie .....as the soon to be new Wall Street cheerleader
Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JP Morgan Chase, recently said
in an opinion piece that "capping the size of American banks won't
eliminate the needs of big businesses," he said. "It will force them

Readers: Although this is a positive bit of news for the US's retail economy, it leaves some important questions unanswered. One being why has the US Treasury Department been entirely MIA in this process, when the importance of CIT to the non-Wall Street part of the US economy is enormous? The fate of CIT is possibly much more important generally than the survival big five on Wall Street. Another might be how is letting  CIT pass into bankruptcy acceptable when the wholesale rescue of AIG from collapse was not acceptable?

According to an ILO report[15] issued before the global economic crisis hit, even though more people were working than ever before, the number of unemployed was also at an all time high of nearly 200 million. Further, "strong economic growth of the last half decade has only had a slight impact on the reduction of workers who live with their families in poverty...", in part because the growth was fueling productivity growth (up 26% in the past decade) but was not creating many new jobs (up only 16.6%).

For an example of what can be done, we can look to the recent experience of Argentina. As everyone knows, Argentina had been the darling of the Washington Consensus and of the IMF structural adjustment approach. It opened its economy, freed its markets, privatized government operations, downsized government, adopted fiscal and monetary austerity, and—importantly—adopted a currency board based on the dollar. It did everything “right”, but the IMF/Washington Consensus approach was fundamentally flawed and put Argentina into an inherently unsustainable situation.