Thursday, September 30, 2021

Rand Paul vs unqualified lawyer

 

Can’t even make this up… Paul to Art Degree lawyer Becerra: “Are you a Medical Doctor? Do you have a Science Degree?”

Becerra has an Art Degree in Economics lol!  I’m not making this up why would I make it up? Don’t have to…  probably doesn’t know the atomic number of Hydrogen…

President scrambled eggs for brains puts an Art a degree lawyer in charge of national health policy… so what does this moron do?  Turns health care into a dialogic argument right on cue…

This is the same as “the coin!” thing where you have a 1917 law imposing debt ceiling then you have some other later law on unlimited coin proofs or some shit and then lawyer Carlos turns it into a dialogic argument about which one of the conflicting laws we should obey…

How about neither moron Art Degree lawyers?

BTW “flat earthers!” = figure of speech… that is all these morons ever have….







The Pashtun will outlast all empires, but can they hold Afghanistan's center? — Pepe Escobar

Backgrounder. Should-read for all who want to understand the dynamic of Afghanistan and its place in geopolitics.

The Cradle
The Pashtun will outlast all empires, but can they hold Afghanistan's center?
Pepe Escobar

'Wacky' or serious? Trillion-dollar coin eyed as workaround to US debt impasse — France 24

Economics professor L. Randall Wray, a Bard College professor who has championed Modern Money Theory, which de-emphasizes the drawbacks of debt, said the special coin is no wackier than other expansionary financial maneuvers enacted by the Federal Reserve during the pandemic that have involved hundreds of billions of dollars of public and private debt.

“It is a work around,” Wray said. “It sort of makes it obvious that the debt limit itself is a pretty stupid idea.”...

Wray and others note that massive infusions of liquidity by the Federal Reserve in the wake of the 2008 crisis did not spur inflation….

Also

Raw Story
Could a trillion-dollar coin stop the GOP from plunging America into recession?
AFP

Deccan Herald
Trillion-dollar coin? US eyes solution to budget impasse

Bill Mitchell — (Modern) Marx and MMT – Part 2

This is Part 2 of my analysis of the way that fundamental ideas in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) are totally consistent with a reasonable interpretation of Marx’s work. The motivation to clarify these issues came after I spoke at an event last weekend in the UK and shared a panel with a critic who claimed that Marx’s work established that MMT is wrong to assume that unemployment is a monetary phenomenon (insufficient spending) and that government spending can do anything about it. The claim was based on a view that Marx thought that capitalist firms have some unique logic that if they decide not to produce no amount of sales orders will induce them to expand production even if they have massive excess capacity (‘machines lying idle’) and a huge pool of idle labour to draw upon. No reasonable reading of Marx’s work would lead to that conclusion. In this part, we will consider what Marx thought about crisis and some later developments of his reproduction schemes, which make it clear that effective demand drives capitalist output, which conditions their employment decisions....
Bill Mitchell – billy blog
(Modern) Marx and MMT – Part 2
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Democrats vote to suspend debt limit

 

lol at all the MMT Democrat phonies:  They suspend it until just after the mid terms so if they get wiped out in midterms (which usually happens) they can immediately turn around and start to hit the GOP over the head with the same moron hammer…





Michael Rosen – Britain: The Banks are Taking over our Universities. Why?

 The Banks crashed the economy in 2008 but then were bailed out, then the government needed to make cut backs as well as borrow from the banks. The banks cleaned up. 


The banks are now telling the universities to sell off assets and to get rid of staff. 


That the banks are taking over universities.


How is this happening and why?


We have to go back to the crash of 2008 caused by the banks overlending, selling debt and leveraging their debts by taking out more loans. To keep money flowing, governments borrowed money and then claimed that they needed to cut public services to pay for this debt. In the case of the UK this is much disputed for several reasons:


a) cutting public expenditure at a time of slump is likely to cut the tax-take and cause more slump.


b) the UK issues currency. It is a large economy. The idea that bondholders were knocking on the UK government’s door demanding their cash back is a myth. Bondholders hold UK bonds for decades so that they have steady, certain income. A large percentage of them are in fact people like pension funds held for many of us. 


c) over a third of the government’s debt isn’t really debt at all. It’s created by the government by issuing bonds which the Bank of England buys! It’s like buying stuff off yourself and telling yourself you owe yourself some money. That’s what they told the British public that and got everyone to believe them. Neat.


So how does this impact on Goldsmiths? 


Because the government claimed that they needed to cut funding of education to ‘pay’ for the government debt. 


(Remember it was the banks that crashed the world economy in 2008, so it’s incredible to think that they have become the repositories of financial wisdom now. No matter. Read on…) 


Michael Rosen – Britain: The Banks are Taking over our Universities. Why?

Wednesday, September 29, 2021

The $52 Trillion Shadow Banks That Supercharged The Commodity Boom — Alex Kimani

With a dearth in lending, trade finance is becoming an increasingly important alternative credit investment strategy where a growing variety of shadow banks and investment funds are becoming "the new banks".

Shadow banks–a term the industry generally resents–consists of financial intermediaries who facilitate the creation of credit across the global financial system. The shadow banking system can also refer to unregulated activities by regulated institutions, including hedge funds, unlisted derivatives, and even credit default swaps. One big distinction between shadow banks vs. traditional lenders: Shadow bankers are mostly exempt from regulatory oversight because these institutions do not accept traditional deposits. Naturally, they also charge much higher rates than traditional lenders–sometimes twice as high.

These companies have been seeing a surge in business during the ongoing commodity boom as banks turn their backs on smaller and higher-risk traders....
Oilprice

My new podcast episode is out.

How Dominant are Big US Corporations? — Blair Fix

Size matters. Not only are they dominant but also their dominance is increasing, making large corps powerful enough to preclude government anti-trust legislation and regulation. 

Economics from the Top Down
How Dominant are Big US Corporations?
Blair Fix

Fast Fashion Is Hot Garbage | Climate Town

 Isn't it weird how it became fashionable for men to have such ultra tight suits that the buttons are popping off. And the ultra drainpipe trousers tended to be a bit short too, so the overall effect was a slim guy almost bursting out of his suit. A bit of a spiv look. 

Anyway, that's an aside, because this is a good video about how bad capitalism can get, which is also about climate change.




Fast Fashion Is Hot Garbage | Climate Town

The Future of Money: The Case for Central Bank Digital Currencies — Eswar S. Prasad

Eliminating the shadow economy.

ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
The Future of Money: The Case for Central Bank Digital Currencies
Eswar S. Prasad | Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy and Professor of Economics at Cornell Universit, aSenior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the New Century Chair in International Economics, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research

InsideSources — Top House Budget Dem: DC Can Spend All It Wants Because It's 'Like the Banker in Monopoly'

Representative John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) is Chairman of the House Budget Committee, which is playing a key role in crafting the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill currently being debated in Congress. During a speech to the Louisville, Ky. Rotary Club in June, he explained why he believes the government can borrow and spend the trillions under discussion without any negative impact on the economy.…
Not only would not have a negative impact, it would have a positive impact on people's lives by investing public funds created by the state in public resources, thereby increasing productivity and raising the living standard. Of course, the devil is in the details and spending for the sake of spending y is not guaranteed to produce positive outcomes. Rather, government spending needs to be tightly targeted toward public purpose in light of both contemporary needs and long-term distributed prosperity.

See also

The federal government has the power to print money and create jobs | PennLive letters ....

