A Wake for a Dying System—Spring Meetings, Sovereign Debt & ChangeNow Summit — Fadhel Kaboub (MMT economist)

This week's gathering in Washington DC for the annual meetings of the World Bank and the IMF should be a wake for a dying global economic architecture, but unfortunately, a New International Economic Order cannot be born without African leadership to reposition the continent and the rest of the Global South away from the bottom of the global value chain. This is what I told the BBC Newsday on Monday....

Global South Perspectives
A Wake for a Dying System—Spring Meetings, Sovereign Debt & ChangeNow Summit
Fadhel Kaboub, Associate Professor of economics at Denison University (on leave) and President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. He currently serves as the Under-Secretary-General for Financing for Development at the Organisation of Educational Cooperation in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.He also held a number of research affiliations with the Levy Economics Institute, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the Economic Research Forum (Cairo), Power Shift Africa (Nairobi), and the Center for Strategic Studies on the Maghreb (Tunis). Fadhel is Tunisian-American MMT economist. Ph.D. in Economics & Social Science Consortium, 2006, University of Missouri - Kansas City. M.A. in Economics, May 2001, University of Missouri - Kansas City. B.S. in Economics, June 1999, with Distinction

Misreading the Signs: Why High UK Borrowing Doesn't Mean Financial Crash — NeilW

 Matthew Lynn’s recent article (“The UK is heading for a full-blown financial crash, and nothing can stop it now”) paints a dramatic picture of fiscal doom, arguing that rising government borrowing figures signal an inevitable economic collapse. While the borrowing numbers themselves are significant, the conclusion that they spell imminent disaster fundamentally misunderstands how government finance works in a country like the UK, which issues its own floating-rate currency. Lynn’s analysis, focused solely on the government’s deficit, misses the other side of the equation: the non-government sector’s surplus....

New Wayland

Misreading the Signs: Why High UK Borrowing Doesn't Mean Financial Crash
NeilW

Capital Flight: A Misconception — NeilW

Recent commentary has expressed concern that investors are “taking their money out of America”. Such claims invoke the idea of capital flight, a concept historically relevant under fixed exchange rate systems. However, applying this term to modern floating exchange rate systems is misleading. While significant shifts in investment preferences can have major economic impacts, no actual “flight” of capital, in the sense of a net reduction, can occur—only balanced exchanges....

New Wayland
Capital Flight: A Misconception
NeilW

DOGE Goons Physically Drag Social Security Worker From Desk

 DOGE "goons?" Seriously? A bunch of computer geeks? How tough can they be? This shit's getting ridiculous.

Dimon implying an upcoming Treasury auction failure

 

Dimon seeing another regulatory snafu coming up and Fed going to have to suspend SLR again… same thing as spring 2020 … they never learn... buckle up for more chaos… 

Jamie Dimon now saying he expects the Fed to have to step in and rescue the bond market.

Unprecedented times.

We had +3% real GDP a quarter ago. pic.twitter.com/KQosKC3UhY

— Spencer Hakimian (@SpencerHakimian) April 11, 2025

“Tariff” reprieve

 

Maybe Cook and the other US multinational CEOs had to finally break the news to the Art degree morons in Trump & Co that the “trade deficit!” was their overseas retained earnings ? 

🤔

BREAKING: Treasury Secretary Bessent was instrumental in getting President Trump to back down on Chinese phone and computer tariffs after multiple calls with Apple CEO Tim Cook and other CEOs. Navarro and Lutnick sidelined and Navarro likely to be fired as scapegoat - SOURCES

— Mike Alfred (@mikealfred) April 12, 2025

The Accursed Tariffs — NeilW

Many electrons have been inconvenienced over this topic, and most have been in vain. I’ve wondered all week whether I had anything meaningful to add. However, a few points that have emerged in discussions are worth highlighting....

New Wayland
The Accursed Tariffs
NeilW

IRS has agreed to share migrants’ tax information with ICE

 

So imminently employers of  millions of illegals are gonna be submitting their FICA tax reports containing those now DOGE deleted 9M SSNs and IRS is gonna immediately flip that information over to ICE for immigration raids probably to the largest offenders first…

Could be a mass firing event which probably won’t show up in UE claims because the current employees are illegal… maybe job openings will spike up … while UE rate appears constant…

So Art degree Fed morons will interpret that as “inflationary!” and will be EVEN LESS inclined to reduce the policy rate for Trump…

I’m more worried about this whole thing than the whole “tariff!” BS…

You may want to load up on some frozen chicken beef or pork products this week just in case..

IRS has agreed to share migrants’ tax information with ICE, to help find immigrants they are trying to deport, per NYT

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) April 8, 2025

Trump's "Liberation Day": Another PR Gag, or Global Reorientation Turning Point? — Simplicius

 I am a bit late with this. I have been jammed this week and just got to. It's an explanation of the Trump tariffs. 

It's the brain child of Stephen Miran, chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. Miran lays it out in  A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System. Simplicius summarizes it briefly.

Bill Mitchell deals with this from the MMT point of view in today's post, which I linked to earlier.

Simplicius the Thinker

Trump's "Liberation Day": Another PR Gag, or Global Reorientation Turning Point?
Simplicius

US government is pinning its tariff hopes on some unlikely to be realised assumptions— Bill Mitchell

 Last week, the US President honoured his election promise, indeed his long-held commitment, to increase tariffs on imported goods and services to the US. The formula they came up to differentiate between countries was bizarre but I don’t intend commenting on that here, except to say, the imposition of tariffs on the – Heard Island and McDonald Islands – which are an ‘Australian external territory’ that is a ‘a volcanic group of mostly barren Antarctic islands, about two-thirds of the way from Madagascar to Antarctica’ (where penguins live) ranked up there with their Signal chaos. These guys have access to the ‘red button’ after all. That’s the scary thing. Anyway I was sent a document that seemingly is the theoretical rationalisation for the tariff decision (thanks Mahaish, appreciated) and so I thought I would give it some time...

William Mitchell — Modern Monetary Theory
US government is pinning its tariff hopes on some unlikely to be realised assumptions
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia