Bill Black — White-Collar Criminologists Answer the call of Conventional Macroeconomists: An Open Letter to Dr. Kartik Athreya, Research Director of the Richmond Fed

I want to thank two prominent “freshwater” macroeconomists, Dr. Narayana Kocherlakota (until recently the President of the Minneapolis Fed and previously the Chair of the University of Minnesota’s economics department) and Dr. Kartik Athreya (Research Director of the Richmond Fed) for their article (2010) and book (2013) , respectively, designed to convey the current status of macroeconomics. Reading their descriptions, and reviewing the work of Oliver Williamson, Roger Myerson, and Leonid Hurwicz in light of the discussion of macroeconomics has made it clear to me that the central difficulties in micro and macroeconomics are with concepts that are the core of what we study as white-collar criminologists and what I dealt with as a financial regulator. There is, therefore, an opportunity for substantial advances should economics draw on the findings of the discipline (white-collar criminology) and the insights of the professionals (successful financial regulators) with the preeminent expertise in these problem areas. Athreya also stresses the key role of law and how the effort to contain fraud explains significant portions of the legal rules for commerce. I also have expertise in law.

Since I combine those three forms of expertise and teach various microeconomics courses, I thought I would write this open letter to orthodox macroeconomists and macroeconomists. For reasons that I will discuss, the perfect person to address is Athreya, with a “cc” to Kocherlakota.

Where economists have drawn on our insights, the results have proven successful. Indeed, I will show that one of the greatest opportunities for the advancement of “modern” macro (and micro) economics would be to cease ignoring George Akerlof and Paul Romer’s 1993 article “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.” I can think of no other field in which a Nobel Laureate, writing in his area of greatest expertise (fraud is the most damaging form of “asymmetrical information”), who proved correct and explicitly warned his field about the need to focus on “looting” (via “accounting control fraud”) would be religiously ignored by scholars in his or her discipline.…

Absolutely must-read.

New Economic Perspectives
White-Collar Criminologists Answer the call of Conventional Macroeconomists: An Open Letter to Dr. Kartik Athreya, Research Director of the Richmond Fed
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

George Akerlof and Robert Shiller — Everything You Need to Know About Free-Market Manipulation

Nobel laureates George A. Akerlof and Robert Shiller are authors of Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception, from which this article is excerpted.

Evonomics
Akerlof and Shiller: Everything You Need to Know About Free-Market Manipulation

George Akerlof, Professor of Economics at University of Berkeley, and Robert Shiller, Professor of Economics at Yale University and the co-creator of the Case-Shiller Index of US house prices

Steve Keen — Wolfgang Schäuble, The Trust Troll

Schäuble was clearly the primary architect of the Troika’s dictat for Greece. One only has to compare its language to that used by Schäuble in his OpEd in the New York Times three months ago (“Wolfgang Schäuble on German Priorities and Eurozone Myths”, April 15 2015). There he stated that “My diagnosis of the crisis in Europe is that it was first and foremost a crisis of confidence, rooted in structural shortcomings”, and that the essential factor in ending the crisis was the restoration of trust:

The cure is targeted reforms to rebuild trust — in member states’ finances, in their economies and in the architecture of the European Union. Simply spending more public money would not have done the trick — nor can it now.

Compare this to the first line of the communique:

The Eurogroup stresses the crucial need to rebuild trust with the Greek authorities as a pre‐requisite for a possible future agreement on a new ESM programme.

The policies in the document match those in Schäuble’s OpEd as well. Schäuble called for:

more flexible labor markets; lowering barriers to competition in services; more robust tax collection; and similar measures.

The Troika’s document forces these measures upon Greece. These include “the broadening of the tax base to increase revenue”, “rigorous reviews of collective bargaining, industrial action and collective dismissals” and “ambitious product market reforms”

Build trust means take apart the welfare state and replace with a market state owned by foreign interests and a domestic oligarchy.

This cannot in any sense be seen as an economic document, since an economic document would have to assess the feasibility of its proposals. Instead it simply states Schäuble’s ideology: regardless of your economic circumstances, simply implement these (so-called) market-oriented reforms, restore trust, and your economy will grow.

This is in spite of the fact that even very conservative economist admit that under this plan the Greek economy won't grow. The plan is obvious aimed at something else and that appears to looting Greece unless it is Greek colonization. It's one or the other, or both.

