An economics, investment, trading and policy blog with a focus on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). We seek the truth, avoid the mainstream and are virulently anti-neoliberalism.
US retail giant Walmart, the world’s largest company by revenue, has launched a program to allow customers to buy bitcoin at 200 of its stores via Coinstar ATMs.
“Coinstar, in partnership with Coinme, has launched a pilot that allows its customers to use cash to purchase bitcoin. There are 200 Coinstar kiosks located inside Walmart stores across the United States that are part of this pilot,” Walmart communications director Molly Blakeman told CoinDesk on Friday.
The three quotes above are from, respectively: 1. William Godwin 2. Charles Wentworth Dilke 3. Karl Marx. There was a very pronounced influence of Godwin on Dilke and of Dilke on Marx (hence indirectly of Godwin on Marx). My research suggests that viewing Marx's work from the perspective of Dilke's major influence reveals both hidden strengths and weaknesses in Marx's critique of political economy....
Leisure is freedom. "Capitalism" has greatly increased freedom, although unequally. But it's only a start in comparison with the potential that technological innovation makes possible. Marx viewed this as leading in the direction of socialism as a socio-economic system as developments in the mode of production make this possible. The mode of production is shifting radically in the digital age toward surplus and away from scarcity of socially necessary goods, but the relations of production have not caught up yet, as productivity increases have mostly increased the wealth of the uppermost rungs of class structure. This is resulting in systemic stress that threatens the continuation of "business as usual."
There are two different creation stories in the Bible, and they are quite different to each other. Joel Baden believes that the people that put the Bible together deliberately wanted it to be ambiguous, so that meaning could be a matter of interpretation. I've come across the term in the past, The Living Bible, which means it can be reinterpreted for the modern age. Which does not mean altered, it means that as the world changes and our understanding of it changes too, the Bible can still be pertinent and meaningful for many people.
Joel Baden (Professor of Hebrew Bible Yale University) spoke at the 2013 Nantucket Project.
Nearly 80 percent of all Americans think the Bible is either literally true or is the inspired word of God. And yet, most Americans have no idea what is actually in the Bible. So we have the paradoxical situation in which we as a culture "have invested the words of this book with amazing authority even when we don't know what these words are and what they mean."
The Democrats won the election with a number of popular policies, but the corporations don't like them, so they have been watering them down. The US is run by an oligarchy, says Michael Hudson, and is probably a failed state. Now we have people from the coal industry designing climate change policies.
The Biden Administration is intertwined with Wall Street but must deliver some election promises to workers. Michael Hudson joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news
Climate change deniers are pushing 'Climate Lockdown' conspiracy theories - a term they invented.
They know the lockdowns have been unpopular, so they are tagging their conspiracy theories onto them, hoping people will reject proposals to combat climate change.
I've noticed some people on the populist left talking about climate lockdowns too.
Today US Vice-President Kamala Harris is travelling to Lake Mead in Nevada to talk up the President’s climate agenda. It’s the biggest reservoir in the US, but it’s drying up because of the twin effects of the heat and the drought, both of which are exacerbated by climate change.
Below is a look inside the climate change denial industry.
Why Climate Change Denial Still Exists In The U.S.
Despite overwhelming scientific evidence, some American politicians continue to deny that climate change exists, while others question the severity of its impact. But public opinion is shifting, and today even oil and gas companies publicly admit that climate change demands action. So why does climate denialism continue to influence U.S. politics? Here's a look into who is funding the movement, and why denial is mainly a U.S. problem.
India Punchline (US preparing for a three-front war with China, Russia, and Iran, ie., a suicide mission. But, hey, ka-ching for the MICIMATT/Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex.)
In recent exchanges on Marx and MMT, one question has concerned the capacity of government spending to encourage private investment and promote employment. Some Marxists appear to regard MMT as incompatible with Marx on this question. My own view is that Marx and MMT are compatible, both in general and on this particular question, and that the contributions of both, when viewed together, hold an important long-term social implication. What follows is a set of remarks outlining my position. Remark 1 is intended to provide context and to identify what I regard as the main social implication following from a joint reading of Marx and MMT. Remark 2 notes the critical significance of Marx’s ‘law’ of the tendential fall in the profit rate when interpreting the long-term implications of MMT from a Marxist perspective. Remarks 3 to 10 concern private investment under capitalist conditions, its likely responsiveness to government spending, but also its crisis prone nature. Remark 11 questions the appropriateness of society pinning its future aspirations on private investment behavior. It is suggested that a transition to socialism is both preferable and, on the basis of MMT, already technically feasible for societies with their own currencies.
The definitive statement to date, between a blog post and an article.
Andrew Gelman reviews Steven Pinker's Rationality. Trenchant criticism along with the praise. A bit longish and rather detailed for a blog review, but definitely worth a read. Many other reviewers would likely not pick this stuff up and a lot of it will get passed lay readers that are the target readership. Applicable to all but also specifically to understanding economics and finance, where "rationality" is a thing (key assumption).
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science I like Steven Pinker’s new book. Here’s why: Andrew Gelman | Professor of Statistics and Political Science and Director of the Applied Statistics Center, Columbia University
It is imperative that China’s leaders address financial-system vulnerabilities, especially the corporate sector’s high leverage ratio. But it is even more important that they take action to counter a persistent slowdown in economic growth.
Posted on account of the author, one of the few genuine experts on the Chinese economy writing in English. Numbers.
Project Syndicate China Must Restore Growth Yu Yongding, a former president of the China Society of World Economics and director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the People’s Bank of China from 2004 to 2006
By 2025, unsubsidized solar power with battery storage everywhere in China will be cheaper than coal. Indeed, solar plus battery is already cheaper than coal in 3/4s of the country. Especially given drops in the cost of battery storage, the paper concludes that China can get 43% of its total power from solar at less than 2.5 cents a kilowatt hour by 2060, making the Communist Party’s current plans for decarbonization by then plausible. Coal is usually figured at 5 cents a kilowatt hour, and solar plus battery is already less than that.
In a lot of financial market commentary – and even in the output of some academics – one might often see discussion of “money printing” in the context of inflation. Although this section explains why the concept is not meaningful, these references do serve a purpose: they are a signal that the reader can stop taking the person invoking “money printing” seriously..…
I hope Stephanie Kelton is working on a sequel called "The Inflation Myth." "Inflation" has been reduced to a meaningless concept that is dominated by connotation rather than denotation. The connotation has become loaded, and most of the stuff on denotation is just wrong.
See also for an example of bonkers "analysis" in midst of a global pandemic with clogged supply chains along with rising energy prices resulting from addressing climate change, as well as distortions introduced by economic warfare.
Stephanie Kelton recently tweeted, asking why if US government spending is the cause of inflation, the global economy is also experiencing inflation. (Search on "global inflation.")
Last week, I did a seminar with a Melbourne financial market group (Wattle Partners), who I regularly help in their education programs. It took the form of an informal (somewhat structured) conversation about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and more practical applications of the MMT understanding. There were several questions from the audience that we didn’t get time to answer in the allotted time so today I am honouring my agreement to provide answers, which might be of interest to the broader readership, if only to reinforce knowledge. The video of the interaction is also available now and you can watch it here.
Located on the edge of the Pearl River, the 138-metre Guangzhou Circle was designed by Di Pasquale of Milan studio AM Project to provide an iconic headquarters for Chinese companies Guangdong Hongda Xingye Group and GDPE Guangdong Plastic Exchange.
The Russians are very vaccine sceptic, with only 29% of the population being vaccinated. Social distancing and masks wearing rules tend to be ignored too.
Russia is well into its fourth wave of the coronavirus pandemic. But Moscow is unwilling to put the country in lockdown. Add to that low adherence to hygeine rules and Russia recently recorded 1,000 over 24 hours due to Covid – a record.
That's despite the country's vaccine Sputnik V being the first to be registered for use in any nation. But Russia's population is among the most vaccine-skeptical in the world.
In his address at the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 21, 2021, Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, declared that the peoples of the world, more than ever before, desire peace, development, equality, and social justice, and they are determined more than ever to attain these hopes through win-win cooperation….
A project of the multilateral development banking system, the Rockefeller Foundation and the New York Stock Exchange recently created a new asset class that will put, not just the natural world, but the processes underpinning all life, up for sale under the guise of promoting “sustainability.”
Hey, it's capitalism. What could go wrong?
The conversation needs to be about public and private goods — the tragedy of the commons, with Garrett Hardin facing off with Elinor Ostrom, Hardin arguing for completing enclosure and Ostrom for stewardship of nature.
The oil, gas, and coal production plans of some of the world's biggest oil, gas, and coal producers far exceed the emissions targets set in the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, a UN report has warned.
The report by the United Nations Environmental Program found that 15 big fossil fuel producers intended to produce 110 percent more oil, coal, and gas in 2030 than is consistent with the Paris Agreement's scenario for limiting rising temperatures to 1.5 degrees from the pre-industrial era, and 45 percent more than is consistent with the 2-degree scenario.
What's more, the world's big fossil fuel producers plan to continue raising oil and gas production over the next twenty years. On top of that, coal production is seen declining only marginally, according to the authors of the report. This is even more out of sync with Paris Agreement targets, the report warned....
Energy companies are being "realistic" in the sense that the political climate is such that there is no way to seriously address climate change through energy use.
At the same time, Russia expects to see a significant increase in gas demand in the countries of the Asia-Pacific region in 2021, the Deputy Prime Minister said
Economist Michael Hudson discusses the update of his book “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire” and the financial motivations behind the US new cold war on China and Russia.
It is Wednesday and so just a few points today. I obviously like data as it tells me a lot about the world and often forces me to alter my views on things. While I mostly analyse economic and financial data, which is my professional skill, I also like to investigate other data sets on things that interest me. Today, I am looking into the vaccine question, which has been playing on my mind lately as the Australian political class, under pressure from all sorts of business lobby groups who fund their election campaigns, have been ‘opening up’ the economy (states and territories) despite high case numbers in some jurisdictions and despite relatively low vaccination rates. They have come up with a ‘Roadmap’ to ‘living with Covid’ (which will see many people die from Covid) and defined key thresholds in terms of average vaccination rates. The problem is the these thresholds are not very scientific at all and their semblance of ‘safety’ points is an illusion. In effect, the political class has abandoned their pretence to following health advice and are just going for it. It is a difficult period in our history.
