This is interesting.
Planet of the Apes was a very powerful film, and it is just as good a warning for today as it was when it was made.
The apes were of different types, and strangely, when not filming, the actors kept to their own groups, chimps with chimps, gorillas with gorillas, etc.
During the Barrett confirmation hearing, we discussed the narrative of the Democrats and the media that the Affordable Care Act was dangling in the balance on the Supreme Court. With huge pictures of beneficiaries of the ACA displayed around the room, some Democratic senators actually said that Barrett was part of a conspiracy to rush her to the Court to kill the ACA. As I repeatedly said, the narrative was entirely disconnected from any legal reality since at least two conservative justices — Chief Justice John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh — were likely to vote for severability and thus preserve the Act. They previously voted on similar cases. Today’s oral argument again exposed the unfair and unfounded narrative against Justice Barrett with both Roberts and Kavanaugh expressly reaffirming their positions on the severability. Will any of these senators or analysts now acknowledge that the hype in the hyperbole from the hearing?Said from the get-go there should not be a mandate. And the way to fix it in light of MMT is M4A. This is a pseudo-problem based on ignorance.
In the hearing, Kavanaugh stated “Looking at our severability precedents, it does seem fairly clear that the proper remedy would be to sever the mandate provision, and leave the rest of the act in place, the provisions dealing with pre-existing conditions and the rest.” Roberts added that the case for severability in the ACA case is obvious and compelling....
“The Chinese luxury market – which is expected to account for half of global luxury sales by 2025 – consists of hundreds of millions of young, digitally-native consumers,” said Daniel Zhang, chief executive of Alibaba, in a statement about the deal.…"
"...half of global luxury sales by 2025…"? Gobsmacked. That really changes the consumer game.
MarketWatchWhy is this paragraph so disturbing? First of all, the words “deficiencies” and “audit” are not two words that one wants to read in the same sentence pertaining to any Wall Street bank. But they are particularly frightening when it comes to the largest bank in the United States that has racked up an unprecedented five criminal felony counts – to which it admitted guilt – in the past six years. That’s five more felony counts than the bank racked up in the prior 100 years of its existence.Wall Street On Parade
Equally unprecedented, the Board of Directors of JPMorgan Chase has kept Jamie Dimon as its Chairman and CEO, despite the fact that he has sat at the helm of the bank during this unprecedented and relentless crime wave.
There is also the disturbing fact that JPMorgan Chase’s three-year probation for its role in rigging the foreign exchange market just ended in January of this year. Nine months later, on September 29, it gets slapped with two new felony counts by the U.S. Department of Justice for rigging the precious metals and U.S. Treasury market and is put on another three-year probation.
And now, just a little more than a month later, we are learning that there is yet another federal probe of this bank in the works....
"The U.S. has imposed their tariffs following the WTO ruling in (the) Airbus case. Now we have a WTO ruling also in Boeing, allowing us to impose our tariffs, and that's what we are doing," Dombrovskis told reporters.
"Of course, we remain open for a negotiated solution. Our proposal remains on the table that both sides withdraw their tariffs," he said but noted that despite several appeals, "so far, the U.S. has not agreed to withdraw their tariffs."
Australia says it's continuing to monitor what top officials have said are "deeply troubling" signs that China is actively initiating trade disruptions as retaliation amid downward spiraling relations between the two major trade partners.Zero Hedge
Since last week regional reports have said Chinese buyers were warned by Beijing not to purchase seven categories of Australian goods, which has set Canberra and firms across the continent on edge given China is recipient of nearly one-third of all Australian exports....
Christiansen asked a question that I thought about for a while but never wrote about: how do certain ideas—in this case the idea of global inequality—arise? How do they get formulated? What explains that they become popular after not only being ignored but not even existing (as ideas) for a long time? Since I was involved in this process, I thought I would try to explain how—at least to me—this seems to have happened.Global Inequality
It is useful of think of the interaction between four forces: ideology, politics, data, and sociology of knowledge....
On November 6, 2020, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their latest labour market data – Employment Situation Summary – October 2020 – which shows that employment continues to grow, but will take a long time at this rate to make up the job losses incurred in March and April. Further, the unemployment rate fell by 1 point to 6.9 per cent and the participation rate rose by 0.3 points. So, on the face of it, this is a positive outcome – jobs growth, participation increasing and unemployment falling. There is some doubt about the strength of the labour force employment estimates but the payroll data also shows steady employment increases. Worrying trends were in the loss of government employment, particularly at the state and local government level. Those losses will worsen if there is no extra fiscal support applied at that level by the federal government. The impasse at Congress on the the size and design of the next tranche of fiscal support is not helping. And then the data shows the lax health policy is allowing the virus to run out of control and how that plays out is anyone’s guess. I suspect a nation has to get the health problem sorted before they can really sort out the economic problem. The US appears to be going in the opposite direction to that. I doubt it will turn out well.
If banks create money out of nothing, and loans create deposits, then why do banks pay interest to depositors?New Wayland
TLDR; because the central bank sets their deposit rate above zero....
I am now returning to my work on recession analysis, covering the background research that will make its way into the second volume of recessions. I have more work to do on nonlinear DSGE models, but my argument is that they are not inherently that interesting, given their mathematical intractability. Yes, you can tell stories with them -- but so what? I can tell stories any number of ways, all of them more interesting.