The other possibility, which Keen prefers, is that Greece is being used to set an example and this economically inexplicable behavior is "punishment." There may be some of that involved, too. It plays well with the propaganda about lazy Greeks. Here they are getting their due and being taught a lesson.

But the fact remains that Greece is being looted by the usual suspects. Considering that to be an unintended consequence seems very farfetched to me, especially give the history, which Keen does not provide here.

Does Wolfgang Schäuble stand to profit from this himself?

Forbes
Wolfgang Schäuble, The Trust Troll
Steve Keen | Professor and Head Of School Of Economics, History & Politics, Kingston University, London

Raúl Ilargi Meijer — Was Greece Set Up To Fail?

Michael Hudson has described in principle how a country is looted. Ilargi fills in the detains regarding Greece. Economic hitman John Perkins has also provided details of other instances and how it applies to Greece. Naomi Klein also describes it in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Ukraine is undergoing a similar process now. First bankrupt the country, then loot it.

All this is taking place under the cover of corporate media propaganda that blames the victims.

It's a well-oiled machine. Which country is next on the list? Is is yours?

The Automatic Earth
Was Greece Set Up To Fail?
Raúl Ilargi Meijer

For links on Greece see also

Debt Rattle July 18 2015

National Or Merely Upper Looting Class Paranoia? And It Seems To Be Infectious.

  (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Since 1918, Winston Churchill was obsessed with "destroying" Germans. One sick dude.

See also A Very Perfect Instrument and the WWI policies specifically avowed by Churchill and his buddies, not to mention The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Any crime, to hold onto an ill-gotten empire. Is this national or merely Aristocratic paranoia? And it seems to be infectious, seeing as how the US 0.1% has the same disease.

Chuck Spinney writes (reposted with permission):

The Cognitive Reality of Strategic Bombing

High Value Targets Exist in the Eye of the Beholder

Few people appreciate that the leadership liquidation strategy of the drone war is merely old wine in a new bottle. It is a logical extension of the strategic bombing doctrine developed in the 1930s and first executed in WWII. This doctrine posits that target analysts located far from the scene of action can identify the critical nodes in an adversary’s infrastructure which can then be taken out in a systematic program of precision attacks. This central premise of strategic thinking has remained unchanged from the identification of ball bearing factories in Germany during WWII to the Mr. Obama’s picking of individual terrorists to be killed by precision drone strikes in the Global War on Terror (GWOT) based on the analysis of the “signatures” emitted by these terrorists, as analyzed by the targeteers far removed from the scene of action. (This CIA report will give the reader access to some of the banal considerations the CIA purports to use — or says it should use — in the thought process that identifies the “high value targets” for liquidation in its targeted killing strategy.)

Yet, the central feature of every strategic bombing campaign is that the number of targets in the master target lists purporting to map these critical nodes always grows wildly once the bombing starts; a phenomenon that suggests the node may not have been so critical to begin with.* The target proliferation phenomenon has held true regardless of the level of precision in the bombardment. It can be seen in every so-called “strategic" bombing campaign to date, regardless of how the nodes have been defined: WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, Gulf War I, Kosovo, and Gulf War II, and the GWOT(where the critical nodes have been reduced to specific individuals).

Attached herewith is a reminder of how this mentality can mutate into the blind butchery of carpet bombing, as happened in the case of the RAF’s night bombing of Germany in WWII** 

———— 

* One possible theoretical exception might have been the Single Integrated Operational Plan (or SIOP) which laid out the target base and weapons lay down for nuclear strikes on Soviet Union during the Cold War. By the mid-70s, we had far more nuclear warheads than targets and there was no hope of growing the SIOP target list to the point that it was large enough to absorb all the weapons — consequently there was a lot of unnecessary double and triple targeting of even unimportant targets to use up the available nucs. 

Fortunately, this possible exception to the target proliferation rule was never tested.

** The RAF night bombing campaign is certainly one of the three candidates for being the most imprecise, most pointless, and most murderous strategic bombing campaigns ever attempted. The other contenders being the USAAF fire and atomic bombing of Japanese cities and its fire bombing of North Korea’s cities).

Germany's forgotten victims

###

This all reminds me of the 3rd American Revolution.

Including some damn Queen or set of aristocrats reeking of death, whether wielding Divine Right or merely stolen economic might. They can't precisely bomb all of us.

At least not without bombing themselves too. The ultimate drone strategy is to bomb everything outside gated communities. And maybe some of those too.

Remember when Dogbert considered forming an Unholy Alliance with the Military Industrial Congressional Complex?

"You're willing to [bomb] allies?" *

"It's the highest ROI!"

* Even ourselves.

Worth Reading: 1993 Paper On Strategic Fraud ... Applies To Diverse Contexts (& OODA Loops)

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

OODA Loops aren't active ONLY in warfare, as the 1993 paper linked to below clearly shows.

Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit

The authors received a Nobel Prize based on this work, about just one aspect of 2G-5G war by parasites on their host, the USA and it's MiddleClass.

That Nobel award actually shows how naive people in other fields can be about the scope for applying misdirection when mastering Policy OODA Loops. After all, the "OODA" loop has been actively studied since circa 1926-1939, as Walter Shewhart's PDSA Cycle, and it's actual existence certainly predates the human species. The bigger the group brain, the more feedback loops contribute to the statistics of it's process control. Only the scale and the methods change.

We're all politicians now. That's what Democracy means. Hence, fraud and misdirection are our constant companions, everywhere, even in our own mirrors.

If we can't trigger an honest effort to re-orient after our own acts - in the midst of an unending FutureShockWave - then we can't possibly make adaptive adjustments in response to all the repercussions we ourselves trigger.

And if we're not re-assessing our own impact on our own outcomes, we can't hope to field OODA loops that are better/faster/leaner than the OODA loops of others - including diverse frauds, Innocent or not, both domestic and foreign.

Ironically, complacency involves actively defrauding ourselves of our future options.

Have you ever actually visualized a Control Fraud lobby arresting a Democracy's OODA Loop? It happens. Remember the Keating-5? The neutering of Brooksley Borne? Or the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act?

There have been more examples, in all disciplines and all arenas, and more are undoubtedly in the works. It's up to us to safeguard our policy OODA loops. That's possible, since none of us is as smart as all of us ... but that only matters if enough of us participate in our national OODA loop.

Until then, a group brain is a terrible thing to waste.

Yves Smith — Who Wins in the Financial Casino?

I received a message last week from a savvy reader, a former McKinsey partner who has also done among other things significant pro-bono work with housing not-for-profits (as in he has more interest and experience in social justice issues than most people with his background). His query:

We both know that financialization has, among so many other things, turned large swaths of the capital markets into a casino 

Here’s my thought/question: is there a house? 

The common wisdom is that the ‘house wins’ in casinos 

In all likelihood, at least in the great financial crisis, the TBTF banks were the ‘house’… yet, it’s at least a bit different from a casino house because, absent the bailouts, those banks would not have won. 

So, who or what was really the ‘house’? Was it the Fed? Did the Fed actually ‘win’? 

Maybe the ‘house’ is the 1% …. or, more precisely, the .01%???

Naked Capitalism
Who Wins in the Financial Casino?Yves Smith

Merijn Knibbe — Piketty and the fixed-investment rate

Think using retained earnings for stock buybacks to increase the stock price and increasing CEO compensation instead of investing retained earnings productively in capital expansion, R&D, etc, or distributing it to shareholders.

Piketty's "capital" includes both real and financial wealth. The balance between real and financial is significant. Financial wealth can be growing substantially owing to change in valuation that is largely the result of rent seeking that adds nothing real, while real capital remains constant or even depreciates. It's a form  of looting a firm.

Almost no space has been devoted to looting as factor in increasing inequality, and rent seeking is only recently being appreciated, although it remains greatly under-appreciated.

Real-World Economics Review Blog
Piketty and the fixed-investment rate
Merijn Knibbe

Speaking of Fallacies of Scale ..... Did a Neoliberal Energy Grab Backfire?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



You just can't make this stuff up fast enough to compete with reality. If it's good for Exxon-Mobile, it's good for the country? Someone please tell the NeoLiberals that Russia is not a banana republic whose consent they can manufacture. In fact, please tell the US electorate that NeoLiberalCons are not our friends.

