David Dayan — Debate Moderators Under the Spell of Deficit-Obsessed Billionaire Pete Peterson

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an organization that is virtually unknown outside of Washington, was nonetheless cited in four different questions during this year’s presidential and vice-presidential debates.

Moderators Elaine Quijano and Chris Wallace, seemingly unable to string together an intelligent thought about domestic policy on their own, outsourced their questions to a cabal of self-styled serious grown-ups who believe that advocating for cutting Social Security and Medicare makes them look like paragons of virtue.…

 Sociologists, psychologists and PR people call it cultivating an image — of being VSPs —Very Serious Persons.

HRC is in Peterson's pocket, in addition to that of George Soros, Wall Street, Saudi Arabia and all the rest of Bill and Hillary's patrons and donors.

The Intercept

Debate Moderators Under the Spell of Deficit-Obsessed Billionaire Pete Peterson

David Dayan

Ellis Winningham — Fix the Debt – One Group’s Efforts to Cause an Economic Depression

Best takedown of the Peterson crowd I have seen.

In the profession of economics, there’s a lot of derp*. I mean, a lot of it. In fact, when it comes to economics, derp is everywhere. On TV, derp is there: from Fox Derp, Bloomderp, CNBDerp and Derp Dynasty, to MNSBDerp and Derp Maddow. Newspapers too, like The New York Derp and The Wall Street Derp. In Congress, derp makes itself at home. In the Oval Office, derp sits behind the big desk and conjures up macro policy. But, these advocates of economic derp aren’t the subject of our discussion today. I wish to address one particular group that is well-known for extreme derp. Its website, in fact, is 100% derp. There’s not a single, intelligent, realistic statement to be found contained within it; from the front page to the “Donate” section. Even the search function results in derp. It hands out T-Shirts with derp printed on them, which then become signs for the people wearing the shirts that says, “I want to rid America of US Dollars!” It uses derp to cause citizens great anxiety and fear at the thought of savings accounts that pay interest. Derp is its life blood; it’s daily bread and without it, the group wouldn’t exist at all. No, I’m not talking about nutty organizations like the Concorde Coalition or the Heritage Foundation. They promote economic derp, but they also deal in other types of derp. I’m talking about an organization that is dedicated exclusively to promoting the most pernicious form of economic derp. I’m talking about the Count Derpula of economics fear mongering called, Fix the Debt.…

Deep derpitude.

Ellis Winningham
Fix the Debt – One Group’s Efforts to Cause an Economic Depression

* Noah Smith explains "derp"in What is "derp"? The answer is technical. It used to be called "dogmatism."

Bill Mitchell — US Federal Reserve should not increase interest rates

Greetings from London in the early morning! If we went back a few years and dug out all the predictions and scare campaigns that were being issued by mainstream economists and their conservative ‘think tank’ conduits about the impending disaster that would accompany the near zero interest rate regimes that the US Federal Reserve Bank had implemented it would make a great comedy sketch. There should be no surprise with the massive predictive failures of the mainstream economists in this regard. They clearly did not understand the underlying dynamics that govern the way the central bank interacts with the commercial banks. The problem is that these conservative forces are so dumb they don’t have adaptive learning mechanisms and so even in the fact of evidence contrary to their Groupthink they keep pumping out the same nonsense. The other problem is that they tend to be well funded by the right-wing establishment that they exhibit disproportionate influence on the public policy debate. That influence has turned to demands that the US Federal Reserve Bank (the central bank) increase interest rates and reverse its quantitative easing – apparently because hyperinflation is just around the corner. Nothing could be further from the truth. At present the US economy is some way into a very slow and relatively tepid recovery. But it has still some way to go and while interest rate changes have a relatively weak impact on overall growth any anti-growth noise is undesirable. It is also not justifiable given the central bank’s own logic.…

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
US Federal Reserve should not increase interest rates
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia