Matthew Harrington — Survey: People’s Trust Has Declined in Business, Media, Government, and NGOs

Despite broad distrust of business, there are high expectations for business to do more — a potential opening to turn the tide of public opinion. Three-quarters of people agreed that “a company can take specific actions that both increase profits and improve the economic and social conditions in the community where it operates.” According to our respondents, the best ways business can build trust in a better future are to pay fair wages, offer better benefits, and create more jobs. The fastest ways businesses can erode trust are to bribe government officials, pay outsize compensation to senior management, and avoid taxes.…

The recent collapse of trust in government and media should serve as a powerful lesson to business of what can happen when institutions become disconnected from the interests and opinions of the people they serve. Executives have been warned — their customers and the population at large will be watching closely....

Harvard Business Review
Survey: People’s Trust Has Declined in Business, Media, Government, and NGOs
Matthew Harrington | global chief operating officer of Edelman, a global communications marketing firm

Chris Dillow — Inequality, trust & politics

We have good evidence that increasing inequality leads to lower trust.

Functional societies are based on trust.

Trust is why the Big Lie works. People refuse to believe that their leaders are lying to them.

But it only works for a while. And when enough people lose trust in leaders, then disfunctionality increases proportionately as cooperation and engagement decline. The end-result is non-participation or revolt.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Inequality, trust & politics
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

David Andolfatto — Why the Blockchain should be familiar to you

Today's post is more about marketing the idea of blockchain. The word sounds intimidating to many people. That's probably because attempts to explain it often make use of a highly technical trade language that few people understand. My goal here is to think of ways to communicate the idea of blockchain in a manner that will make people feel like the concept is familiar to them. Indeed, I believe that the broad conceptual idea of blockchain should be familiar to us all.

Renowned Bitcoin expert Andreas Antonopoulos writes here:It will take time for the idea of decentralized trust through computation to become a part of mainstream consciousness, and until then, the idea creates cognitive dissonance for those accustomed to centralized trust systems. With thousands of years of practical use, centralized systems of trust are accepted unconditionally and without much thought as the only model of trust.

It's an excellent article and I highly recommend you read it. What I want to do here is push back a little on the notion that decentralized trust systems should necessarily create cognitive dissonance. In particular, I should like to point out that we've had tens of thousands of years of experience with decentralized trust systems. Alright, so let's get started.….

Very worthwhile read if you don't know much about blockchain already. It's a simple explanation that David Graeber might have written. It's basically how decentralized systems based on mutual trust work and have since prehistory, and how digital networking allows this to be scaled.

Notice how the blockchain described above could serve a very useful economic purpose. In particular, notice that the act of consumption (medical services) in [1], John is effectively using [2] as currency. At least, this is how things work in what anthropologists describe as "gift-giving societies." And if you think about it for a while, you'll notice that the same principle is at work in the various groups you interact with on a daily basis (your friends, your family, coworkers, etc.). Much, quite possibly most, economic exchange occurs via such localized trust networks.

The problem with this ancient blockchain technology is that it doesn't scale very well. There's only so much data we can fit in our brains. So as populations grew and as people started forming large communities, a new type of record-keeping system was needed. The model that came to dominate is one in which databases are collected and maintained by trusted third parties. Much effort is expended in keeping these private databases secure (not always successfully). It is often difficult for these agencies to communicate and reconcile their databases (as in when you try to send money from your bank account to your friend's foreign bank account overseas).

And so enter the "new" technology, blockchain. I hope I have convinced you what is new here is not the principle of the blockchain. The new technological developments are: [1] bigger brains (increased capacity for data storage and processing via computers); [2] better communications (the Internet); and [3] computer-based algorithms to serve as communal consensus mechanisms (e.g., proof-of-work).

These innovations will permit a revolution in the truest sense of the word: we are traveling back to where we began--but with planet earth as our village.

MacroMania

Why the Blockchain should be familiar to you

David Andolfatto, Vice President, FRBSL

Patsy McGarry — Higgins says unaccountable forces are running EU

Unaccountable forces removed from democratic control are today in control in the European Union, President Michael D Higgins has declared in one of the most pointed speeches of his term in office.

