In a Monday news release, the WFP warned that tens of millions of people will most likely go hungry this year due the COVID-19 pandemic. The agency’s estimates show that around 270 million people will face food insecurity before the year ends, which represents an 82% increase from before the pandemic swept across the globe....Sputnik International
He added that similar work is being carried out by the United States of America, in particular for its F35 fighter jets.
In addition, Murakhovsky said, so far neither Russia nor the United States have been able to build such a unified information system for managing all types of troops due to difficulties in creating a single data format for different types and branches of the armed forces.The operative term is "information system."
National security concerns are cited for the reason the Indian Ministry is shutting down access to 59 Chinese apps.
TikTok, ShareIt, WeChat, and 56 other Chinese apps have been banned in India over what the government called national security concerns.
China’s state-owned oil companies—Sinopec, CNOOC, PetroChina, and Sinochem—are discussing an arrangement to buy crude oil together instead of individually, to avoid bidding wars and gain more bargaining power, unnamed sources in the know told Bloomberg.
The group has already secured the support of the central government and its first step as a collective buyer would be to bid on Russian and African oil cargos on the spot market, the Bloomberg sources said.
If the group bidding pans out, it could indeed give the four quite a lot of bargaining power: Bloomberg notes that Sinopec, CNOOC, PetroChina, and Sinochem together import more than 5 million bpd of crude oil, which is more than 20 percent of OPEC’s total daily production. That stood at a little over 24 million bpd as of May....The swing buyer cartel.
In May 2020, the IMF published a new Working Paper (No 20/73) – Hysteresis and Business Cycles – which provides some insights into what happens during an economic cycle. The IMF are somewhat late to the party as they usually are. We have known about the concept and relevance of hysteresis since the 1980s. In terms of the academic work, I was one of the earliest contributors to the hysteresis literature in the world. I published several articles on the topic in the 1980s that came out of my PhD research as I was searching for solutions to the dominant view in the profession that the Phillips curve constraint prevented full employment from being sustained (the inflation impacts!). The lesson from this literature in part – especially in current times – is that governments should do everything possible to avoid recessions. The hysteresis notion tells us clearly that the future is path dependent. The longer and deeper the recession, the more damaging the consequences and the longer it takes to recover while enduring these elevated levels of misery. Organisations like the IMF have never embraced that sort of reasoning, until now it seems. They certainly didn’t act in this way during the Greek disaster. But, better late than never....Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Review of The Case For a Job Guarantee, by Pavlina Tcherneva (Wiley, 2020).An idea whose time has come.
The demand for some version of a federal job guarantee is not new in US politics. Tcherneva highlights that the idea was part of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights, as well as a key issue raised during the Civil Rights Movement. Though there were some impressive federal job programs mounted during the New Deal, the author calls the Job Guarantee “the missing piece of the Roosevelt Revolution.”...
After having previously been ignored and disparaged for decades by mainstream economists and politicians, MMT has been making the headlines and finding its way into a growing public conversation.
Two significant publications over the last few weeks are challenging the very basis upon which government policy is determined; ‘does it fit with our political agenda, is it affordable’ and ‘how can it be paid for?’
‘The Deficit Myth’ by Stephanie Kelton was described by Professor Hans G Despain in a review in the LSE blog as a ‘triumph’ challenging, as he explained, the false idea that ‘deficits are irresponsible and ruinous towards the productive political activity of deciding which spending programmes should be prioritised’.
Hot on its heels came Pavlina Tcherneva’s book ‘The case for A Job Guarantee’ described by James K Galbraith as the ‘next big, common-sense idea for economic reform’. And in the words of Paul Prescod in the Jacobin Mag, the Job Guarantee ‘offers an inspiring vision of what society would look like if we utilized the various talents and skills working people possess’
Both these publications have stirred an already growing interest in that hitherto boring subject of economics, showing that far from being irrelevant to people’s lives it is critical to them in terms of human and planetary well-being....
China is doing no less than building a new model in FinTech that will make the old model obsolete and in this way they are simply leapfrogging the current financial systems distributing the dollar with fast, lean and modern systems supporting the Financial Silk Road...Kick ass tech.
Quite rightly the Asiatimes is asking .. Who is actually decoupling from Whom? And I can add, and using modern FinTech to do so with solutions appropriate contextually to our modern world....
So, it is clear that both inside and outside of hard FinTech which this writing is about, the trajectory of recreating systems and simply leaving the US out, is alive and well....Excellent backgrounder.
