Moon of Alabama — Kasandras Beware - China Economy Will Not Hit A Wall

Contra Krugman.

Moon of Alabama
Kasandras Beware - China Economy Will Not Hit A Wall

Also

ECNS
Western journalist claiming Shanghai a 'Ghost Town' faces backlash

William Mitchell — The Chilean coup just one link in a complicated right-wing economics agenda to empower capital

Several related strands have come together in the last week of work and thinking. Today (September 11, 2023), of course, is a massive day in history and I am not referring to the year 2001. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the overthrow of the Salvatore Allende’s democratically-elected government in Chile by the US CIA and there local puppets under the leadership of General – Augusto Pinochet. I have also been following a trail of the antecedents of the Powell Manifesto (thanks to Jonathan for a tip), which helps understand how the neoliberals infested every institution in the US and beyond. And the Chilean coup d’état in 1973 was followed by – Operation Condor – which together with the coup demonstrated the principle terrorist organisation in the world has been the US government and its agencies. Tracking the Powell trail also took me to old research about the so-called ‘Manne Programs in Economics for Federal Judges’ – which was a program mostly taught by Chicago School economists that indoctrinated US judges into free market economic thinking and has distorted US judicial decisions ever since. And the circle closes when we investigate the role played by the so-called – Chicago Boys – who were Chilean PhD graduates from that school, who went back to Chile and ravaged the prosperity of the people with their extreme neoliberal ideas. All interlinked events on the path to global neoliberal domination. History is worth studying and it is striking how interrelated all these things are that have come together in my work the last week or so.

Not exactly MMT, but crucial for appreciating the dynamics of the world system and the role of politicized ideological economics in it. This post is about the role of neoliberalism. Presently, both the so-called left and right in the US are deeply entrenched in neoliberal ideology, although this post is about the right.

William Mitchell — Modern Monetary Theory

The Chilean coup just one link in a complicated right-wing economics agenda to empower capital
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Russia defies sanctions with homemade Sukhoi Superjet — Scott Foster

A Russian passenger jet built almost entirely with domestically manufactured components completed its first test flight on August 29, a launch that gave Yakovlev Design Bureau and United Aircraft Corporation’s (UAC) respective shares on the Moscow Exchange a buoyant lift.


Designed by Yakovlev and manufactured by UAC at its Komsomolsk-na-Amure factory, the new Sukhoi Superjet 100 (SSJ-100) is a narrow-body regional aircraft with a range of 4,578 kilometers (2,472 nautical miles) that can carry 87 to 108 passengers depending on seat configurations....

Coupled with Huawei's new chip, Russia indigenously produced commercial aircraft erode the Western lead in these key fields. 

Asia Times
Russia defies sanctions with homemade Sukhoi Superjet
Scott Foster

The Rise of BRICS and the Fall of the G20 — Larry Johnson

You should not look at the war in Ukraine as an isolated phenomena with no bearing on the global economic order. The war in Ukraine is a symptom of the breakdown in the Western dominated “rules based” international order and this disruption is reverberating around the world. The recent coups in Africa, for example, are another sign that the vassals of the Western feudal lords are no longer willing to be de facto colonial subjects. They want some measure of independence and are turning to Russia and China to find a way out.

Don't focus on particular events, especially shiny objects. Look at the dynamics of the world system.

A Son of the New American Revolution
The Rise of BRICS and the Fall of the G20
Larry C. Johnson | CEO and co-founder of BERG Associates, LLC, an international business-consulting firm with expertise combating terrorism and investigating money laundering, formerly Deputy Director in the U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism (1989-1993, and CIA operations (1984-1989)

RT — Moscow releases Russia-China de-dollarization update

The de-dollarization of Russia-China trade is practically complete, according to Georgy Zinoviev, the director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s First Asian Department, as cited by RIA Novosti.…

The share of national currencies in Russian-Chinese payments is growing at an extremely rapid pace,” Zinoviev told the news agency. “At the beginning of 2022 it was hovering around 25%, now it is exceeding 80%.”...

RT — Question More (Russian state-sponsored med
Moscow releases Russia-China de-dollarization update

Pepe Escobar — No Respite for France as ‘New Africa’ Rises

 "The natives are getting restless." 

Once the bear's claws tore away the veneer, a new era was launched. But it would not have happened without a fire-breathing dragon in the background. Now the long oppressed colonies are standing up. Empire is about securing cheap resources and cheap labor from the colonies, without which the lifestyle of the imperial elite  cannot be sustained.

