As is expected, by far not all data on actual capabilities of S-500 is available, but the range of 600 kilometers against any aerodynamic targets means one not just tactical or even operational, but fully strategic ramification--it is precisely the range within which latest versions of E3 Sentry AWACS aircraft must enter to have any impact of the target acquisition and battle management. So, you get the idea, right? As you can see, my next book (while still not 100% completed, very close, though) is getting ready for hitting shelves this Summer, and it touches partially on these issues. No NATO Air Force is capable to fight without AWACS enabler. Without it it becomes severely degraded and an easy pick for hostile Air Force and, especially, ground-based modern AD complexes such as Buk-M2, S-400 and S1 in the "ambushes". While one may argue with Irina Alksnis' (in Russian) that Russia didn't exit from arms race, she simply won it, there is very little doubt about the fact that within last 15 years Russia designed, developed and produced some of the most revolutionary weapon systems in history, and which did change warfare and rendered old operational and strategic thinking still dominating Western military-political circles simply obsolete.…This is what Russia and China mean by "asymmetric response." This is nothing new. Chinese military history is replete with introduction of new weaponry to counter advances in weaponry by enemies. See below.
If you were a Roman citizen around, say, 200 BC, you probably would have assumed Rome was going to last forever.Vox
At the time, Rome was the greatest republic in human history, and its institutions had proven resilient through invasions and all kinds of disasters. But the foundations of Rome started to weaken less than a century later, and by 27 BC the republic had collapsed entirely.
The story of Rome’s fall is both complicated and relatively straightforward: The state became too big and chaotic; the influence of money and private interests corrupted public institutions; and social and economic inequalities became so large that citizens lost faith in the system altogether and gradually fell into the arms of tyrants and demagogues.
If all of that sounds familiar, well, that’s because the parallels to our current political moment are striking. Edward Watts, a historian at the University of California San Diego, has just published a new book titled Mortal Republic that carefully lays out what went wrong in ancient Rome — and how the lessons of its decline might help save fledgling republics like the United States today.
I spoke to Watts about those lessons and why he thinks the American republic, along with several others, are in danger of going the way of ancient Rome. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
I had this letter in the FT this morning in response to a piece from Gavyn Davies, which continued the standard neoclassical economist's tradition of entirely missing the point about modern monetary theory….Tax Research UK
AbstractThis paper focuses on the different development strategies of China and India, particularly regarding the role of manufacturing and services, for long-run productivity growth, external competitiveness and financial fragility. The findings appear to support the argument that productivity improvements in manufacturing drive productivity improvements in other sectors. They also substantiate previous findings that the Indian services-led growth trajectory has had limited success in transferring surplus labor from agriculture to other sectors. Furthermore, the trajectories have affected the export performances of the two countries with the Indian trade balance and current account revealing persistent deficits, compared to China's surpluses. The paper also argues that the way in which India has sought to sustain these deficits entails elements of financial fragility, and that the Chinese struggles with the internationalization of the renminbi also imply a possibility of financial instability.
On Sunday, May 12, 2019, I will be presenting a workshop in London on – Local Government Funding: Challenging the Status Quo. Basically, I will be speaking about the way in which flawed understandings of the capacities of currency-issuing governments, combined with a vicious, ideological attack on working people from a government fully invested in neoliberal transfers to the elites, have ravaged the capacity of local government in the UK to deliver essential public services. See the Events Page for more details. It is a public event and I hope people support it. To prepare for that workshop, I have been digging deeply into the data to fully acquaint myself with how the ideological austerity push has been distributed across central and local government service delivery. It is no easy task. The data is a ‘dog’s breakfast’ and coming to summary positions is quite time consuming. There are also nuances in the way local government is structured (particularly since the Thatcher years where devolution and cost-shifting was accelerated), which mean that care must be taken in making sensible comparisons. Here are some of the things I found. I have learned a lot in this process, which is a good thing. This is Part 1 of a two-part series....Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Readers are probably aware that there is quite a lot of discussion of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and the potential for fiscal experimentation batting around at the moment. Others have weighed in on this already, and I have little to add.
It is striking, however, that most of the push-back — where there is push-back — is not focused on trying to discredit the idea that we should engage in fiscal experimentation. Indeed, the notion that we should engage in fiscal experimentation seems to be, if not mainstream, at the very least part of the discussion.
Yet, vulgar strawman-style arguments against MMT aside, no one seriously disputes the fact that if too much fiscal expansion is undertaken the economy will eventually hit a hard inflation barrier, past which any increase in spending will generate inflation rather than real output expansion. Interestingly, no one seems to have tried to come up with a new framework for estimating where this inflation barrier might be and whether it is too risky to overshoot it.
So, I’ve decided to fill that gap. Linked below is a paper where I use a new capacity utilisation-based framework to provide hard, yet optimistic numbers of how far we might push the economy in the spirit of fiscal experimentation....Fixing the Economists
What then is the escape from capitalism?
What would be the essential features of a socialist economy, one the would be really achievable?Exactly the right question. It's not just about there but getting from here to there. The former is utopian, the latter involves being realistic. This is not primarily a theoretical question but a practical one.
Eiteman and Guthrie conclude their paper with this statement: “If the beliefs of businessmen in general coincide with those included in this sample, it is obvious that short-run marginal price theory should be revised in the light of reality.” That was in 1952….Another thing conventional economics reverses and gets backwards. "Reality is a bitch."
What is Stiglitz’s solution? “Things don’t have to be that way. There is an alternative: progressive capitalism. Progressive capitalism is not an oxymoron; we can indeed channel the power of the market to serve society.” You see, it is not capitalism that is the problem but vested interests, especially among monopolists and bankers. The answer is to return to the days of managed capitalism that Stiglitz believes existed in the golden age of the 1950s and 1960s.
How are we to return to the golden age of progressive capitalism?….
The trend towards looser fiscal policy could mark the biggest shift in economic thinking in a generation,,,,Discussion of pros and cons in which MMT gets a play, of course.
“The winning formula for the Democrats is they are going to have to endorse some of these relatively fiscally extreme positions to get nominated,” says one Democratic strategist, speaking of the 2020 presidential contenders. “The threats of debt and deficits have not panned out. We have been running deficits and debt for 30 years and where is the crowding out, the inflation and the soaring interest rates?”"The emperor has no clothes."
In Marc Lavoie's Post-Keynesian Economics: New Foundations, he has an interesting discussion in Section 6.10.4, which is labelled "Minsky or Steindl Debt Dynamics?" The Minsky dynamics are the well-known Financial Instability Hypothesis (link to primer), while the Steindl dynamics refers to the discussion in Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism by Josef Steindl. Lavoie's discussion raises some issues with the limitations of aggregated analysis in this context. This is a brief comment on this topic.…
In summary, we need to be cautious about putting too much emphasis on aggregate debt ratios as a shorthand for riskiness of borrowing.Important for the topic itself but also as a demo of how care must be taken to include all the factors that are relevant to analysis.
Eurostat released the latest fiscal data for 2018 on Tuesday (April 23, 2019) which showed that – Euro area government deficit at 0.5% and EU28 at 0.6% of GDP – apparently a cause for celebration if you can believe the news reports that have accompanied the data release. The problem is that these numbers are meaningless without a context. And a relevant context is how well the monetary system is accommodating the advancement of material well-being among the citizens of Europe. On that ‘functional’ criterion, the horror story, more or less continues. Data relating to the real world (as opposed to the world of fiscal numbers on bits of paper) tell us that the damage from the GFC interacting with a dysfunctional monetary system design still lingers and the 19 Member States are still highly vulnerable to the next crisis. The austerity mindset remains and these fiscal outcomes indicate a failure of policy. Nothing to celebrate at all....The only ones celebrating are the elites. They are doing fine, thanks to rent extraction.
It's difficult to project precisely what the overall economic impact of this would be. Student debt is distributed all up and down the income ladder, and people at different income levels will spend or save the freed up money in varying proportions — it's the spending that will juice job growth and economic activity. But a Levy Institute paper from early 2018 — written by economists Scott Fullwiler, Stephanie Kelton, Catherine Ruetschlin, and Marshall Steinbaum — took a crack at figuring it out.The Week
To think correctly about globalization one needs to think of it in historical context. This means seeing today’s globalization and its effects, positive and negative, as in many ways a mirror-replay of the first globalization that took place from the mid-19th century to the First World War....That globalization was grounded in imperialism and colonialism. WWI was the culmination of this, and the aftermath was its dénouement. That led to the rise of neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism.
For too long, citizens have been told that the government cannot afford to invest more in education, healthcare, infrastructure and other public services. At the same time, they have seen governments find money to pay for tax cuts, bank bailouts, military activities and other programmes that they likely deem to be less essential.
MMT asks that instead of worrying about their balance sheets, governments start looking at ways to use the resources at their disposal in the most efficient way possible. According to the theory, generating full employment, creating a more equal society and fortifying our education systems are all possible without causing rampant inflation. It is not a question of being able to afford it – it is a question of political will.…World Finance
Wednesday today and a short blog. I also have to travel a lot today. But some brief comments on an interesting article from French commentator Michel Lepetit – Nourrir le débat sur une annulation partielle (370 mds€) de la dette publique (April 15, 2019) – which means more or less “Promoting the debate on a partial cancellation (€370 billion) of public debt”. The article proposes that the Banque de France cancels its holding of French government debt (the €370 billion), which could also lead other national central banks in the Eurosystem following suit with respect to their own government debt holdings. He argues that the cancellation (write off) would have no negative social impacts and could help Eurozone governments fund the transition to a low-carbon future. Above all, it reflects an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Michel Lepetit argues that the QE implemented by central banks, especially since the GFC demonstrates the patent failure of the foundations of monetarist dogma (“l’échec patent des fondements du dogme monétariste”).…Is consolidation of accounts within a single entity like government actually "debt cancellation"? Why not standard accounting practice?
The reason this is crucial is set out in the article below. It shows in a detailed way that it is investment, and not any other major factor in the economy, which controls China’s rate of economic growth – as it does in other major economies. In addition to its medium-term effect it was the fall in fixed investment which led to the economic slowdown in the second half of 2018, and the upturn which led to the good results in the first quarter of 2019 and in March in particular. Quantitative analysis of the data therefore confirms that it is fixed investment which is the most powerful factor in China’s medium-term economic development and its short-term macroeconomic regulation....The article also contains an explanation of how the US approach to trade involves hybrid warfare. Hybrid warfare leads with economic warfare and information warfare, followed by cyberwarfare (although cyberwarfare is ongoing under the guise of intelligence gathering), and only then moves on to kinetic warfare if hybrid warfare does not accomplish the objectives, or if the adversary responds.
In a few weeks I am off to Britain again to participate in a series of events. Two of these events will be in Scotland where we (Warren and I) will discuss, as outsiders, issues pertaining to the monetary arrangements that might accompany a move to Scottish independence. It is a controversial issue in itself, but, unfortunately, is also intertwined with the vexed issue of EU membership. And the complication then becomes that progressives, who might otherwise be attracted to the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) way of understanding the monetary system, also exhibit the standard misconstrued Europhile view that the EU, neoliberal though it is, can be reformed and that an independent Scotland should be part of that mess. And, in doing so, they then take problematic positions on the currency question. So a sort of ‘nest of vipers’ sort of situation, from the Aesop’s fable – The Farmer and the Viper. As in the Fable, the Europhiles embrace of the EU will always pay them back in grief. Anyway, while I am always cautious discussing the pro and con of situations where I have no direct material stake and a less than full understanding of specific cultural and historical influences that are at work, the Scottish question is interesting and demonstrates many of points that nations should be cogniscant of when discussing monetary sovereignty. And besides I have to get up in Edinburgh and Glasgow in a few weeks so as a researcher I am trained to be prepared and seek the best understanding that I can of the complexity of the situation. I will be writing a few posts on the Scottish issue as I prepare for that speaking tour....Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Relentless reports that the New Silk Roads, or the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), are a perfidious neo-imperial debt trap set up by Yellow Peril 2.0 are vastly exaggerated.The BRI is set to bring the lagging economies (and societies) in Asia into the 21st century in a way similar to the dynamic growth of China since the Deng era, but free of Western control, unlike Japan and South Korea. Europe has no choice but to join. And if the US doesn't change its imperialistic approach, the rest of the South (Latin America and Africa) is headed that way, too.
With less than one week to go before the next BRI forum in Beijing, a quick overview of what’s been happening in Europe and Southwest Asia may be quite enlightening....
It is generally possible to predict what people will think about abortion from what they think about climate change, and vice versa; and those who are concerned about wealth inequality tend to favour gun control, while those who are not, do not. Why, since these seem wholly unrelated issues, should this be so? Opinions seem to be based more and more on what team you belong to and less and less on your assessment of facts.
Say what you will about modern monetary theory, but it’s worth asking why it’s assumed that states in America, which wields the power of the world’s reserve currency, should turn to draconian austerity measures when the going gets rough. After all, no political party at the federal level even pretends to care about budget balance anymore. Governors, on the other hand, must spend within their means and consider trade-offs, whether they’re a Democrat or Republican. To their credit, many have chipped away at long-term problems.
When the next recession comes around, though, they might not have the tools to go at it alone. They’re going to need a lift. The Fed should stand ready to provide that boost.….NewsMax Finance
As the maladies of modern capitalism have multiplied, fundamental questions about the future of the world’s dominant economic model have become impossible to ignore. But in the absence of viable alternatives, the question is how to reform a system that is increasingly at odds with democracy.James K. Galbraith looks at three recent books on the crisis in capitalism:
ITV Report on UK Child poverty/