View: Why it's time for India to give Modern Monetary Theory a chance - The Economic Times

Bill Mitchell — British Labour Conference seems to be going well

It’s Wednesday, and I have been following the British Labour Party conference and it seems they are conducting business as usual. That is, working out new and old ways to keep themselves unelectable even when the Tories are one of the worst British governments in history I would think. But so it goes. A split is the only way forward I guess. The Blairites can then hold conferences, stack votes to have unelectable leaders and design fiscal rules to their hearts content. At least they will be saving me time this time around. I will just be able to cut and paste my previous critiques of John McDonnells’ neoliberal Fiscal Credibility Rule and apply the analysis to the new Rachel Reeves’ rules. Not much has changed. Who is giving this lot advice? After that, I am sure you will appreciate that the IMF is now considered to be past its use-by date and currently mired in a data-fudging scandal. And then some Rock Steady to calm us down. That’s what today’s blog post offers....
Bill Mitchell – billy blog
British Labour Conference seems to be going well
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

Iran Cements Alliance With China, Russia In Clear Message To Washington — Simon Watkins

 Game all but over. US loses. The window of opportunity has closed.

Oilprice
Iran Cements Alliance With China, Russia In Clear Message To Washington

More “coin” nonsense…

 

They should rather be talking about what they can reasonably get thru reconciliation…

The Fed will not purchase “the coin” with reserves… The “coin” doesn’t pay a coupon where is the Fed going to get the USDs to pay the IOR or the RRP rate on the newly issued reserves?  Fed doesn’t operate under an appropriation… they factor the govt guaranteed interest bearing securities they buy when they add reserves…

Quit whining and pass something via reconciliation…  this whole “the coin!”  thing is a feckless distraction… 








Bannon: Show us the plan!

Bannon lays out the MAGA GOP wing position on the current fiscal situation…

I don’t disagree with a lot of what he is saying here, minus his mistakes in the national accounting…. but everyone else makes those same mistakes so…











Luke Savage - Conspiracist Thinking Is the Result of 40 Years of Social Atomization

AN INTERVIEW With GEORGE MONBIOT


George Monbiot may have been wrong about Syria, and also the White Helmets, but he does remain a genuine socialist, in my opinion.

What really opened my mind up about conspiracy theories was when I was debating with the climate change deniers on twitter, and I saw how their minds work, but to my alarm I began to wonder about many of my own precious beliefs, as I could see similar psychological patterns within myself. We all have them where we can get a belief and get entrench by it. So, you have to be vigilante about this, but not close your mind completely, as there are some real conspiracies out there. 

Anyway, this is a superb article, but George Monbiot may have closed his mind a bit too much too on some topics too. 

It's interesting how the radical right,  which is controlled by very rich people, talk like anti establishment lefties at times, when they say they are anti elite, even though they are the elite. My theory is that the ruling class had become predominantly socially liberal, so now many conservatives felt they could not support the state anymore. Conservative are normally more authoritarian and so tend to support the establishment.

Like the radical right, the left completely distrust the establishment, and so many of them now are so entrenched by this that they are unable to look at each situation independently and weigh it up, so now some of them have fallen for vaccine scepticism and also oppose mandates. If you go into hospital because you are very ill you don't want staff there who could give you covid (by the way, nearly all doctors have have been vaccinated) and the same for care homes for the elderly, but some on the left oppose all mandates. Some even hold climate change denial views.

Tweet 

Beaumont hospital reveals that 8 medical staff, 49 nursing staff & 57 administrators have not been vaccinated. Earlier this year it had the highest number of Covid cases of any hospital in Dublin. There is also  "strong antivax movement in the hospital"


The Internet means we can get caught in our own little groups and echo chambers. 

One of the statements that gets to me is, "there is no left and right anymore, only us against the elite", but two thirds of the over 55's in England vote Tory and they haven't gone away.

Amid a disorienting explosion of crises and social shifts, there are worrying signs that some parts of the Left are becoming more susceptible to conspiracist ways of thinking. It’s a symptom of social atomization in the neoliberal era — but we don’t have to accept it as inevitable.
 
Author and activist George Monbiot, however, finds something singularly dark and sinister about our present moment. In a recent column for the Guardian, he writes with urgency about the extreme right’s appropriation of countercultural idioms and revolutionary language in the age of QAnon and COVID. In a wide-ranging conversation, Jacobin’s Luke Savage sat down with Monbiot to discuss the issues raised in his latest piece, the corrosion of community in the neoliberal era, and the desperate need for a new narrative of solidarity and common good in an age of resurgent fascism and ecological collapse.

Jacobin 

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/09/conspiracy-theories-qanon-covid-left-anarchism-counterculture-extreme-right-restoration-stories-bridging-communities



US hegemony and the bogeyman — Bilal Khan

Neo-imperialism and neocolonialism justified by the purported universality of Western values.

Asia Times
US hegemony and the bogeyman
Bilal Khan

MMT and Embedded Marxian Value — Peter Cooper

Bill Mitchell has just posted the first instalment in a two-part series on Marx and MMT. I was unaware of that while preparing the body of this post, but some of what follows bears incidentally on the topic. Bill Mitchell’s series is in response to a Marxist in the audience of one of his presentations who apparently claimed Marx’s theory as proof that government, through its spending, is powerless to do anything about employment in a capitalist economy. The unfortunate phenomena of some Marxists being more neoclassical than Austrian, and some others being more Austrian than neoclassical, are not new. It is unfortunate, from a Marxist perspective, because it leads, in practice (as opposed to fanciful aspiration), at best to uselessness and at worst to policy prescriptions that are more right wing than the proposals of the right wing....
heteconomist
MMT and Embedded Marxian Value
Peter Cooper

Is Joe Biden a trillion-dollar coin kind of president? — Quartz

#MTFC

Carlos Mucha (beowulf) gets a shout out too.

Quartz (of all places)
Is Joe Biden a trillion-dollar coin kind of president?
Tim Fernholz

Eurasian consolidation ends the US unipolar moment – Part 2 of 2

The New Silk Road, BRI, SCO, and the consolidation of central Asia.

The Vineyard of the Saker
Eurasia takes shape: How the SCO just flipped the world order (Part 1 of 2) (linked to previously)

Afghanistan: Where's the Cash? — Eric Margolis

Afghanistan’s US-run government was the world’s largest producer and exporter of opium, morphine, and the end-product, heroin.

As it did after first seizing power in the mid-1990’s, Taliban, the Islamic anti-drug and anti-communist movement, is shutting down the Afghan drug trade. Billions worth of heroin, opium and morphine that had been flowing into Central Asia, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Southeast Asia will be sharply reduced. Afghanistan’s drug-based economy is now in dire jeopardy....
ericmargolis.com

Caitlin Johnstone —There Is No ‘Good’ Form Of Capitalism

 Caitlin Johnstone sure knows how to write a good rant.

CaitlinJohnstone.com
There Is No ‘Good’ Form Of Capitalism: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Caitlin Johnstone

Mathew D. Rose – All Quiet on the German Front

 Expect no change. Neoliberalism remains solidly entrenched.

Brave New Europe
Mathew D. Rose – All Quiet on the German Front

War Is a Racket: Ex-State Department Official Matthew Hoh Speaks Out — Lowkey

"War Is a Racket" is a reference to Gen. Smedley Butler's statement of the same name.

MintPress News
War Is a Racket: Ex-State Department Official Matthew Hoh Speaks Out
Lowkey

Isikoff’s — Cops and Robbers Camouflage the Big Lie — Ray McGovern

Ray McGovern responds to "Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA’s secret war plans against WikiLeaks",
I sent a quick tweet to alert those many readers, who are malnourished by the corporate media, to the subliminal but clear subtext; the Big Lie that Assange was a Russian agent. (After all, he published DNC emails "hacked by the Russians" to hurt candidate Clinton and throw the 2016 election to Trump. Right? "Hacked"? = Wrong.)…
Isikoff and his co-authors are disingenuous, to be charitable, in trying to breathe new life into the cadaver of Russia-gate – especially the long disproven charge that Russia hacked the DNC emails. One factor in the timing of the Yahoo article may well be an attempt to distract attention from the constantly piling-up evidence that Russia-gate was manufactured by lawyers working for Hillary Clinton – first and foremost Michael Sussmann. Have a look at authentic investigative reporter Aaron Mate’s latest: "With Clinton lawyer charged, the Russiagate scam is now under indictment" of Sept. 20."...
AntiWar
Isikoff’s Cops and Robbers Camouflage the Big LieRay McGovern, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and retired 27-year career CIA whose tasks included preparing and briefing The President’s Daily Brief and leading the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch^

China is decoupling from the world, not the other way around — Neil Newman

  • The increasing nationalism of Chinese consumers, as much as supply chain issues and Covid-related disruptions, is the reason international firms are moving overseas
  • China will lose some foreign talent, but domestic demand will shift towards perfectly good locally made products. The real winner, though, is Vietnam
The irony, of course, is that Vietnam is a communist country.

Related

TASS
Vietnamese top diplomat says Hanoi to step up cooperation with Russia in all areas

Bill Mitchell — Marx and MMT – Part 1

I gave a talk at the Resist Event in Brighton UK last Sunday evening. On the panel was a person who dismissed Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as irrelevant to the real challenges that arose under Capitalism and he invoked Marx a lot. It was not a very illuminating interchange because not only did he misrepresent what MMT was but, in my view, he also seemed to think that we could extrapolate Marx’s scant ideas of money directly into the situation faced by nations today. Marx considered money to be a commodity (gold) and he did not present any meaningful analysis of the role played by the modern consolidated central bank-treasury function (aka government). Last Sunday’s critic claimed that MMT is wrong to assume that unemployment is a monetary phenomenon (insufficient spending) and that government spending can do anything about it. Apparently, Marx thought that capitalist firms have some unique logic that if they decide not to produce no amount of sales orders will induce them to expand production even if they have massive excess capacity (‘machines lying idle’) and a huge pool of idle labour to draw upon. Marx would never have agreed with that idea. Marx’s writings are not the Bible. They are insights gleaned at specific points in history with specific institutional arrangements, some of which remain relevant today, some which do not. Modern Marxist-oriented scholars are aware of that point. A deterministic application of his thinking is not very likely to yield insights when the context is very different. In this two-part series, I seek to lay out a clear reason why MMT is not a violation of a correctly interpreted Marx.

For those interested in pursuing an in-depth investigation of MMT in relation to Marx, or Marx to MMT, Peter Cooper is the go-to guy. He blogs at heteconomist.com down under.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Marx and MMT – Part 1
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Renegade Inc: Michael Hudson | China’s Fortune Cookie Crumbles

 This is good! 

Michael Hudson says Soros and his boys are dissapointed that China did not follow Western neoliberalism and privatise everything, because they wanted to go in, grab the lot, and then engage in rent extraction like they did in Yeltsin's Russia. 

Money can be got cheap in the West when banks can create it out of thin air, so it's easy to raise the cash to buy everything up. This is winner take all capitaliam, unrelated to work or merit. 


With China’s increasing wealth, Western investors want some of the action… One of those investors is a bullish gentleman called George Soros, however the Chinese are acutely aware that with western investment comes inequality – so as Beijing begins to rethink how to do proper economic growth, we ask will China learn from Western mistakes? 

Ross Ashcroft is joined by economist and author Michael Hudson to discuss the West's attempts to turn China Neoliberal. 




https://youtu.be/LAwFs22Rmqw


Monday, September 27, 2021

US War Plans with China Taking Shape — Brian Berletic

The window of opportunity is closing.

NEO
US War Plans with China Taking Shape
Brian Berletic, former US marine

Nathan Tankus — Yet Another Debt Ceiling Crisis! (Or, How Joe Biden should Learn to Stop Worrying and #MintTheCoin.)

Nathan Tankus summarizes the debt ceiling institutionally and the feasiblity of issuing the coin to get you up to speed on this.

Nathan Tankus
Yet Another Debt Ceiling Crisis! (Or, How Joe Biden should Learn to Stop Worrying and #MintTheCoin.)

Gibson's Paradox and Inflation

 Trending on Twitter. Mike Norman has been saying forever that raising the interest is a price increase and therefore it is an inflationary bias rather than a deflationary one as supposed. This is a chief factor affecting the price level, along with what the government chooses to pay in the market to transfer resources to public use. 

Conventional economists conclude that interest rates are inversely correlated with price level based on theoretical assumptions, but evidence shows the opposite. MMT economists point out that the theoretical assumptions of conventional economics are wrong in that they do not take institutional arrangements into account but rather assume that market forces operate freely to equilibrate supply and demand naturally based on rational maximization and that this leads to general equilibrium. The data say otherwise.

Gibson's Paradox is the observation that the rate of interest and the general level of prices are positively correlated.[1] It is named for British economist Arthur Herbert Gibson who noted the correlation in a 1923 article for Banker's Magazine. The correlation had been noted earlier by Thomas Tooke.[2]The term was first used by John Maynard Keynes, in his 1930 work, A Treatise on Money.[3] It was believed to be a paradox because most economic theorists predicted that the correlation would be negative. Keynes commented that the observed correlation was "one of the most completely established empirical facts in the whole field of quantitative economics."

The Quantity Theory of Money predicts that a slower money-growth creates slower price-rise. In addition, slower money-growth means slower growth of loanable funds and thus raises interest rates. If both these premises are true, slower money-growth should mean lower prices and higher interest rates. However, Gibson observed that lower prices were accompanied by a drop—rather than a rise—in interest rates. This is the paradox that needs to be explained. For instance, in the 1873-96 depression, prices fell considerably while interest rates remained low. Economist S.B. Saul says that Alfred Marshall explained the paradox by saying that other factors might have been at play: a peace dividend and improving international system of banking and finance.
Economists generally thought that interest rates were correlated to the rate of inflation, whereas Keynes' findings contradicted this view. During the period of gold standard, he concluded that interest rates were correlated to the general price level, and not the rate of change in the prices. In fact, he thought that interest rates were highly correlated to the wholesale price index rather than the rate of inflation.[4]
Wikipedia
Gibson's Paradox

Critics Fume as ICC Excludes US From Probe Into Afghan War Crimes — Andrea Germanos

Double standard and privilege undermines the credibility of legal institutions. The US legal system is also compromised by this, and as a result of the rule of law suffers.

Common Dreams
Critics Fume as ICC Excludes US From Probe Into Afghan War Crimes
Andrea Germanos

Sputnik — Russel Brand Shocked at Prospect That Trump 'Was Right' About Clinton & Russia Collusion

 Losing the left. The sooner they wake up to the bipartisan kleptocracy the better.

Sputnik International
Russel Brand Shocked at Prospect That Trump 'Was Right' About Clinton & Russia Collusion

Zero Hedge — Senior Fed Economist Slams Economics As "Arrant Nonsense", Hints It Perpetuates "Criminally Oppressive, Unjust Social Order"

“I leave aside the deeper concern that the primary role of mainstream economics in our society is to provide an apologetics for a criminally oppressive, unsustainable, and unjust social order.”
Zero Hedge
Senior Fed Economist Slams Economics As "Arrant Nonsense", Hints It Perpetuates "Criminally Oppressive, Unjust Social Order"
Tyler Durden

Lab-Leak, Gain-Of-Function, and the Media Myths Swirling Around the Wuhan Institute — Joshua Cho

Longish and detailed but probably everything you need to know about GOF research.

MintPress News
Lab-Leak, Gain-Of-Function, and the Media Myths Swirling Around the Wuhan Institute
Joshua Cho

Steve Sweeney - Scenarios presented for killing Mr Assange included shootouts on the streets of London, crashing a car into his vehicle or even shooting the tyres off a plane taking him to Russia.

 The plan was never approved, but they asked British security for help, so it seems they would have done it if they thought they could get away with it. Shooting the wheels of a plane to cause it to crash would have killed more than just Julian Assange. 


BRITISH spooks remained tight-lipped today after questions posed by the Morning Star over an alleged CIA plot to kidnap and assassinate Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in London.


MI5 did not respond when asked what it knew about the plans to kill Mr Assange on British soil reportedly discussed by the US spy agency and former US president Donald Trump at the White House in 2017.


Scenarios presented for killing Mr Assange included shootouts on the streets of London, crashing a car into his vehicle or even shooting the tyres off a plane taking him to Russia.


According to the Yahoo news report, US officials had asked their British counterparts to support their efforts. A former senior administration official claimed that the British agreed with the plan to eliminate Mr Assange.


https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/british-spooks-remain-tight-lipped-over-alleged-cia-plot-assassinate-julian-assange

Rudd Inflation Expectations Article — Brian Romanchuk

Jeremy B. Rudd caught a fair amount of attention with his recent discussion paper “Why Do We Think That Inflation Expectations Matter for Inflation? (And Should We?)” The text has a lot of zingers that post-Keynesians would write, but Rudd is in fact a researcher with the Federal Reserve.

The paper is an interesting survey of how “inflation expectations” worked their way into neoclassical economic dogma....
Bond Economics
Rudd Inflation Expectations Article
Brian Romanchuk

Israel-Iran nuclear row

Ticking timebomb.

Sputnik International
Iran Denies IAEA Access to Karaj Nuclear Facility Due to Ongoing Sabotage Probe

RT
US tells Iran to give UN atomic watchdog access to centrifuge components workshop, or face ‘response’

Newsweek
Israel Prepared to Act Alone to Keep Iran From Nuclear Weapons, Prime Minister Says

Related

Elijah J. Magnier
Iran’s action is pushing Syria to be embraced by the Arab and international community
Elijah J Magnier

The Road to the Stolen 2024 Election — Josh Marshall

I view this as a manifestation of the dominate historical dialectic of this century, traditionalism versus liberalism and decolonization, affected by climate change. The foundation of the social and political conflict in the US is not so much economic as it is driven by the paradox of integrating liberalism with traditionalism. Liberalism was dominant for an extended period and now the pendulum is swinging the other way, exacerbated by the demographics — America is now transitioning to a predominantly non-white nation. As result, the foundation of representative democracy characteristic of the Roman model is crumbling. This has been taking place against a background of neoliberalism, neo-imperialism, and neocolonialism, which complicates the situation in a world that is decolonizing and becoming increasingly multi-polar, challenging US unilateralism.

TPM
The Road to the Stolen 2024 Election
Josh Marshall

MintNewsPress (corporate Democrats = oligarchy, Trump GOP = autocracy)
Chris Hedges: America’s Fate: Oligarchy or Autocracy

The China Cold War Will Unstick America’s Glue — Alastair Crooke

Is this a turning point for the world order? Alastair Crooke explains why this is so.

Strategic Culture Foundation
The China Cold War Will Unstick America’s Glue
Alastair Crooke | founder and director of the Conflicts Forum, and former British diplomat and senior figure in British intelligence and in European Union diplomacy

See also

This is an incredible strategic blunder, to the point of being irrational. It is only explicable based on emotion supervening on reason, which is what hubris involves. It's betting the farm.

Responsible Statecraft
US continues to push China and Russia together at its own peril
Doug Bandow

Can climate change be tackled without ditching economic growth? — Klaas Lenaerts, Simone Tagliapietra and Guntram B. Wolff

The choice is either degrowth or green growth. Degrowth is an unfeasibe option. So the question is how to implement green growth, if that is even feasible.

Bruegel
Can climate change be tackled without ditching economic growth?
Klaas Lenaerts, Simone Tagliapietra and Guntram B. Wolff

See also

Oilprice (decarbonization)
The Harsh Truth Behind Europe’s Energy Crisis
Cyril Widdershoven

See also

Zero Hedge (decarbonization)
Millions Of Chinese Residents Lose Power After Widespread, "Unexpected" Blackouts; Power Company Warns This Is "New Normal"
Tyler Durden

Connecting the Dots in China — Stephen S. Roach

The new dual thrust of Chinese policy – redistribution plus re-regulation – will subdue the entrepreneurial activity that has been so important in powering China’s dynamic private sector. Without animal spirits, the case for indigenous innovation is in tatters..…
Typical Western thinking. If I can have it all, I don't want any. Maybe Chinese entrepreneurs are more than mature that the adolescents in the US? If this were just Stephen Roach's opinion, I would bother calling attention to it. But I am hearing this more and more recently as another of those reasons that China is doomed to fail that never pan out.

And history shows that US enterpreneurs will take what they can get anyway and angle for more. The 90% max progressive tax rate didn't destroy US entrepreneurs' animal spirits.

There are also socio-economic factors that influence politics. The Chinese leadership are likely learning lessons observing growing political divisiveness, social unrest and societal dysfunction  in the US.

Project Syndicate
Connecting the Dots in China
Stephen S. Roach, a faculty member at Yale University and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, is the author of Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China.

See also

Zero Hedge
Morgan Stanley: We Are Approaching An Inflection Point In China Policy Easing
Chetan Ahya, Chief Economist and Global Head of Economics at Morgan Stanley

Rex Nutting - The super rich elite have more money than they know what to do with

The top 1% has run out of investing ideas, so they’ve parked $4.7 trillion in the bank


More and more stuff is behind paywalls nowadays, well, they need to earn a living, but fortunately, you can still find alternatives if you hunt around. And the Financial Times let's be read a few articles for free occasionally. The Guardian has a massive readership and can cover its costs through adverts, for now, anyway. 

Forget all those phony fairy tales about whether a couple who makes $350,000 is rich or poor (they are neither), and focus on the big picture: Half of Americans have almost nothing while a small fraction have almost all the capital. And the gap between the many and the few is growing every year.

A society that allows a few to capture most of the wealth is neither fair nor efficient. No one can claim that the U.S. economy is performing better now than it did when the wealthy 1% only had half as much.

It might be different if the rich really were letting their wealth trickle down by investing in the future economy. But they aren’t; at least, not enough. Not in this new Gilded Age, and this gulf between a tiny pampered elite and the grumbling masses is driving populist protests all over the globe.

Market Watch 


Bill Mitchell — The Merkel failure

Its seems the conservative economics press is going through a hard time as it tries to wrest itself from its past litany of errors of judgement, backing the wrong horse, whatever. The latest example is The Economist Magazine, which ran a Leader Article over the weekend (September 25, 2021) = The mess Merkel leaves behind. It eviscerates the Merkel period for leaving Germany with a legacy that will cause headaches for future leaders and for the German people. This runs counter to the usual stuff the Magazine has offered about the soundness of Germany over many years as a bastion of stability and good financial management. It also provides a dose of reality to the raft of ridiculous glowing assessments of the Merkel years. In my view, she has overseen a government that has undermined its own prosperity, deliberately disobeyed the very rules it enforces on other nations in the Eurozone, and bullied leaders of other nations to enact dreadful policy shifts that have impoverished defenceless citizens. It is a cause of celebration that she is going not because we laud her work, quite the opposite. One failure less in public office....
Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The Merkel failure
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Trump went all-out to win farmer support. Now they're all in on Biden's infrastructure plan By Katie Lobosco

 Former President Donald Trump sent billions in federal aid in a bid to win over America's farmers -- but now they're all for President Joe Biden's $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, in hopes it will mean fixing roads and bridges critical to the delivery of food to the rest of the nation

CNN

Chad Loder Esposing the Right-wing Antivax Movement.

 A lot of these people seem to be paid out of work actors. This nonsense has had an influence on much of the anti-imperialist left that I follow, from Caitlin Jonestone, Jonathan Cook, and Jimmy Dore amongst others. 

Twitter 


Chad Loder Esposing the Right-wing Antivax Movement.

John Smith’s “Rigorous Exposé Of Neoliberalism” in Britain’s The Morning Star

 Things could have been so different in the UK if John Smith had become Prime Minister. Although the establishment know how to destroy a government, John Smith's Labour Government could have made significant changes. 


“This seminal and original study of contemporary imperialism should be on every militant’s bookshelf, not least because it is tightly argued, exhaustively researched and unashamedly Marxist throughout. ¶ John Smith’s central argument is that the decline in manufacturing in the Western industrialised countries, and its rise in the so-called Third World, are part of a deliberate strategy by transnational corporations to exploit low wages, underpinned by appalling working conditions, in order to realise super profits….”


 John Smith’s “Rigorous Exposé Of Neoliberalism” in Britain’s The Morning Star

Sunday, September 26, 2021

El Salvador exemplifies the surrealism of cryptocurrencies — Jeffrey Frankel

Surreal!...
Econobrowser
Guest Contribution: “El Salvador exemplifies the surrealism of cryptocurrencies”
Jeffrey Frankel | James W. Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard University's Kennedy School, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and member of US President's Council of Economic Advisers in 1983-84 and 1996-99


Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks — Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff

CIA vs. Wikileaks and specifically, Julian Assange. Longish but fascinating account. Amazing how many resources the CIA burned though in a revenge operations. much of which was illegal and potentially dangerous with respect to foreign policy. Quite scary, actually, when Wikileaks and Assange were reporting the facts. In addition, it further undermines trust in the US government when added to many other accounts of CIA operations that go well beyond intelligence.

Yahoo News
Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks
Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff

See alsoSputnik International
CIA Was Ready to Start Firefight in London to Prevent Russia From Busting Out Assange, Media Claims

Also

Isikoff Still SpinningRay McGovern, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and retired 27-year career CIA whose tasks included preparing and briefing The President’s Daily Brief and leading the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch

KV - The Testimonies Project Debunked

 I expect that the film, The Testimonies Project, will get debunked pretty soon, but here's my two pennies worth. 


A bunch of people talking about the symptoms they got after they had a vaccination is merely anecdotal unless backed by medical reports. With billions of people getting vaccinations, there's bound to be coincidences.


Cancer Data UK


There are around 367,000 new cancer cases in the UK every year, that's around 1,000 every day (2015-2017).


Cancel Research UK


2019 Stroke Statistics US


Every 40 seconds on average, an American will have a stroke. About 795,000 Americans have a new or recurrent stroke annually. 


 AHA Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics


Daily Mail


Can drinking tea cause you to get struck by lightning? 


Freak' 1 in 10 million lightning strike kills builder as he drinks a cup of tea on his lunch break


Anti-Vaxxers abusing the Yellow Card system. 


More recently, anti-vaccination websites are using Yellow Card summary reports to fabricate fake news that vaccines are killing people.

Back in 2004, James Laidler famously filed an adverse reaction report into VAERS, claiming that his annual influenza vaccine turned him into the Incredible Hulk!

Incredibly, the CDC had to ask for his permission to remove the fake database forever!


Here’s How Antivaxxers Create Fake News Using VAERS!

Sputnik — Lavrov Says Borrell Told Russia to Get Out of Africa

Colonialist chutzpah.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told him that Russia should leave Africa.

"As Josep Borrell told me, ‘You'd better not work in Africa at all, because Africa is our place.’ That's exactly what he said," Lavrov recalled on Saturday at a press conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly (UNGA).…

"And to say ‘I'm here first, so you get out of here’ is, firstly, insulting to the Government of Bamako, which invited external partners. Secondly, that's no way to talk to anyone at all," Lavrov told journalists at the UNGA....
Sputnik International
Lavrov Says Borrell Told Russia to Get Out of Africa

TASS
EU sticks to colonial paradigm of world order - Russian diplomat

Kyrsten Sinema Used the Winery Where She Interned to Fundraise With Private Equity Daniel Boguslaw

 Corruption (conflict of interest at least)? 

Hardly a blip on the screen of legalized bribery in US politics though. Even so, seems pretty stinky.

The Intercept
Daniel Boguslaw

BBC - The YouTubers who blew the whistle on an anti-vax plot

 Dark antivax disinfo groups working behind the scenes. 


A mysterious marketing agency secretly offered to pay social media stars to spread disinfo about Covid vaccines. Their plan failed when the influencers went public about the attempt to recruit them. 


An influencer marketing agency called Fazze offered to pay him to promote what it said was leaked information that suggested the death rate among people who had the Pfizer vaccine was almost three times that of the AstraZeneca jab.

The information provided wasn't true.

It quickly became apparent to Mirko that he was being asked to spread disinformation to undermine public confidence in vaccines in the middle of a pandemic.


BBC - The YouTubers who blew the whistle on an anti-vax plot


Saturday, September 25, 2021

Chinese Social Sites Ban Online Influencers Capitalizing on Buddhism — Luo Meihan

Several state media outlets have criticized the trend dubbed “foyuan” for turning religion into a profit-making tool.…

This is peanuts in comparison with the commercialization of religion in the US. 

Sixth Tone
Chinese Social Sites Ban Online Influencers Capitalizing on Buddhism
Luo Meihan


Evergrande bubble popped in time: no Lehman moment — David P. Goldman

Must-read. Details.
China stage-managed crisis for investment & social goals; US should've done similarly before 2008 Lehman shock….
Asia Times
Evergrande bubble popped in time: no Lehman moment
David P. Goldman

See also at AT

Moon of Alabama — The Release Of Meng Wanzhou's Is A Small But Decisive Victory For China

The whole case was constructed and the arrest arranged by John Bolton when he was National Security Advisor under then President Donald Trump...
Moon of Alabama
The Release Of Meng Wanzhou's Is A Small But Decisive Victory For China

How Russia will likely respond to AUKUS — Alexey D Muraviev

Moscow could seek to sell its own nuclear submarine technology and form a countervailing maritime coalition with China in response to AUKUS…
Perhaps most notably, Russia may see the AUKUS submarine deal as setting a precedent, allowing it to promote its own nuclear submarine technology to interested parties in the region. This is not merely hypothetical — it has been suggested by defense experts with close links to Russia’s Ministry of Defence....
I mentioned this possibility yesterday. Here it is today. This is a no-brainer. Russia now has a Western precedent for expanding its role as a military supplier. It's also a strategic necessity, since the major advantage the West has is in submarine warfare. I would say it now a question of whether Russia will lease subs to China as it does with India, or share technology, as it does with some military hardware with India.

Russia is not "just a gas station." It is the #2 arms exporter.

Asia Times
How Russia will likely respond to AUKUS
Alexey D Muraviev

Money and Macro - The Macroeconomics of China's Evergrande

Dr. Joeri Schasfoort goes over the various scenarios of how the Evergrande collapse could turn out.




Money and Macro - The Macroeconomics of China's Evergrande

Steve Joordens - Anti-Vaxxers As Viewed Through a Psychology Lens

 The psychology of Anti-Vaxxers. Tribal group-think and social media misinformation. Steve Joordens is kind to antivaxxers, but does not concede any ground. 





Steve Joordens - Anti-Vaxxers As Viewed Through a Psychology Lens




Friday, September 24, 2021

Links — 24 Sep 2021

Internationalist 360º
How the CIA Tried to Overthrow New Zealand’s Progressive Labor Government by Stoking White Racial Rage Against the Indigenous Māori Population
Murray Horton

TASS
Scientologists install software to get access to personal data in Russian firms — source

Moon of Alabama
NY Times Acknowledges U.S. Failure In Russia - Adds More To What Caused It

Bitcoin Magazine (mentions MMT, disparagingly)
Join the Bitcoin TikTok Army And Save Gen Z

Deseret News (totally wrong)
Washington can't keep running up debt without consequences | Opinion
Douglas Hervey and Blake Moore, Contributor

Market Watch
Key detail in China’s crypto crackdown is callout of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tether
Mark DeCambre

Zero Hedge
China Is Responsible For More Than A Third Of World GDP Growth - This Is A Problem

Of Two Minds
What's Really Going On in China
Charles Hugh Smith

Market Watch
Why Costco is rationing toilet paper and paper towels again, and what it says about supply chains everywhere
Tonya Garcia

Common Dreams
Dems Who Opposed Pentagon Cuts Received Nearly 4x More Donations From Weapons Makers
kenny

Politico
'Radical’ Biden nominee faces backlash from banks
ZACHARY WARMBRODT

Fast Company
NASA scientists explain what’s driving the decline in Arctic sea ice
Alek Petty and Linette Boisvert

Politico (reading the riot act from the bench)
‘You’ve disgraced this country’: Judge rips Capitol riot defendant
Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney

AlterNet (Robert Kagan)
How the US is facing its ‘greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War’
Alex Henderson

The Grayzone
US Congress outlines new phase of economic attacks and hybrid war on Nicaragua’s Sandinista government
Ben Norton

China Isn't Going to Make It — Anatoly Karlin

There is a good chance that crypto and Web 3.0 will transform global finance, governance, and the Internet over the next generation in fundamental ways. Many of these transformations will be in ways that challenge or at least question the traditional prerogatives of the state as regards censorship, monetary emissions, and even legal sovereignty. But it is not a process that can be reversed top-down at the global level. Now, it will just just pass China by. Fred Reed waxes eloquent about the “digital yuan”, but why would anyone want to use a centralized stablecoin pegged to the yuan that’s controlled from the PBC given the variety of more discrete and already existing alternatives? China can certainly enforce it within its own borders. But in the outside world, you have Bitcoin on the Lightning network, now universally implemented in El Salvador and soon to be integrated into Twitter micropayments according to rumors. There are many other competing decentralized solutions on Ethereum and other chains, including stablecoins pegged to various currencies...

I think Anatoly Karlin has this wrong for several reason, the first of which he mentions. It's a sovereignty issue and a state as the authority to protect its sovereignty with the full power of the state. Sure you can use crypto anywhere but is it worth the risk and the Chinese government is likely to set the risk bar very high.

Secondly, he assumes that other states won't defend their sovereignty, too. I am as sure of that as he is. We'll see down the line. I don't think that crypto will necessarily go away but it will be hobbled as a threat to sovereignty and government control of its finance and economic sectors, nationally and internationally.

Finally, I think he seriously underestimates China as a global competitor. Look what happened to the US in the case of Russia. Russia quietly became dominant in the development of military technology, meaning the US lost its dominance, but at the risk of nuclear war that would obliterate CONUS (military speak for continental United States). It is true that the US maintains a lead in many important sectors but that's what competition is about.

The Unz Review
China Isn't Going to Make It
Anatoly Karlin

Related

Predictably, ZH jumps on board. Because "freedom." Well, the outcome of this concept of freedom is anarchy.

Zero Hedge
Why The West Can't Ban Bitcoin The Way China Did
Tyler Durden

Zero Hedge — “The Housing Market Is Almost Frozen" - An Even Bigger Problem Emerges For China“The Housing Market Is Almost Frozen" - An Even Bigger Problem Emerges For China

China may have to nationalize the company. No one else has pockets that deep. This appears to be much bigger than GM, which the US government deemed it had to nationalize at the time of the GFC. 

Nationalizing means taking the entity on the government books. In the end the US government came out ahead on paper with GM, not that it mattered for a currency sovereign. However, China is not fully sovereign in its currency since it pegs to the USD. (Technically, China doesn't peg to the USD at a fixed rate but allows its currency to float within a range. So it is an overtly managed currency).

Zero Hedge
“The Housing Market Is Almost Frozen" - An Even Bigger Problem Emerges For China“The Housing Market Is Almost Frozen" - An Even Bigger Problem Emerges For China
Tyler Durden

The China Initiative, a Flawed and Dysfunctional Policy — Mel Gurtov

What happens when you don't think things through.

WIPO expert says China is becoming a global innovation leader — Xinhua

Innovation!
A consistent innovation policy, increased spending on education and science and the ability to translate all these into sound results are behind China's current role as a global innovation leader, a senior official from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) told Xinhua on Thursday.

As per the WIPO's "Global Innovation Index (GII) 2021" released on Monday, China is still the only middle-income economy among the world's top 30 most innovative countries. It has established itself as a global innovation leader and is approaching the top 10.

According to the report, China has made continuous progress from ranking 14th last year to 12th this year and is now "knocking at the door of the GII top 10." This year, China also reached the top three in the Southeast Asia, East Asia and Oceania (SEAO) region for the first time.…
ECNS
WIPO expert says China is becoming a global innovation leader
Xinhua (Chinese state media)

China issues fact sheet on U.S. intervention in Hong Kong affairs — CGTN

China fires back.

ECNS
China issues fact sheet on U.S. intervention in Hong Kong affairs
CGTN (Chinese state media)

Also

ECNS
Fact Sheet: US Interference in Hong Kong Affairs and Support for Anti-China, Destabilizing Forces
fmprc.gov.cn

Related

ECNS
Chinese ambassador to U.S. expounds on China's whole-process democracy
Xinhua (Chinese state media)

China has 955 mln over-the-top TV users: report — Xinhua

OTT TV offers television or film contents that viewers access with a high-speed internet connection instead of cable or satellite TV subscriptions.
ECNS
China has 955 mln over-the-top TV users: report
Xinhua (Chinese state media)

Woman Who Helped Expose Wall Street Mega Banks’ Vast Holdings of Physical Commodities Is Nominated as a Top Bank Regulator — Pam and Russ Martens

Omarova represents a triple threat to the insidious behavior of mega banks on Wall Street: she has an in-depth knowledge of how they operate; she is not timid about explaining it to investigative bodies in the U.S. Senate; and, as head of the OCC, she would have a bully pulpit to speak to the American people directly about the urgency of reining in the systemic risks on Wall Street.

Omarova has already demonstrated to Wall Street that it should not underestimate her. In 2013 and 2014, the U.S. Senate took testimony from witnesses on the matter of the mega banks on Wall Street quietly buying up unprecedented amounts of physical commodities and then trading on their inside information of those markets. Witnesses pointed to the Federal Reserve as aiding and abetting these egregious manipulations by its rewriting the rules governing such ownership interests.

One of the key witnesses that testified against these abuses was Omarova, then an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law.…
Good move, but if Omarova is for real, this will likely not go down well with the Wall Street Democratic donor base.

The legal structure of predatory capitalism is bad enough in funneling $ to the top without cheating too. These folks seem to want it all.

Zero Hedge — "Hyperinflation" Tops List Of Fears For UBS Clients

Here we go again. Someone should inform TIPS market participants about it. And, of course, perma-bear Peter Schiff is quoted.

Zero Hedge
"Hyperinflation" Tops List Of Fears For UBS Clients
Tyler Durden

NY Times Advises China on Covid-19: Abandon Success, Try Failure John V. Walsh

The headline says it all. John Walsh gives the numbers. 

But, hey, USA. USA. USA. Daft.

Counterpunch
NY Times Advises China on Covid-19: Abandon Success, Try Failure
John V. Walsh

Zero Hedge — China Declares All Virtual Currency Transactions "Illegal", Sending Crypto Prices Tumbling

 Boom! How many people get that cryto involves a sovereignty issue and that this is its reason for being.

Zero Hedge
China Declares All Virtual Currency Transactions "Illegal", Sending Crypto Prices Tumbling
Tyler Durden

See also

ECNS
China to tighten regulation on virtual-currency trading, speculation
Xinhua (Chinese state media)

Sputnik — Chinese Diplomat Explains Why Beijing Should Scrap ‘No-First-Use’ of Nukes Policy

According to the former envoy, Beijing's current policy has given China the “moral high ground” but the policy “'is not suitable […] unless China-US negotiations agree that neither side would use [nuclear weapons] first.”
Mostly moot in that Russia, which is allied with China all but formally, has no such policy and it fact has the opposite policy, and Russia alone can actually destroy continental US with a single nuclear barrage of hypersonic missiles from it nuclear trident, against which the US has no defense.


Related

TASS
China castigates AUKUS alliance as pact violating nuclear non-proliferation

winterspeak — Evergrande -- redux of what?

I don't know much about Evergrande, but given the origin of this blog did want to share some speculation. First, their debt is denominated in dollars, so unlike Russia in 98, default may not be optional (Russia could have printed rubles if it wanted). CCP may have enough US$ to make good on Evergrande obligations, but whether they do so, and what they ask in return, is unclear. When put in the context of China's forex dollar holdings, Evergrande's obligations seem small.…
Short and worth a read in full. (winterspeak's blog has been idle for 54 months until now if you are wondering about not seeing him linked to here.)

winterspeak
Evergrande -- redux of what?

See also

Zero Hedge
China Steps In To Ensure Evergrande Funds Used To Complete Housing Project, Not Pay Creditors
Tyler Durden

Angry Bear — Subpoenas Issued, Focusing on Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection

Like I said yesterday, constitutional crisis brewing. Read to the end. It is not just a constitutional crisis, but allegedly an ongoing attempted coup.
As detailed in this edition, there were four distinct players or Trump staff who laid much of the groundwork leading up to January 6th. The House Committee has subpoenaed each person to testify. One has to wonder if they will resist and whether the House has a backbone and whether the courts will back the issued subpoenas issued.…
Note that the headline assumes an insurrection, which is a legal matter that remains to be determined. Of course, it is also a major political issue in the US, which more or less guarantees a biased approach with both parties talking their playbook.

See also

Sputnik International
Trump Vows to Use 'Executive Privilege' to Stonewall Jan. 6 Panel Subpoenas


Trillion Dollar Coins And Debt Ceilings (Again...) — Brian Romanchuk

The periodic debt ceiling silliness has again erupted in the United States. Since I was feeling mildly unwell this week, I was largely out of the loop. If the reader wants a brief explanation of what the trillion dollar coin idea is about, I highly recommend my brief discussion in my latest book Modern Monetary Theory and the Recovery.

If we go beyond the shameless self-serving plugs, it is quite easy to summarise my views....
When the electorate gets tired of this nonsense, it will go away. But as long it plays well, the political theater around the deficit, debt and the debt ceiling as a demonstration of fiscal responsibility will play well. And a long as it plays well, don’t' expect the craven media to drop it either. The sooner this public tires of this stupidity the better.

Bond Economics
Trillion Dollar Coins And Debt Ceilings (Again...)
Brian Romanchuk

Whitehouse prepares for govt shutdown


Boy, must be time to go all in bullish as there won’t be as much “crowding out!” come October 1st….  :p





 

Thursday, September 23, 2021

#duh

 

What idiot didn’t think this would happen….  420 to 9… 





Culture As An Asset — macromon

Just when you thought you'd seen everything. 

Capitalizing cultural artifacts.

Global Macro Monitor
Culture As An Asset
macromon

William Hartung — How Corporations Won the War on Terror — The Profits of War

The Profits of War. 
The costs and consequences of America’s twenty-first-century wars have by now been well-documented — a staggering $8 trillion in expenditures and more than 380,000 civilian deaths, as calculated by Brown University’s Costs of War project. The question of who has benefited most from such an orgy of military spending has, unfortunately, received far less attention.

Corporations large and small have left the financial feast of that post-9/11 surge in military spending with genuinely staggering sums in hand. After all, Pentagon spending has totaled an almost unimaginable $14 trillion-plus since the start of the Afghan War in 2001, up to one-half of which (catch a breath here) went directly to defense contractors.
Follow the money. And the revolving door at the Pentagon. Endless war is the goose that lays the golden egg.

See also

Visual Capitalist
This is How Much NATO Countries Spend on Defense
Avery Koop

Sputnik — US House Passes Legislation Funding Israeli Iron Dome Defense System

 Expect Russia to share more military and dual-use technology with China and Iran. Hey, it's just business, right?

Sputnik International
US House Passes Legislation Funding Israeli Iron Dome Defense System

Angry Bear — Eastman’s six-point memo of instructions for overturning the 2020 election

I avoid post links to overtly political matters but this is relevant to unfolding events that involve a constitutional crisis. It's also a legal matter. The soft coup attempts, first against Trump and then against Biden, have taken dirty tricks to a new level. We will be paying attention to developments.

Angry Bear
Eastman’s six-point memo of instructions for overturning the 2020 election

Eurasia takes shape: How the SCO just flipped the world order — Pepe Escobar

The Asian Century shaping up?

The Cradle
Eurasia takes shape: How the SCO just flipped the world order
Pepe Escobar

Sputnik — GOP House Members File Impeachment Articles Against Biden Over 'Clear Violations of His Duties'

 What's new in the Banana Republic of America?

Impeachment as political farce.

Sputnik International
GOP House Members File Impeachment Articles Against Biden Over 'Clear Violations of His Duties'

Related

Payback for Russiagate? Or just politics as usual in the Land of the Free, the upshot of which is the US government losing legitimacy with the American people no matter who is elected. Dangerous.

Bannon Admits He Spoke With Trump About 'Killing' Biden Presidency Ahead of Deadly Capitol Riot


Rogger Farmer — An Interview with Roger Farmer by Phil Armstrong: Part 4 of 4: On Modern Monetary Theory

Roger Farmer critiques MMT.

Roger Farmer's Economic Window
An Interview with Roger Farmer by Phil Armstrong: Part 4 of 4: On Modern Monetary Theory
Roger Farmer | Distinguished Professor of Economics at UCLA


Bill Mitchell —Job vacancies rising in Britain in mostly below-average pay sectors

Part of my working day is spent updating databases and studying the additional observations. I learn a lot that way about trends and how far off the mark my expectations of a particular phenomenon might be. Today I updated various labour market datasets from Britain and did some digging into the relationship between vacancies and pay. It is clear that as the British economy opens up again, that unfilled job vacancies have grown very strongly over the Northern summer. While that is a good thing because it means there are opportunities for workers to gain employment, shift employment to better paying jobs etc, the message is no unambiguous. If the vacancy growth is biased towards low-pay work then the chances for upward mobility might be stifled. Such a trend might also reflect the fact that employers are now finding that their old practices of accessing vast pools of EU labour willing to work at low wages are being constrained and that will signal the need for a change in strategy, including restructuring, capital investment and better paid jobs. It is too early to discern which way that will go. But what I found while looking at this new data is that while job vacancies are booming, the majority of them are in below-average pay sectors. More analysis is needed to fully assess the implications. Here is where I started on this path …
Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Job vacancies rising in Britain in mostly below-average pay sectors
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Death blow for current CR

 

No way in hell this thing passes now…





Biden polling

 

Lowest of any President in US history… he has effectively zero political capital left… 

GOP simply will not participate in the Dem CR with polling this low… which means if Dems don’t revise the current legislation we get a Government shutdown at least and highest likelihood of default due to debt ceiling yet…

As of yesterday’s DTS the TGA + EMs = 470b so we at least have another 6 weeks for them to figure it out…






My new podcast episode is out

Something fucked up when I posted it yesterday. So, here it is.

Wednesday, September 22, 2021

Zero Hedge — Stunning Interview Sees China Warn "23 Million Australians" That US Pact Now Makes Them "Target" For Nuclear Attack

 Like I said when it was first announced, painting a target on your back. 

The warning below should come as no surprise. What did they expect? Actions have consequences.