Consortium News
Pepe Escobar: No Respite for France as ‘New Africa’ Rises

William Mitchell — The tax extreme wealth to increase funds for government spending narrative just reinforces neoliberal framing

Despite the rabble on the Right of politics that marches around driven by conspiracies about government chips in the water supply or Covid vaccines and all the rest of the rot that lot carry on with, the reality is that well-funded Right that is entrenched in the deepest echelons of capital are extremely well organised and strategic, which is why the dominant ideology reflects their preferences. That group appears to be able to maintain a united front which solidifies their effectiveness. By way of contrast, the Left is poorly funded, but more importantly, divided and on important matters appears incapable of breaking free from the fictions and framing that the Right have introduced to further their own agenda. So, the Left is often pursuing causes that appear to be ‘progressive’ and which warm their hearts, but which in reality are just reinforcing the framing that advance the interests of the Right. We saw that again this week with the emergence of the Tax Extreme Wealth movement and with the release of their open letter to the G20 Heads of State – G20 Leaders must tax extreme wealth. This ia the work of a group which includes the so-called Patriotic Millionaires, Oxfam, Millionaires for Humanity, Earth4All and the Institute for Policy Studies. It demonstrates perfectly how these progressive movements advance dialogue and framing which actually end up undermining their own ambitions.

I am not sure whether "right" and "left" are useful descriptors. As Bill observes, the positions are conflated and the real differences of positions are obscured. The differences are in rhetoric only. There are strong cultural and institutional biases operative that act as hidden assumptions influencing the framing in a neoliberal direction. 

What Bill has called "neoliberal tendencies" go unnoticed, even among some MMT proponents, as Bill has also pointed out in his comment section over the years. Escaping the framing as a set of hidden assumptions is difficult and most don't make it out of the box. We see this is a strong monetarist bias in econ and finance as well as politics, for example.

William Mitchell — Modern Monetary Theory
The tax extreme wealth to increase funds for government spending narrative just reinforces neoliberal framing
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Michael Hudson — Naked Capitalism–Your Guide, Philosopher, and Friend in Times of Crisis

Fundraiser for a very worthy cause.

This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 155 donors have already invested in our efforts to combat corruption and predatory conduct, particularly in the financial realm. Please join us and participate via our donation page, which shows how to give via check, credit card, debit card, or PayPal. Read about why we’re doing this fundraiser, what we’ve accomplished in the last year,, and our current goal, strengthening our IT infrastructure.

Michael Hudson: Naked Capitalism – Your Guide, Philosopher, and Friend in Times of Crisis

Also

KLG: What Naked Capitalism Means to Me

On a different note, also at NC

Biden Approves $40 Billion Worth Of Drugs To Be Airdropped To Burning Man

Babylon Bee [satire]

Reuters — Teardown of Huawei’s new phone shows China’s chip breakthrough

 That didn't take long.

Huawei's Mate 60 Pro is powered by a new Kirin 9000s chip that was made in China by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), TechInsights said in the report shared with Reuters on Monday.

Huawei started selling its Mate 60 Pro phone last week. The specifications provided advertised its ability to make satellite calls, but offered no information on the power of the chipset inside....

Buyers of the phone in China have been posting tear-down videos and sharing speed tests on social media that suggest the Mate 60 Pro is capable of download speeds exceeding those of top line 5G phones…...

Reuters

Teardown of Huawei’s new phone shows China’s chip breakthrough

Also

Important.

Moon of Alabama

How Sanctions Failed To Hinder China's Development

Inflation And The Labour Market — Brian Romanchuk

The usual response to critics who state things like I just did is “give me a better model.” The idea is that we need to replace one reductionist model with another reductionist model. The reasoning seems to be that economics is like physics, where a lot of the history of the field is doing exactly that. (Physicists might be getting into “complexity,” which may or may not be a mathematical pseudo-science. In any event, this is not what people have in mind when they compare economics to physics.) If inflation is a complicated process, any reductionist model is going to fail.

Any empirical work on the link between inflation and the labour market is going to run into a snag that is the result of what I argue are relatively non-controversial positions.…

Bond Economics
Inflation And The Labour Market
Brian Romanchuk

Amazon is promoting the eBook version of The Deficit Myth. A one-day promotion @ $3.99

Stephanie Kelton
@StephanieKelton

Amazon is promoting the eBook version of The Deficit Myth. A one-day promotion @ $3.99

Vietnam, Philippines and Brunei to join cross-border QR payment scheme — Erwida Maulia And Ismi Damayanti

Vietnam, the Philippines and Brunei will join other major Southeast Asian economies in an interconnected QR code payment system that aims to promote use of local currencies and reduce dependence on the U.S. dollar.

Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore are already progressing with the implementation of bilateral transactions using QR codes among one another -- which was initiated last year, said Perry Warjiyo, governor of Indonesia's central bank, on Friday.…

Nikkei Asia
Vietnam, Philippines and Brunei to join cross-border QR payment scheme
Erwida Maulia And Ismi Damayanti, Nikkei Staff Writers

The US Problem With China: Beijing Is Better at Capitalism — Patrick Lawrence

As it provokes a new Cold War, the U.S. is warning that its corporate and financial interests, which came first after the 1980s Dengist reforms, no longer take precedence, writes Patrick Lawrence.

Consortium News
The US Problem With China: Beijing Is Better at Capitalism

Patrick Lawrence

GoFundMe, Go To Hell — Matt Taibbi

Censorship moves to a new level in denying funding.