“The present institutional structure of the European Union can be seen as reflecting the distribution of political power in recent decades, decades that have seen the emergence of a new financialised global order, where unaccountable agencies and forces removed from democratic oversight or control are in the ascendancy,” he said.

He made the speech as he opened the Royal Irish Academy’s Centre for the Study of the Moral Foundations of Economy and Society.… 

The anti-austerity street protests in many EU states, he said, could be seen as “not just the mechanical result of deplorable levels of unemployment and deteriorating material circumstances”, but also a reflection of a “breakdown of trust between citizens and their institutions”.
Deep injury has been inflicted on people’s moral outlook in recent decades by an extraordinarily narrow version of economics which had cut ties with its ethical and philosophical roots, Mr Higgins said.

European leaders must remain “attentive and open”, he added saying, “a social view of Europe demands that our fellow citizens should never be seen merely as ‘consumers’ of public policies, driven by a sense of their sectional interests.”…

The Irish Times
Higgins says unaccountable forces are running EU
Patsy McGarry

Izabella Kaminska — G.K. Chesterton’s fence and the consequences of lowering barriers

"Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”

G.K. Chesterton

Technologists and free-marketeers are obsessed with removing barriers: Barriers to entry. Frictions. Levees. Borders. All in the name of frictionless transactions.

But barriers were often put up for a reason.…

Dizzy is a historian by training. The post is worth a read in full.

Economists need to pay more attention to history — and philosophy, too. Homo economicus, which is a foundational assumption of conventional, presumes a theory of human nature that is not only contested by regarded in the history of thought as puerile.

This is also another argument against the over-reliance on formal models in economics. Economics is a "moral science," as Keynes put it,  rather than a natural science. It has an important and foundational economic component, as well as being historical rather than atemporal.

This constitutes another paradox of liberalism.

Dizzynomics
G.K. Chesterton’s fence and the consequences of lowering barriers
Izabella Kaminska

Chris Dillow — Believing others

False confidence.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Believing others
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Izabella Kaminska — Scaling and why it matters

Not enough attention is paid to scale. Scaling is the basis of civilization. As Roger Erickson has pointed out, it is also the basis of evolution. Dizzy calls our attention to it with respect to the push for decentralization and sharing. Descaling won't work, especially in a capitalistic system in which there are economies of scale.

Dizzynomics
Scaling and why it matters
Izabella Kaminska

Steve Keen — Wolfgang Schäuble, The Trust Troll

Schäuble was clearly the primary architect of the Troika’s dictat for Greece. One only has to compare its language to that used by Schäuble in his OpEd in the New York Times three months ago (“Wolfgang Schäuble on German Priorities and Eurozone Myths”, April 15 2015). There he stated that “My diagnosis of the crisis in Europe is that it was first and foremost a crisis of confidence, rooted in structural shortcomings”, and that the essential factor in ending the crisis was the restoration of trust:

The cure is targeted reforms to rebuild trust — in member states’ finances, in their economies and in the architecture of the European Union. Simply spending more public money would not have done the trick — nor can it now.

Compare this to the first line of the communique:

The Eurogroup stresses the crucial need to rebuild trust with the Greek authorities as a pre‐requisite for a possible future agreement on a new ESM programme.

The policies in the document match those in Schäuble’s OpEd as well. Schäuble called for:

more flexible labor markets; lowering barriers to competition in services; more robust tax collection; and similar measures.

The Troika’s document forces these measures upon Greece. These include “the broadening of the tax base to increase revenue”, “rigorous reviews of collective bargaining, industrial action and collective dismissals” and “ambitious product market reforms”

Build trust means take apart the welfare state and replace with a market state owned by foreign interests and a domestic oligarchy.

This cannot in any sense be seen as an economic document, since an economic document would have to assess the feasibility of its proposals. Instead it simply states Schäuble’s ideology: regardless of your economic circumstances, simply implement these (so-called) market-oriented reforms, restore trust, and your economy will grow.

This is in spite of the fact that even very conservative economist admit that under this plan the Greek economy won't grow. The plan is obvious aimed at something else and that appears to looting Greece unless it is Greek colonization. It's one or the other, or both.

The other possibility, which Keen prefers, is that Greece is being used to set an example and this economically inexplicable behavior is "punishment." There may be some of that involved, too. It plays well with the propaganda about lazy Greeks. Here they are getting their due and being taught a lesson.

But the fact remains that Greece is being looted by the usual suspects. Considering that to be an unintended consequence seems very farfetched to me, especially give the history, which Keen does not provide here.

Does Wolfgang Schäuble stand to profit from this himself?

Forbes
Wolfgang Schäuble, The Trust Troll
Steve Keen | Professor and Head Of School Of Economics, History & Politics, Kingston University, London

How Do You Get People To Explore Their Options? Give 'em Enough Income To Keep Doing So.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Speaking of trust, an erstwhile cartoonist examines the ...

Trans-Pacific Partnership

and, quite accidentally, ends up considering trust in government, and how to get people to explore their options. Could be worse. He muddles some of the issues regarding Free Trade, but at least he's against blind acceptance of the TPP ... for the simple reason that it ASSUMES that we can trust our lobbying process that produces the government we have. Amazing. We need a cartoonist to explain that? Maybe so.



What's also amazing? I keep reading (including in the TPP comic) of people getting Nobel Prizes for rediscovering common sense that peasants carved into stone inscriptions WAY before the Egyptians built the pyramids.

Don't rely on existing assumptions? (Daniel Kahneman) No kidding? That predates humans! Ever see a penguin afraid to go in the water even though it can't see any leopard seal?

Multiple people may both cooperate & compete simultaneously? (John Nash) Wotta concept! :( You mean like symbiosis, autocatalysis, or teamwork?

Weepin' Buddha on a decline! Are these people joking?

I'm sticking to my thesis. ANY aggregate* or network going through a growth spurt HAS to get clumsier (& dumber), before it can regain & extend agility.

Can I get a Nobel Prize for reminding the new, clueless hoards of THAT age-old observation? :( Or does anyone even care about getting Nobel Prizes any more, since our aggregate went through it's latest growth spurt, and triggered another round of deflation in aggregate intelligence?

Why? Good heavens. Do you have to ask? A network dependent upon interconnections & feedback ... that suddenly doubles it's number of nodes without increasing it's feedback interconnects by N! (AND TUNING them all) .... is a clumsy, ignorant network. [N! = N-factorial]

How fast does it take a disorganized, growing network to re-organize on a larger scale?

It takes time.

What's the half-life of feedback-based agility recovery in a network expanding faster than its inter-connects? 

There are endless options, but in our current challenge, we (or another country) will eventually evolve a culture that pushes to re-organize on a bigger scale, faster. Or maybe human nation states will do that through symbiosis - which sounds less statistically likely. Witness the EEU struggles, and the history of "Monetary" unions. How system evolution eventually occurs can't be predicted by prior systems, only discovered by trial and error.

We named our goal as "Adaptive Rate" over 150 years ago, yet we're still spewing students faster than we're reminding them what their core challenge is.

Until then, it seems that our culture won't have hit rock bottom until someone gets a Nobel Prize for rediscovering that 2+2 = 4. Once we stop sinking lower, we can turn the corner & start regaining cultural agility, and AdaptiveRight will reapproach survivable balance with CopyRight. It's a simple balance for any adaptive system: keep components alive a & adequately provisioned ... WHILE growing the system. Components eating their system is dumber than sawing off the limb they sit on.

* (not just adolescents, i.e., an aggregate of cells who go through an aggregate growth spurt, and yes, get clumsier before they can regain agility;  do I have to repeat this 12 times?)

Frances Coppola — Greece and the EU: a question of trust

I have been mulling over the terms of the agreement between Greece and the Eurogoup. Initially, I thought that Greece had ended up with an appalling deal, getting almost none of its aims and losing control of EFSF funding for its banks. The retention of future primary surplus targets under the November 2012 agreement - only the target for this year is under review - seemed particularly harsh.

But then I listened to Pierre Moscovici explaining the thinking behind the deal, and suddenly the penny dropped. We've all been missing the point. Holger Schmieding of Berenberg Bank was on the right lines - he commented recently that the real problem in the Greek negotiations was that trust had broken down. Indeed it has. But not recently. Trust in Greece broke down a long time ago.… 

This, in a nutshell, was the obstacle. Syriza wanted a new arrangement in which the rest of the EU would trust it to deliver on its promises. The rest of the EU wanted Syriza to prove its trustworthiness by completing the current programme. Deadlock.…

So although the Greek government didn't get debt relief, and it didn't get a commitment to reducing primary surpluses from 2016 onwards (this will have to be negotiated on the basis of revised forecasts taking into account the effect of the new reforms), it got something much more important - the opportunity to prove that it can be trusted.… 

This agreement, rather than treating it as a basket case that must be told what to do and supervised closely, offers it the opportunity to earn that trust by doing the following: 

• creating a programme of credible and achievable reforms that will deliver the growth that Greece desperately needs  
• delivering the reforms agreed with the supervising institutions
• meeting all of its existing commitments 

If it can do this, then it will be trusted by others to deliver more - possibly including a complete programme of its own design. And in this way it will restore the dignity of Greece. 

That's the challenge to Syriza.…

Coppola Comment
Greece and the EU: a question of trust
Frances Coppola

We Need Public Trust (And Scalable Verification Methods), Not Just Public Institutions

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)




In ongoing discussion with friends at the Public Banking Institute, we often return to a state of talking past one another.

It's obviously my fault. Trying to think ahead always seems to come across as opposition - especially if articulated clumsily. At least initially.

Guess I really do need more practice at saying "Yes, And" instead of "No, But."

It's not enough to think .... one needs to constantly PRACTICE all the arbitrary hand-shaking protocols too, just to effectively communicate with all parts of your own, diversifying electorate.

Does the following help?

Some of my PBI friends (not all) get so involved in local projects that they tend to forget about the implications of national policy.

I am NOT dismissing anything about Public Banking. In fact, I couldn't agree more. There should be many more Public Banks, at every level. Nationalize TBTJ mega-banks. "State-alize" many regional banks, and "County-ize" & "City-ize" many local banks. It's necessary.

That still won't be enough to restore our cultural agility. Not now, and not ever.

I am trying to think ahead, and consider why Public Banking will always be necessary but not sufficient. There are further issues that must be included in the mix. That's why I keep bringing up the "3i's" of contingency management.

Impact;
In-Flight;
Instigators.
...If you don't address all 3, simultaneously, you can't win (excepting luck).

That advice applies not just to current frictions, but also to our own future actions, and selves.

So one obvious implication sticks in my mind. No amount of practice at local tactics (or regional strategy) replaces interleaved attention to national policy. That's just common sense. The inverse is also true, of course. We need both, not either in isolation.

You cannot tell from the presence of public banks alone whether a public is ceding national policy space to NeoLiberal ideologues.

The archetypical Public Bank, the state Bank of North Dakota has had zero impact opposing the slow return of NeoLiberal national fiscal policy the past 80 years. There's no evidence that they even tried!

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve, for example, is a Public Bank. Heck, Congress is a Public Institution too. 

None of that means that any public institution is immune to being co-opted by Control Frauds. 

Foxes will always seek to be appointed to head local, regional and national Hen Houses. Our need isn't just for more hen houses - which we always need. We ALSO need continuously evolving methods for keeping our own foxes under control.

Plus, those new methods must be more scalable than previous and current methods.

So I'm always thinking of ways to have our public banks AND our national policy too. To me, that's the minimal challenge worth pursuing. Otherwise, you're saying "No class war or Control Frauds in local politics, but they are ok in national government." Lots of luck with that approach.

That is not setting our sights high enough.

The root issue is trust (AND to verify).

If we can't trust private enterprise to run all banks, what can we trust private enterprise to run? Garbage collection? Police Departments? Our MICC?

If we want institutions we can trust, regulate the damn industries!

The root solution is regulatory methods.

What we really want is evolving methods for maintaining Public Regulation ... of all industry sectors, and all components, private or public. That timeless logic is the only way I see how to tackle our exponentially rising organizational tasks.

"More is Different" - it sure is. So how do growing human populations manage more of themselves?

By always bridging FROM current-scale methods TO our emerging, larger-scale behaviors, with NEW METHODS ... that's how. In plain words, that means by ALWAYS thinking ahead, and NOT just on what we're already working on today.

Every 50 years or less, we have a wholly new scale of organizational issues. Issues that today's methods and institutions won't adequately address.

How will we regulate all our emerging, scale-dependent activities?

Not by micromanaging every discipline, but by instilling subtle, new methods allowing us to continuously regulate distributed TRUST, and thereby cultural resiliency. The key issue is to constantly improve the quality (including tempo) of decision-making that is always increasingly distributed.

We can't do that by scaling up committees, or micromanaging existing processes.

Take the ancient example of siRNA allowing micro-regulation of massively larger genomes, and thereby eventually enabling massively multi-cellular species, eventually called Eukaryotes (e.g., humans). We couldn't have evolved just by having more "public" proteins. That's like expecting to put enough police cars on the streets to enforce all traffic laws. That approach - regulating self with more self - just won't scale.

Similarly, stages of larger-scale human culture were possible only after invention of language, writing and other miniaturized, "scalable" technologies.

Again. Self-regulation of more self, by micro-management WITH more self, just doesn't scale.

Replacing self-regulation with ingenious micro-regulation technology allows us to have our "more" and organize it too. All we need from our growing population is their feedback, not distributed-regulation with their actual selves.

Take the same principle applied to Blue Collar policing. The breakthrough method for retaining trust in police is public verification, i.e., not only adding more layers of "Public Policing" but adding miniature lapel-cameras to every cop on the beat.

Face it. We'll never trust enough of our accountants and bankers - public or private - until they wear lapel-cameras too, or something analogous.

What we're doing now is never enough, because there'll be more of everything tomorrow, and more is always different, because interdependencies that are insignificant at one scale eventually become significant - or overwhelming - at another scale.

Ancient cathedral builders learned that, the hard way. So do all people in all professions, ... but never fast enough.

Achieving Public Regulation comes down to inventing subtle new methods for monitoring key portions of increasingly distributed decision-making, so that we can maintain alignment across our growing electorate, and retain trust in ourselves.

There are always more insanely great things our aggregate can achieve .. but only if we invent ways to trust and verify the aggregate utility of our own, distributed actions.

Or regulate.

Andrew O’Connell — Interpersonal Trust in the U.S. Hits a Historic Low

Social fabric fraying?

SOURCE: Declines in Trust in Others and Confidence in Institutions Among American Adults and Late Adolescents, 1972–2012

Harvard Business Review — HBR Blog Network
Interpersonal Trust in the U.S. Hits a Historic Low
Andrew O’Connell

AP — Study: Millennials Less Trusting Than Gen X Was

A new study has found that, while Americans are mistrustful of each other and institutions -- from government to corporations and the media -- young people are among the least likely age group to have confidence in those institutions, especially since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

AP — The big Story
Study: Millennials Less Trusting Than Gen X Was

Martha Irvine

The Economist — John D. Rockefeller Defended [Review of Titan: The Life Of John D. Rockefeller Sr. By Ron Chernow]

Nowadays, says Ron Chernow, most people imagine that American businessmen believe in competition. In fact, as he shows, in his thorough and thought-provoking biography of the greatest businessman in American history, combination has been as constant and perhaps as creative a force in the history of capitalism as competition. 

“It was forced upon us,” John D. Rockefeller said. “We had to do it in self-defence. The oil business was in chaos and daily growing worse.” And he spelled out his economic credo in words that were as shocking in the 1870s, when he built his great combination, or in the 1890s, when he had to defend it against the attacks of the muckrakers, as they may be to free-market theorists today. “The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return.”...

Mr Chernow has written a worthy biography of a truly titanic figure. He conceals none of the seamier side of Standard Oil's practices, but his overall view is sympathetic. In his opinion the vast accumulation of Rockefeller's fortune and the almost equally fabulous disbursements of his philanthropy were not in contradiction, but were two sides of his Protestant capitalist ethos. “Many of Rockefeller's critics alleged that he divided his life into compartments and kept two separate sets of moral ledger books: one governing his exemplary private life, another sanctioning his reprehensible business behaviour,” Mr Chernow writes. “But he saw his entire life guided by the same lofty ideals.”