The West is 20 years behind this technology, because China decided to leapfrog and not follow the accepted development trajectory and as such has reconfigured the potentials for the entire planet.
It is high time and in the words of Michael Hudson: “So the United States, through the World Bank, has become I think the most dangerous, right-wing, evil organization in modern history — more evil than the IMF. That’s why it’s almost always been run by a Secretary of Defense. It has always been explicitly military. It’s the hard fist of American imperialism.”
The world is leapfrogging, and elegantly zig-zagging around current imperial financial systems, for a true birth of a new post capitalist post industrial order, without going to war for it.The Vineyard of the Saker
Yuen Yuen Ang, political science professor at University of Michigan, has written an ambitious book. “China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption” is much more than an observer might infer from its title. Its goal is to redefine corruption, reexamine the relationship between corruption and economic growth, and analyze (often empirically) the role of corruption in China’s development during the past 40 years.
Ang begins with two important points: to better understand it, corruption needs to be unbundled into different types because they are likely to have different effects on economic growth. Second, it needs to be weened away from a Western-centric view that, in part because of inability to distinguish between different types of corruption, tends to overlook typical Western corruptions (say, in lobbying or revolving doors between private and public sectors) and present a biased view whereby corruption exists only in less developed economies. That view, Ang argues, leads to a mistaken view that corruption is bad for growth (despite dearth of confirming empirical evidence) and to an idealized view of development characterized by “inclusive institutions” (Acemoglu-Robinson) or “open-access societies” (Douglass North). They are both criticized by Ang.
The concluding sentence is most interesting.She proposes a four-type breakdown of corruption. First, petty theft (pay bribe rather than fine); second, speed money: street-level corruption (get a shop license faster); third, grand theft (embezzlement on a large scale—Nigeria’s Abacha); fourth, access money (giving permissions to capitalists to engage in big projects). Only the latter, in Ang’s view, is desirable....
Eventually, one hopes, economists will move from their faux-moralizing attitude toward corruption and begin to treat some forms of it as rental income.Global Inequality
It is an act of criminal malfeasance that the United States’ federal government has not eased the tremendous fiscal pressure on states and municipalities, enabling them to prioritize public health and long-term economic wealth over immediate maintenance of tax revenue. Misgovernance of the United States presently rises to the level of war crime (and that is not just Donald Trump).
A recent article by Rohan Grey, aptly titled Monetary Resilience, highlights one way this national misgovernance might be circumvented. Municipalities could issue complementary currencies:...Rohan Grey is an MMT lawyer.
Nobody briefed or told me, @VP Pence, or Chief of Staff @MarkMeadows about the so-called attacks on our troops in Afghanistan by Russians, as reported through an “anonymous source” by the Fake News @nytimes. Everybody is denying it & there have not been many attacks on us.....
...Nobody’s been tougher on Russia than the Trump Administration. With Corrupt Joe Biden & Obama, Russia had a field day, taking over important parts of Ukraine - Where’s Hunter? Probably just another phony Times hit job, just like their failed Russia Hoax. Who is their “source”?
This will be presented in 3 sections and in 3 different blog postsBackgrounder with lots of economic history in addition to social and political history. While the author is a committed socialist, which is a matter of choice based largely on values (normative), the history (positive) seems to me to factual and well-researched. It's a tightly packed summary that covers centuries, so it is a fairly long read, but worthwhile. Increasingly, world history is being made in Eurasia.
By profession I’m an Engineer and Consultant, but my first love was and is History and Political Science. In retired life, I’m pursuing higher study in Economics.See also
I’m one of the few decade-old members of The Saker blog-site. Hope that this website will continue to focus on truth and justice in public life and will support the struggle of common people across the world.
An Indian by nationality, I believe in humanity.
Yves here. Michael Hudson discusses the deflationary impact of the coronacrisis and how modern, misguided approaches to unsustainable debt loads are making matters worse.
Remarks given at the 1st ASECU Teleconference ‘Systematic Crises Triggered the Current Pandemic & Progressive Way-Outs,’ May 8, 2020
So what of the concern that the rapid growth of bank reserves will prove inflationary? This concern is misplaced. The Fed can adjust the interest rate it pays on bank reserves, controlling the cost of credit and influencing whether the reserves are lent out.
Only when the bank reserves are lent out does the expansionary credit multiplier process start to work. The Fed controls this process because it controls short-term interest rates.
The Fed is pumping huge amounts of money into the economy. A former New York Fed chief takes a look at what it means (via @bopinion) https://t.co/fDqrFnAYQL
— Bloomberg Economics (@economics) June 22, 2020
