Hudson, who, by my primitive criteria, is one of the best (true) economics and economic history brains of our time doesn't mince the words and calls it as he sees it (correctly): Trump’s Trade Threats Are Really Cold War 2.0. Hudson correctly identifies the issue….Reminiscence of the Future
Igor Sechin, the CEO of Rosneft and one of the most powerful people in Russia, isn’t jumping on the Alt-Media bandwagon of speculating about America’s supposedly imminent demise but is instead warning that it might actually be about to enter a “golden age”, albeit one that could very easily lead to “energy colonialism” all across the world....And this is what is now happening. Exhibit #1 is "freedom gas." More expensive, but, hey, "freedom" doesn't come without cost.
“It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life. You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen. Some of you will join the fight against radical Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of you will join the fight on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific, where North Korea continues to threaten the peace, and an increasingly militarized China challenges our presence in the region. Some of you will join the fight in Europe, where an aggressive Russia seeks to redraw international boundaries by force. And some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere. And when that day comes, I know you will move to the sound of the guns and do your duty, and you will fight, and you will win. The American people expect nothing less. So, wherever you’re called, I urge you to take what you learned here and put it into practice. Put your armor on, so that when — not if — that day comes, you’ll be able to stand your ground.”
This is part one in an investigation into government-funded, opposition-linked NGOs that pose as impartial monitors and investigators of the Syrian conflict.More on propaganda, disinformation, and the information wars as tools in hybrid warfare.
For those [journalists] who want to keep their jobs, police raids and prosecutions are reminders when self-censorship isn’t enough to prevent their investigating abuses of the law, war crimes, fraud and corruption. The first home truth is that truth is loss-making for an enterprise; pauperizing for its reporter. The second home truth is that in wartime – that’s now – truth-telling may be a criminal offence which will get the reporter time in jail.Dances with Bears
It was always just a matter of time before the reemergence of establishment Democrats reminded people why they were booted from power in 2016. As ugly as Donald Trump is and as not constructive as his tenure in the White House has been, the Democratic establishment would rather lose with establishment candidates and retrograde policies than loosen its grip on its service to the oligarchs.
Phrased differently, if Democrats cared about ‘defeating Trump,’ they would offer programs that people want. But they are so firmly in the grip of corporate interests and the oligarchs that they won’t do so. The Republicans are just as beholden, but they offer fewer (manufactured) illusions. They represent the interests of capital. This transparency provides political clarity for those who oppose their policies....Economic liberalism as capitalism is not compatible with political liberalism as democracy. Economic liberalism leads to plutonomy, a form of oligarchy, while democracy is the rule of the people, by the people and for the people. The economic interests of capital as the owners and the interests of workers are mutually exclusive.
While confusion has been sown around the meaning of ‘corporatism’ that stood at the center of (Benito) Mussolini’s vision of the good life, a defining characteristic of both Italian and German fascism was capitalist-state alliances where state power was used for the benefit of select capitalists and select state actors. Labor unions were systematically disempowered, and the interests of powerful economic and state actors were put forward as those of the polity.The difference between Mussolini (and Gentile)'s fascist "corporatism" and contemporary neoliberal capitalism is under Mussolini, corporations were in the aid of the state and aided by the state, whereas in neoliberal corporatism, corporations control the state and use the levels of the state to extend their reach and deepen it. In both, the military and intelligence services are instruments of state control with the state in service to corporations. This results in imperialism and colonialism internationally.
#PBOC injects 100 bn yuan via open market operation (28-day reverse repo)
— YUAN TALKS (@YuanTalks) June 14, 2019
At stake is whether China will agree to do what Russia did in the 1990s: put a Yeltsin-like puppet of neoliberal planners in place to shift control of its economy from its government to the U.S. financial sector and its planners. So the fight really is over what kind of planning China and the rest of the world should have: by governments to raise prosperity, or by the financial sector to extract revenue and impose austerity.
U.S. diplomacy aims to make other countries dependent on its agricultural exports, its oil (or oil in countries that U.S. majors and allies control), information and military technology. This trade dependency will enable U.S. strategists to impose sanctions that would deprive economies of basic food, energy, communications and replacement parts if they resist U.S. demands.
The objective is to gain financial control of global resources and make trade “partners” pay interest, licensing fees and high prices for products in which the United States enjoys monopoly pricing “rights” for intellectual property. A trade war thus aims to make other countries dependent on U.S.-controlled food, oil, banking and finance, or high-technology goods whose disruption will cause austerity and suffering until the trade “partner” surrenders....
A good diplomat does not make demands to which the only answer can be “No.” There is no way that China will dismantle its mixed economy and turn it over to U.S. and other global investors....Cold War 2 or WWIII?
Two authoritative Australian experts, backed up by a retired admiral of the Royal Australian Navy, recently issued a dire report that warns of an impending collapse of civilization from human-caused climate change. The report, titled “Existential climate-related security risk:
A scenario approach,” is not the product of alarmists, but of two authors with expertise in their professional areas. Only one of the authors is an environmental expert. He is David Spratt, a Research Director at the Australian National Center for Climate Restoration in Melbourne. The other, Ian Dunlop. Is an unlikely harbinger of environmental doom.
Dunlop comes out of the executive ranks of the coal, oil, and gas industries – the usual opponents of climate science. Dunlop is a member of the Club of Rome and the former chairman of the Australian Coal Association, not places where one would normally discover climate change proponents....Civilizational collapse? Hey, we are too busy with WWIII for that.
The US president said the United States was "protecting" Germany from becoming over-reliant on Russia by opposing the project.Selling "protection" like the Mafia?
The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) is studying a proposal to create a gold-backed cryptocurrency, which could be used for cross-border settlements with other countries.
The bold proposal was made by Russia’s State Duma member Vladimir Gutenev. He has suggested initiating discussion to set up national cryptocurrency, denominated in gold.
Commenting on Gutenev’s proposal, the head of CBR Elvira Nabiullina said: “As for mutual settlements, we will consider, of course, a proposal on a cryptocurrency that is tied to gold. But, in my opinion, it is more important to develop settlements in national currencies.”RT
China hopes to win Indian and Russian support in establishing a “new type” of “rules-based” and “multilateral” trade initiative.Checkpoint Asia
Multiple Indian media reports suggest the country’s recently re-elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi will join forces with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Kyrgyzstan this week to express their concerns about US President Donald Trump’s protectionist approach....
The Dangerous Myth of 'Taxpayer Money'
For over 40 years, Republicans have controlled the conventional wisdom around budgets, successfully using the “taxpayer money” myth...
...essentially the same thing as Quantitative Easing (QE), which has had no measurable effect on any macro variables in places like Japan. (There is certainly a feverish mythology about QE in some corners of the markets,...
The People's Bank of China (PBOC), China's central bank, on Thursday pumped 100 billion yuan (about 14.51 billion US dollars) into the financial system through open market operations.
To maintain stable liquidity in the middle of the year, the central bank conducted the operations with 28-day reverse repos at an interest rate of 2.85 per cent.
Net liquidity injection was 90 billion yuan on Thursday, as previous reverse repos worth 10 billion yuan matured, reports Xinhua.
PBOC injects $14.51 billion into capital market https://t.co/foQOP7ehyM— thefinancetoday (@thefinancetoday) June 13, 2019
“There is no such thing as public money, only taxpayer money.” — Margaret Thatcher, 1983Not only is the “taxpayer money” frame damaging, it doesn’t reflect how public spending actually works.…
Margaret Thatcher’s mantra was backwards: There is no such thing as “taxpayer money,” only public money....
In the decades following the 1980s, free market policies dominated policy agendas across the world. The gains from growth, however, were not broadly shared within countries, as evidenced by the high levels of economic inequality in the United States and most other advanced economies. In a recent paper, a group of economists at the International Monetary Fund argue for a rethinking of the rules—actual or perceived—that guide economic policies, so that the distributional consequences are considered and addressed by policymakers.
In their paper, IMF economists Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri argue there are four primary reasons why it is critical to pay greater attention to how economic gains are shared up and down the income ladder. First, their research shows that economic inequality leads to lower and less durable growth. Even when growth is the primary goal, attention to inequality is necessary. Second, they find that economic inequality may lead to social tension and ultimately political backlash against free market policies, including globalization. Third, redistributive policies to curb excessive inequality tend to support, not slow, economic growth. And fourth, many aspects of economic inequality are the result of policy choices made by governments, meaning policymakers should factor in the distributional consequences when designing and evaluating policies.
A disproportionate focus on growth over distribution was solidified among economists during the 1980s with the consensus view that the benefits of growth would trickle down the income ladder. Governments and institutions such as the IMF dismissed questions of distribution as secondary to growth, based on their confidence in markets to reward everyone fairly and their belief that redistributive policies hurt growth.
Ostry, Loungani, and Furceri question this conventional wisdom by showing that high inequality is bad not only for social reasons but also for growth....
Based on their findings about fiscal consolidation and capital account liberalization, the authors ask “why support them if there are scarce efficiency benefits for them but palpable equity costs?” The answer is important because fiscal consolidation and capital account liberalization are two policies that have historically been at the center of the IMF’s economic reform agenda. This paper is one illustration of a shift in policy priorities at the IMF, where leaders increasingly recognize that liberalization and tight fiscal policy are not always suited for sustainable economic growth....A cardinal rule in conventional economics is to consider only production and consumption and to ignore distribution on the assumption that the "market forces" as "the magic of the market" lead to Pareto optimal distribution (through "trickle down"). That's magical thinking. Turns out to be "black magic," too.
Simon Wren-Lewis is obviously upset because some MMTers have called his economic policy proposals (providing the theoretical foundation for Labour’s Fiscal Credibility Rule) “neoliberal”. Neoliberal or not, what he does have to say about MMT and his own mainstream economics makes it clear what the debate really comes down to:Monetary policy, except at the lower bound (to which Labour affixes a rule), versus fiscal policy in accordance with functional finance.
Yet again, the question of "printing money" and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has come up on Twitter. In my view, these debates are confusing because critics of MMT tend to mash multiple concepts into a pile of textual sludge. Unfortunately, MMTers are forced to respond to those attacks, and the end result is that everyone is confused.Bond Economics
One of the advantages of mathematical training is that you are forced to take definitions seriously, and step cautiously from premise to premise. This enforces clarity in logic.
The whole "MMT is pr1Nting M0N3y$!!!" online debate is a classic example of the logical mish-mash we run into. By my count, there are at least three concepts being pushed together.I will focus only on the second argument here, for very good reasons. ...
- The MMT description of monetary operations in the real world, which involve the government "writing cheques" (or using electronic transfers) to pay for expenditures. I.e., "everything is paid for by printing money."
- MMT proposals about abolishing the government bond market.
- MMT criticisms of how "mainstream" economists employ the "governmental financial constraint" logic.*
If the reader finds all this perplexing, it is because for the past forty or so years policymakers and mainstream economists and commentators have peddled a series of false myths about how modern monetary systems work....
To be clear, politicians and central bankers know full well how the system works.