Crimea: an EU-US-Exxon Screwup

"The EU started openly pushing Ukraine for a really raw, exploitative trade deal in March 2012. A month later, in April 2012, Putin signed up with ENI-Italy to explore Russian Black Sea oil/gas. In August 2012 Exxon put up big bucks to outbid Russia’s Lukoil for exploring Ukrainian Black Sea oil/gas (a deal crucial to Exxon’s breaking of Russia’s stranglehold on gas supplies for Europe). Over the next year, Yanukovych (no doubt convinced by massive contributions to his Bahamian bank accounts) pushed the Ukrainian parliament to pass all the laws required to meet the EU/IMF’s draconian austerity requirements. (see Michael Hudson’s “New Cold War Ukraine Gambit” for an explanation of neoliberal looting economics.) When it looked like he might succeed, Putin quickly imposed the gas/trade embargo on Ukraine in August 2013, starting a precipitous drop in the Ukrainian economy–and Yanukovych started backing away from the EU deal. 

That’s when the EU-US-EXXON made their monumentally stupid move of unleashing the coup against Yanukovych, beginning with the November 2013 Maidan protests leading to the neo-fascist incited riots that ended in the coup of 27 February 2014. The US-EU inspired coup, of course, gave Putin the perfect opening to welcome the grateful Crimeans back into the Russian fold–thereby swelling Putin’s domestic approval ratings enough to keep him in power for the next ten years. (For a good analysis of how Putin may view the world, see Mark Ames’ analysis of how he is exploiting the politics of resentment in Russia, Nixon-style.) And, perhaps not coincidentally, welcoming the grateful Crimeans also happened to more than double Putin’s Black Sea oil/gas holdings, while ruining Exxon’s chances for breaking his stranglehold on European gas supplies. 

Putin certainly isn’t the greatest European strategist since Bismarck. But it doesn’t take much to win when opposed by dumb, ultra-greedy opponents guided by the arrogance of ignorance. All Putin needed was seeing one tiny move further ahead.

This is no joke. Why do the NeoLiberalCons keep beating our aggregate heads against a wall?  Do they really think we'll appreciate them when we finally make them stop?

Bill Black — Finance Refuses to Take Akerlof and Romer Seriously about Looting

Economists don't get fraud. No place for it in economic theory.

New Economic Perspectives
Finance Refuses to Take Akerlof and Romer Seriously about Looting
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Encouraged By Their "Success" In Europe, European Investors Position East Africa For Looting Too

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Whoa!

This is quite a story. Not only is the whole financial system WAYYYYYY more trouble than it's worth, the euro system is the worst of the worst, including deadly trouble.

Looting Rwanda is what Davos touts as Euro investing options?

The confluence of statements in this Rwanda story also implies a bevy of Rwandan elites eager to sell the rest of their citizens to the highest bidders. (Those bidders will also throw in assassinations, gratis, as a show of good will? Wow!)

This is so worth reading that a few comments are posted in-line [bold text].

Rwanda emerges as East Africa’s investment gateway

Rwanda’s finance minister Claver Gatete waxes lyrical over the country’s bid to become an international-investment hub for the budding East African Community and defends the administration’s security policy.

Claver Gatete, Rwanda’s minister of finance, has but only a few minutes to spare on the phone with Euromoney as he darts from one meeting to another at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The minister is upbeat as investors praise the administration’s deft stewardship of the economy, which is rapidly entrenching its status as an innovative hub for central and east Africa. Gatete’s gallivanting zeal as the country’s chief sherpa on the global economic stage is designed to send a clear message to the international investment community: Rwanda is open to global business.

The Davos exposure comes as Rwanda braces for a landmark economic event in May – the annual African Development Bank forum. Gatete says the event will prove a watershed in the country’s economic rehabilitation in its post-conflict age. “Having the forum in Rwanda this year is a vote of confidence for us,” he says. “It shows the region and the rest of the international community that we are capable of successfully hosting such a central event in African development.”

Rwanda has proven itself to be an extraordinary African success story relative to expectations in 1995. Although there was a slight slowdown in economic growth in 2013, between 2001 and 2012, real GDP growth averaged 8.1% per year and, between 2006 and 2011, an estimated one million people were pulled out of poverty. Underscoring the country’s economic ascent, the Kigali Convention Centre, an impressive glass dome that will become a focal point of the city upon completion, was financed by a successful Eurobond issue in April 2013.

The debut issue was priced at the tighter end to yield 6.875% and attracted a $3.5 billion order book – more than eight-and-a-half times the issue size and more than half the country’s GDP. The conference centre will house a five-star hotel with 292 rooms, a large conference room with a capacity to hold 2,600 people, as well as 24,000 square metres of office space.

The administration hopes the China-backed project won’t in the coming years be seen as an under-used vainglorious construction effort. 

[rge: Good luck with that.] 

Instead, it’s hoped it will be seen as a proactive capacity-building project as Rwanda attracts greater FDI flows, buoyed by its reputation as a regional business and transport hub for the East African Community.

Early signs are encouraging. Last year, the World Bank ranked Rwanda – a commodity-poor landlocked nation – the second-easiest country to conduct business in sub-Saharan Africa, after Mauritius.

[rge: That defines success? Or could that WB ranking be calling looters to Rwanda? After all, "pro-active" capacity building has a 'sterling' track record. Even in China. :) ]

Globally, Rwanda is ranked at 32. The Rwanda Development Board has drastically cut the time it takes to register a business in the country: it’s possible to be in and out of their offices with all necessary licences in less than six hours. 

[rge: For foreigners only, or local citizens as well? They don't say.]

However, questions over president Paul Kagame’s human-rights record, and tolerance of dissent continues to dog the administration, testing international support. In the latter part of 2012, Kagame was accused of supporting the Democratic Republic of Congo’s M23 rebels in the Great Lakes conflict. Gatete is anxious to reject any accusations of collusion. “It was proven that the government of Rwanda had not provided any assistance to [the M23],” he says. “The country got all of its aid back, all bilateral and multilateral agreements were restored, and donors are continuing to offer their support with no exceptions. As I have said, confidence in Rwanda – politically and economically – remains firm.” He adds: “We work closely with the international community to reach a peaceful solution in the Congo, nothing more.”

However, Rwanda’s international standing came under the spotlight again recently, after the US criticized scathing comments made by Kagame, who claimed that political opponents ought to be treated harshly. The remark came after one of his exiled critics, Patrick Karegeya – a former director of external intelligence and a former opposition leader – was found dead in a hotel room in Johannesburg, raising questions about the administration’s involvement. “We didn’t do it, but my question is: shouldn’t we have done it?” said Kagame at prayer breakfast on January 12, as was reported by Reuters.

Says Gatete: “Karegeya was part of the opposition and was responsible for setting off bombs in Kigali, but the death had nothing to do with us and we will leave the South African government to look into the case. All Kagame is trying to do is protect the country.” Anxious to shift back into Rwanda’s international-investment bid, Gatete cites two landmark projects that highlight the country’s dynamism. “One of the most interesting [projects] is Visa International’s project here to roll out mobile payments and transfers,” he says. “If it’s successful, it will be rolled out in the rest of the region. “The East African Commodities Exchange is another example. Rwanda was chosen for the site of this despite its size and because of its insight into business. Rwanda is a good place to do trials such as this one.

We are a government that international companies can trust and it’s a place where business runs smoothly.”

[rge: A place even Al Capone couldn't resist? With the way paved by missionaries of finance, hosting prayer meetings?]

The exchange aims to increase liquidity and offer a commodities market for 130 million people in the region. One of its goals is to create a platform for smaller, regional producers and give them access to futures and options – an ambitious project given nascent financial infrastructure, limited listed equity products and issuers, as well as illiquidity. Nevertheless, the commodities exchange is another step towards East African integration, aimed squarely at the economies of scale.

“We already have freedom of movement and freedom to seek employment within the region, which helps business in Rwanda and elsewhere,” says Gatete. “We already have certain things in place, including a customs union and a common market. “The next phase will be a monetary union and a single currency.”

[rge: You just HAD to expect that that was coming at some point, given input from the looters in Brussels.]

Few consider the integration project will be plain sailing, but Gatete’s enterprising zeal highlights how Rwanda – the small country with big ambitions – represents a competitive challenge and opportunity for its reform-shy regional neighbours.

[rge: Right! "Painful structural adjustments will be necessary." Just like in Greece. Maybe Rwanda's "reform-shy" neighbors are right to hunker down & hope to survive another round of colonialism. Evolutionary resiliency is, after all, built through maintenance of diversity, not the brittle "efficiency" of over-adapting everything to transient contexts. Every time "we're all (anything-uniform) now," we're mostly all dead just one context later, when the Luddites offer their standard excuse that "no Luddite could have predicted this!"]

Bill Black — America Has Become a "Cheater-Take-All" Nation

Why do people like Tyler Cowen still equate wealth with merit? Many rich people are just crooks....

Tyler Cowen’s new book Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation warns that inequality will only get worse as a "hyper-meritocracy" of smart, energetic people at the top commanding machines and data speed ahead and the lazy, not-very-bright folks at the bottom fall further behind.

One thing seems to be left out of the discussion: those hyper-meritocrats are led by criminal morons.

Cowen’s embrace of Social Darwinism assumes that the winners have a selective advantage that arises from “merit” – which Cowen conflates with the ability to create wealth. This is passing strange as we are still suffering from an orgy of wealth destruction led by the “winners.” The people who grew wealthiest were often the people must responsible for the largest destruction of wealth in history. That it is an anti-meritocratic system. We do not live in a “winner-take-all” nation. We increasingly live in a “cheater-take-all” system.

AlterNet
America Has Become a "Cheater-Take-All" Nation
William K Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri – Kansas City

Bill Black — Why do Conservatives Oppose Prosecuting Elite Corporate Frauds?

There are at least four principles that virtually all conservatives purport to support – except when the potential defendant is socially elite. I have written previously about two of these principles on several occasions – the need for accountability and “broken windows” theory that calls for the prosecutors to make the prosecution of even minor street crimes a high priority if they have, even indirectly, a material effect on the community.

The third principle is that it is vital to punish in order to deter crime.....

The fourth principle, the one this column addresses, is the conservative love of “creative destruction” – a concept made famous by the economist Joseph Schumpeter. I have a simple proposition – there is no more creative destruction than putting a control fraud out of business through a prosecution, receivership, or enforcement action....

New Economic Perspectives
Why do Conservatives Oppose Prosecuting Elite Corporate Frauds?
William K Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri – Kansas City

Double standard of justice. Why? Because the fundamental principle of conservatism is that some people are better than others, whereas the fundamental principle of liberalism is that all are created equal. As a result, there is no reforming conservatism. It is a pernicious doctrine that underlies and justified exploitation by an authoritarian elite, often in the name of "freedom."

Where I would disagree with Bill is where he asserts, "Control frauds are the ultimate betrayal of capitalism." I would say that they are the logical outcome of capitalism, which leads to elite capture of the state and exploitation of the people. Only by restraining and ultimately putting an end to capitalism can the situation be addressed in a lasting way. Otherwise, they'll be baaack, zombie-like. Cyclicality is part and parcel of capitalism.

Conservative scholars love (purported) “private market discipline.”  This is the theory that creditors will promptly destroy any control fraud.  The problem is that creditors actually fund the massive growth of control frauds rather than “disciplining” them.  Control frauds report extreme profits.  In the case of accounting control frauds these reported profits are fictional, but the creditors love to fund their growth.  In the case of other forms of control fraud the supra-normal profits produced by the fraud are real, so private market “discipline” is a complete oxymoron.  The creditors eagerly fund these other forms of control fraud because of their highly profitable frauds.

Bill Black — Teaching White-Collar Crime

If you never read anything else by Bill Black, please read this and share it widely. It is an excellent summary of Bill's work in documenting control fraud by CEOs as the primary cause of the US financial crisis, and also why nothing has been done about it.

New Economic Perspectives

Teaching White-Collar Crime

William K Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri – Kansas City

Greece's International Lenders are Squabbling.

Gangsters fighting over the loot? Can someone remind me how a country can fail to supply itself with enough fiat currency, and decide to borrow someone else's fiat instead? And then panic at the prospect of running out of fiat? Somehow fiat currency was transmogrified to fiat looting? And people say that currency is hard to understand! It's Luddites who it is hard to understand. Viva la repression! Who says the ancient Greeks perfected tragecomedy. Their descendants are doing them one better - by staging worse.

The elite Greek families like to have a captive populous.

It's a question of how long the Greek peasants will covet their protective chains.

IMF, EU clash over Greece's bailout prospects

This is scarcely to be believed (no pun intended).
Whole populations really will do anything in their power to avoid thinking!

Are the loan sharks sensing that this pond is nearly all fished out?

Ironically, at least they're distributing income by buying & using teargas.

Enough tears adds to aggregate demand? What a sick outlook.