Paul Krugman recounts the point that rentiers are turning into that old horror movie cliche of the killer/zombie/psychopath who just won’t die quietly — even when you think you’ve killed him multiple times. In classic formulaic style, just when you least expect it, they rise again to try to take you down one last time.
The point refers to John Maynard Keynes’s famous observation that one day the global economy would rid itself of the plague of economic value-sucking rentiers by arriving at a post-scarcity moment. At such a time an abundance of capital would make economic rent an impossibility. Rates would naturally fall to zero to reflect the excess of capital, and rentiers would have to die.
Today we’re calling that idea “secular stagnation”. Which of course sounds more impressive than plain old “abundance” and new enough to be able to distance itself from Marxist economics.
Though, as economist Steve Keen has pointed out, there’s really not that much new or different about it all. Lefties, he notes, have been warning about the symptoms of secular stagnation — which include growing inequality — for over 30 years. And even Summers himself observed that the path towards stagnation probably began as far back as the 1980s; we just never diagnosed the problem properly at the time....The Fiinancial Times — FT Alphaville
Attack of the killer rentiers
Izabella Kaminska
2 comments:
Jamie Dimon gets a raise after evading any criminal charges or massive crime and fraud convictions for their bank. What is a few billion in fines between cronies? If anyone deserves a conviction it is this guy, he was scowling and mocking regulators while his bank was being reckless with the Whale. While the fines were being paid, they were undertaking a massive us Ivy League type corruption effort in China. Caught again. And he gets slapped with a fine equal to a couple months profit! An Injustice. He should be doing 20 years following the Mortgage scams and servicing debacle alone. If I walked in stole $100 from his bank with a gun I'd be in for the rest of my life. He has been proven to be guilty of billions in fraud and gets a slap on the wrist and he uses the government's own gun toting officers to throw people out of their homes fraudulently. Our government is filled with weaklings and corruption. I'm sorry but there is no excuse for this governance failure. I'm angry as hell.
Dimon: "It's not fair."
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