 Like Ayn Rand, he must have liked Nietzsche, too.

"Combination" = oligarchy, cartel, trust

The Economist
John D. Rockefeller Defended

Maria Alejandra Madi — Economics and Trust

Keynes on trust needed to counter uncertainty.

WEA Pedagogy Blog
Economics and Trust
Maria Alejandra Madi

Henry A. Giroux — Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State

This is a long post but Giroux meticulously combed through the state of affairs and their implications for contemporary life and (formerly) liberal democracy. You've probably read Orwell and probably know all this already, but Giroux sums it up eloquently.

Truthout | Op-Ed
Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance
Henry A Giroux

Connie Cass — Poll: Americans Less Trusting Of Each Other

These days, only one-third of Americans say most people can be trusted. Half felt that way in 1972, when the General Social Survey first asked the question....

Does it matter that Americans are suspicious of one another? Yes, say worried political and social scientists.

What's known as "social trust" brings good things.

A society where it's easier to compromise or make a deal. Where people are willing to work with those who are different from them for the common good. Where trust appears to promote economic growth.

Distrust, on the other hand, seems to encourage corruption. At the least, it diverts energy to counting change, drawing up 100-page legal contracts and building gated communities.

Even the rancor and gridlock in politics might stem from the effects of an increasingly distrustful citizenry, said April K. Clark, a Purdue University political scientist and public opinion researcher.

"It's like the rules of the game," Clark said. "When trust is low, the way we react and behave with each other becomes less civil."...

Trust has declined as the gap between the nation's rich and poor gapes ever wider, Uslaner says, and more and more Americans feel shut out. They've lost their sense of a shared fate. Tellingly, trust rises with wealth.

"People who believe the world is a good place and it's going to get better and you can help make it better, they will be trusting," Uslaner said. "If you believe it's dark and driven by outside forces you can't control, you will be a mistruster."

The Huffington Post
Poll Reveals Americans Don't Trust Each Other Anymore
Connie Cass | AP

Rumplestatskin — Everything I was Afraid to Ask about Bitcoin but Did

Bitcoin, transaction cost, reversibility, trust.

Naked Capitalism
Everything I was Afraid to Ask about Bitcoin but Did
Rumplestatskin, a professional economist with a background in property development, environmental economics research and economic regulation.

The Outcome of What Passes for Political Economy Today

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)



Perhaps ignorance is the problem? And apathy? And intellectual laziness?

Republicans and the “Lofgren Corollary"

"A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980)."

                 ***

At what point does this become treason?

Decline in public trust is decline in trusting democracy.  Always shrouded in a fog of mistrust and fraud, is the Dark Side of politics.

Mike Whitney — The True State of the Economy

At the same time the corporations and banks are reporting record profits, Gallup surveys show that “trust in all three branches of the federal government remains on the lower end of what Gallup has measured historically” while “Americans’ trust in banks fell to an all-time low of 18% — lower than its level at the height of the global financial collapse.” (Gallup)

So, there is a tradeoff for all the loot Obama’s friends have been pilfering from working people, and that tradeoff is trust. Americans no longer have confidence in the government, the market or the justice system. Gradually, that lack of trust will cross-over into the economy as wary consumers set aside more of their earnings to protect themselves from the government-corporate-racketeer oligarchy. A slowdown in personal consumption will impact retail sales, durable goods, hiring and capital investment. It will douse those green shoots with motor oil and push the economy back into negative territory.

Counterpunch
The True State of the Economy
Mike Whitney

The "confidence fairy" isn't a total myth. Trust in government does count socially, politically and economically.

Obama has been a disaster that has been magnified by GOP obstructionism. Luckily, the obstructionism has at least prevented the Grand Bargain that Obama is seeking to cement his legacy as a Very Serious Person that cut entitlements and balanced the budget, in emulation of Bill Clinton's policy of triangulation.