Rather than chase after hundreds of papers that I think are uninteresting and will be rapidly made obsolete by the ongoing wave of research, I would rather focus on a niche area that I think is interesting. Roger E. Farmer has been publishing models for some time that fit within the broad neoclassical tradition, yet have some similarities to post-Keynesian thinking. The book Prosperity for All (Amazon affiliate link) gives a readable introduction to his work.
The book by itself is interesting for heterodox readers in that it discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the DSGE methodology from an insider perspective. A lot of heterodox critiques are based on literary criticisms that were essentially developed decades ago….
For those who may be wondering about institutional arrangements.
MarketWatch‘She is poised to not just put really big cracks in that glass ceiling in this election, but she’s poised to break the glass ceiling in a future election’
Pretty much what I have been saying and could not say better.
Global InequalityBased on an article by Danny Haiphong and the videos of Gweilo 60.
Micheal Hudson often talks about how public industries should supply low cost services to the public and private industries to increase a country's standard of living, and to help make the private sector more competitive in the world. But in the West the the captains of industry felt they could making even bigger profits from both the private sector and the public sector together, and so they got governments to privatise the public utilities. But China has done the opposite, subsidising the public utilities to bring costs down for the consumer and the private sector.
The Internet is incredibly cheap in China because it is subsidised by the government, and there are no roaming charges, so if you are high up on a remote mountain the internet costs are exactly the same as it does in a city, which makes it cheaper for people in remote areas to participate in the economy, and to become more educated, or to run their own business.
Roads and services are taken to the remote, very poor villages high up in the mountains, and teams of advisors are sent in to show the villagers how to grow more nutritious food, and even how to grow a surplus which they can take to the market at the nearest towns. This increases China's GDP.
New schools are being built in the local towns, and the new roads can help the village children to get to them. Then, when they have the qualifications and are at the right age, they can find work in the town's factories and businesses and then send money back home. And so the standard of living improves in the villages, and young, newly educated bright people may even start their own internet companies, maybe selling exotic farm produce they have produced, or buying and selling on Alibaba, or just supplying internet services, or working for a major company from home. The government has made this all possible by supplying the infrastructure, the services, and the Internet, and so China's economy is always booming.
One day I can see the beautiful mountain villages becoming terrific tourist attractions, especially as the Chinese become more wealthier.
Ed Balls, a British Labour politician, and once the 'genius' economic adviser to Gordon Brown, used to say that the less the government does, the better. The Chinese government doesn't seem to agree. Neoliberalism is not for them.
The key factor that separates the U.S. and China is austerity. China’s planned economy and socialist governance system allows for the subsidization of the needs of the people to exist simultaneously with investments in high-tech industries. Upgrades in telecommunications technology and e-commerce, for example, have played important roles in the rising incomes of rural families and therefore have contributed to the overall policy of poverty alleviation in China. Technology under late stage U.S. capitalism serves as a weapon against the broad masses of people by raising their rate of exploitation as contending tech corporations battle over which can dominate the market faster. Technological development receives no assistance from the state unless in the form of military contracts for the production of weapons, bases, and other installations of war. Danny Haiphong
The Chinese government is working to eradicate poverty in China, where much of it is in the villages high up in the mountains. The stunning countryside and views from these mountain villages could mean they will become terrific tourist attractions when the roads are fully in place and high-speed rail have linked all the towns. Even Westerners might want to go to holidays there.
China is putting high-speed rail across the Himalayan mountains to the remote regions of Tibet, which is an enormous and very ambitious project. The trains goes so high up they need to have pressurised cabins, like airplanes have.
There are no places in China more beautiful than the villages on the tops of the Chinese mountains. They have the terraced rice fields and tea fields. They have the mountain streams and the clouds covering the peaks. They also have the struggle of poverty to contend with. Beauty and Wealth are two different things and this video delves into this particular subject.
And this “pandemic” trend was picked up by the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who embarked on a course towards an intensified collapse of the CSTO (which, it should be recalled, in addition to Russia and Armenia, includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) and to build a “Turkic NATO” with a single “Army of Turan” on its ruins. Among the members of such an alliance he sees Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, unrecognized by the world community, all of them under the direct military-political leadership of Turkey.
Such thoughts began to be especially actively promoted by Erdogan against the background of the military escalation in Nagorno-Karabakh, during which Ankara provides unequivocal support to Baku. Turkey is trying to demonstrate to Russia’s allies that Armenia is retreating before the union of Azerbaijan and Turkey, while Ankara “does not surrender its allies and is leading them to victory.”
The reason for Erdogan’s use of precisely “military patterns” in his frank neo-Ottoman aspirations is understandable, since the military has always had a dominant position in Turkish society and in the implementation of Ottoman ideas....
Speaking about the modern policy of Turkey, today the terms “neo-Ottomanism” and “Pan-Turkism” are increasingly used. These are the cornerstones of the foundation of the foreign policy course taken the leader of the Turkish state, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
However, the irony of modern neo-Ottomanism lies in the fact that the very idea of consolidating the peoples of the Turkic world, which primarily opposes Iran, under the slogan of the Great Turan, is an integral part of the ideology of the “Young Turks” who had already led the Ottoman Empire to its fall.