Zero Hedge
Stunning Interview Sees China Warn "23 Million Australians" That US Pact Now Makes Them "Target" For Nuclear Attack
Tyler Durden

Links — 22 Sep 2021

Green Greenwald
New Proof Emerges of the Biden Family Emails: a Definitive Account of the CIA/Media/BigTech Fraud

Asia Times
Iran is the X factor in Central Asia power shift
M. K. Bhadrakumar | retired diplomat with the Indian Foreign Service

Fixing the Economists
FX Crises and the Trajectory of Interest Rates
Philip Pilkington

One World
Moscow Sent A Strong Signal To India By Condemning The Quad As Anti-Russian

Andrew Korybko

SouthFront

Zero Hedge — IEA Demands Russia Deliver More Gas To A Reeling Europe

Funny thing that, how without Nord Stream 2 Europe is dependent on Russia. Geopolitics is a bitch. Let me see, Europe joins the US in trying to strangle Russia with economics sanctions and complains when Russia is not shipping enough gas to Europe to keep down prices. Chutzpah?

Zero Hedge
IEA Demands Russia Deliver More Gas To A Reeling Europe
Tyler Durden

Do Sectoral Rates of Surplus Value Tend to Equalize, and Why Ask? — Peter Cooper

The argument starts from Marx’s distinction between concrete and abstract labor. In making this distinction, Marx explicitly identifies productivity as a property of concrete labor and labor complexity as a property of abstract labor. Variations in productivity, since they relate to concrete labor, directly affect the aggregate production of use-values (‘real’ output) but not the aggregate creation of value (socially necessary labor time or nominal value). In contrast, variations in labor complexity, since they relate to abstract labor (the substance of value for Marx), directly affect the aggregate creation of value rather than the aggregate production of use values.

If it is true that labor complexity affects value creation at the aggregate level, then empirical macro analysis from a Marxist perspective – and not just empirical micro analysis – is made more difficult. Nevertheless, the difficulty largely dissolves so long as it is safe to assume that there is a tendency for sectoral rates of surplus value to equalize. Under an assumption of equal rates of surplus value, labor complexity is easily discerned from wage relativities.

Marx did in fact suggest that such a tendency operates….
heteconomist
Do Sectoral Rates of Surplus Value Tend to Equalize, and Why Ask?
Peter Cooper

Natalie Grover - Poor numerical literacy linked to greater susceptibility to Covid-19 fake news

Cambridge University study also suggests older people less likely to believe coronavirus misinformation


 I know that you guys over here at MNEs are pretty smart, but from the averages -

Also, older people were more likely to believe covid misinformation. 


Some scientists think that susceptibility to misinformation is related to political views, while others think it is linked to reasoning abilities, study author Dr Sander van der Linden explained.

“My take is that both are relevant. And I was surprised to see numeracy playing such a strong role here … it was one of the single most important predictors,” he said. “I like that finding in a sense because it gives me hope that there’s a solution out there.”


Natalie Grover - Poor numerical literacy linked to greater susceptibility to Covid-19 fake news


US plan to discredit Chinese investments unmasked | The Herald

Dirty tricks. They have strategically placed journalists throughout the media. Get $1000 for a spiced up story. 


Herald Correspondent


The United States is sponsoring a strategy to undermine Chinese investments in Zimbabwe by smearing the Asian giant’s companies as engaging in widespread labour malpractices, as well as violation of human, community and environmental rights, among other ills, The Herald has learnt.

The strategy is part of an intricate plan, also involving some European and Nordic countries, to discredit Chinese businesses through disinformation, lies and sensationalism in the independent media and social platforms.


US plan to discredit Chinese investments unmasked | The Herald

Economic Sanctions: A Reality Check — Timothy Taylor

Interesting observations by an economist that question the geopolitical effectiveness of economic sanctions as hybrid warfare aimed at achieving political goals, such as regime change through color revolution. 

But Timothy Taylor fails to notice sufficiently that imposition of economic sanctions has often backfired both politically and economically against the US, e.g., reducing American soft power, resulting in import substitution and building of national and regional self-sufficiency, de-dollarization, and promoting multi-polarism.

Overall, as a policy tool economic sanctions as hybrid warfare have failed to meet objectives. As Taylor observes, they are usually just "feel-good" measures that generate a sense of "doing something."

Conversable Economist
Economic Sanctions: A Reality Check
Timothy Taylor | Managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota

See also
Xinjiang in China has quietly become one of the world’s top tourist hotspots – overtaking France. More than 158 million visitors came to Xinjiang, the scenic northwestern region of China last year, and the number is expected to top 200 million this year.

For comparison, Paris has about 30 million visitors a year, and the whole of France, considered the most visited place in the world, had about 80-90 million visitors a year in pre-Covid times. The French government has set a target of 100 million visitors a year when the pandemic is over.

Xinjiang is already way ahead, with pflans to welcome 400 million visitors annually by 2025....
Oh, the irony.

Bill Totten's Weblog
Unexpected Twist
Friday writers
Originally at Friday

Bill Mitchell — Zero-hour contracts in the UK are an affront to progress

It’s Wednesday and so not much blog writing today. I have a few writing commitments to finalise in the coming few weeks and I need some time to do that. So today I provide some working notes and analysis of the data on UK Zero-hour contracts after I updated my dataset today. Some advertising of upcoming events follows and then some great guitar playing. A typical Wednesday at my blog it seems....
Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Zero-hour contracts in the UK are an affront to progress
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Tom Fowdy - MSM loves to blow up any tiny problem in China into an existential crisis. No, the country’s not facing a ‘Lehman Brothers moment

 That does not mean that China’s government will do nothing. Its financial system does not operate in the way those in the West do. All of its major banks are state owned. The government can impose its own controls and rules as it sees fit and simply “defy economic gravity” – precisely why theses of its collapse have been so frequently wrong. 


The government may let the firm itself die, but step in to pay off its creditors and investors, because in no circumstances does China want to be branded responsible for a global financial crisis or meltdown, not least in this new era of scapegoating Beijing for everything. There are many solutions to this crisis, but China has seemingly made a political decision that the status quo cannot continue; firms fuelling themselves on debt like this cannot go on as normal without serious reform.


RT


MSM loves to blow up any tiny problem in China into an existential crisis. No, the country’s not facing a ‘Lehman Brothers moment

Tuesday, September 21, 2021

THE EMPIRICAL FAILURES OF Neoliberalism, by Mike Konczal, Katy Milani, and Ariel Evans

 Over the last five decades, an empirical revolution in economics has undermined many of the assumptions of “neoliberalism,” the reigning approach to economic policy. Many of the guiding assumptions underlying neoliberal policymaking no longer speak to what is going on in the economy or our country more broadly.

In “The Empirical Failures of Neoliberalism,” Mike Konczal, Katy Milani, and Ariel Evans elevate five of the leading arguments made by advocates of neoliberalism and explore their theoretical claims. Ultimately, the authors debunk neoliberals’ arguments, tracking them against recent research by leading scholars of economic inequality to show how neoliberalism has failed to deliver its promises of increased economic growth, equality, and mobility.

By elevating the leading empirics that turn neoliberalism’s theoretical claims on their head, this issue brief aims to energize a thoughtful reevaluation of the dominant—but failed—ideology. Konczal, Milani, and Evans lay the foundation for a new set of economic policies that are capable of building a stronger, more inclusive economy and democracy—by curbing the concentrated power in our economy and political system while also building on the strengths of government to directly address both the individual and collective challenges facing our nation. 


GROWTH, INEQUALITY, AND MOBILITY 


Advocates of deregulation promised both more efficient markets and economic growth (as measured by gross domestic product) that would “trickle down” to benefit the economy as a whole. Such an approach, they promised, would be like a risingtide that lifts all boats. Contrary to the theory, however, regressive policies, including lower tax rates for corporations and the already wealthy, deregulation, and privatization, have resulted in slower growth, greater income inequality, wage stagnation, and decreased labor market mobility.


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THE EMPIRICAL FAILURES OF Neoliberalism, by Mike Konczal, Katy Milani, and Ariel Evans