Racket News
GoFundMe, Go To Hell
Matt Taibbi

William Mitchell — The Ireland growth miracle is largely illusory and biasing Eurozone growth data upwards

I have been avoiding keeping up-to-date with the Irish national accounts over the last several years for reasons that I documented in this blog post – Ireland – not as rosy as the official story might suggest (January 2, 2018). Ireland has been held out as the poster nation for the Eurozone boosters because of its seemingly ‘impressive’ growth performance after entry into the common currency and its resilience after the Global Financial Crisis. During the GFC, I wrote a series of blog posts (see below) that delved into reality of the Irish situation and we learned that the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ growth miracle was an illusion and was driven by major US corporations evading US tax liabilities by exploiting massive tax breaks supplied to them by the Irish government. Since then the ‘smoke and mirrors’ have become even more obvious as the Irish national accounts recorded massive increases in business investment all due to fudges in the way several large corporations recorded their tax affairs. I decided recently to see where this was at given the European Commission is still claiming that growth. What I found was that the distortions in the Irish data are influencing the outcomes reported for the European Union as a whole and things are definitely not as robust as the official figures demonstrate....

William Mitchell — Modern Monetary Theory
The Ireland growth miracle is largely illusory and biasing Eurozone growth data upwards
Bill Mitchell |rofessor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia P

Huawei Chips Demonstrate The Perils Of Technology Protectionism — Moon of Alabama

Sullivan's whole speech is an argument against free markets and for protectionism and sector subsidies. It does away with the economic framework the U.S. had build after the end of the second world war. This is supposed to be replaced it with bilateral and block wise agreements that are to the advantage of the U.S., to the disadvantage of its agreement 'partners' and which exclude China and other 'hostile' economies....

How the worm turns. End of an era.

Moon of Alabama
Huawei Chips Demonstrate The Perils Of Technology Protectionism 

MMT the Movie: Coming to a Festival Near You — Stephanie Kelton

Documentary on MMT.

The Lens
MMT the Movie: Coming to a Festival Near You
Stephanie Kelton | Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Stony Brook University, formerly Democrats' chief economist on the staff of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, and an economic adviser to the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders

Interviews with video and transcript — Michael Hudson

Interviews with video and transcript.

Michael Hudson — On Finance, Real Estate And The Powers Of Neoliberalism
BRICS Keep Building

High Finance & Investment Colonialism
Michael Hudson | President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Guest Professor at Peking University

China’s “Lehman moment!” ?

 

Only if the BOC reacts by making the same reification error as the Fed did and adds bazillions of reserve balances “to lend out!”….

China’s Lehman moment is today with Evergrande down 90%.

If that follows the 2008 contagion path, markets collapse within 3-4 weeks.

— Endless Capital w/ no pullbacks (@endless_frank) August 28, 2023

Reactions to Fed Chair Powell's Speech — Stephanie Kelton

Curiously to me, Stephanie does not mention the role of raising the interest rates as potentially contributing to inflation when Mike, Warren, and Bill have been doing so for some time.

The Lens
Reactions to Fed Chair Powell's Speech
Stephanie Kelton | Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Stony Brook University, formerly Democrats' chief economist on the staff of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, and an economic adviser to the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders

Stop Trying To Make BRICS Happen — Brian Romanchuk

BRICS was a brilliant bit of sell side marketing, but it has taken a life of its own. One needs to stop projecting fantasies onto the global financial system, and accept that its form follows function.

The extreme dominance of the share of global GDP after World War II by the United States was a historical accident, and so the relative rise of other economic powers was inevitable. Meanwhile, the eagerness of the United States to use sanctions as a foreign policy tool is going to create incentives to develop mechanisms to do an end run around those sanctions. Nevertheless, the geopolitical system is far more stable than is commonly described. (I will enter a geopolitical tangent later in this article to justify that claim.)

Since I have ranted about this repeatedly, I am just going to do a “greatest hits” refresh of my economic arguments.

Bond Economics

Stop Trying To Make BRICS Happen
Brian Romanchuk

William Mitchell — New feudalism seems to forget about the capitalists

Bill on feudalism and capitalism. 

Capitalism and feudalism are essentially different in that land is the dominant factor in feudalism and land rent is the chief means of expropriation. Under capitalism, capital and expropriation of surplus value through industrial (technological) production along with financial rents are the dominant factors, although land and land rent are also still key in generating passive income resulting from ownership (title). That is to say, capitalism and feudalism are based on different institutional arrangements but capitalism has incorporated and modified some of the institutional arrangements of feudalism.

The question that Bill raises is about whether it is valid to view capitalism as a sort of "neofeudalism." He introduces some important issues.

William Mitchell — Modern Monetary Theory
New feudalism seems to forget about the capitalists
Bill Mitchell |rofessor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia P

System reserves

 

Total System reserves took a nice 50b drop last week but it does no good if Tsy runs TGA down by almost 200b at same time.. TGA account balance supposed to be $650b…. TGA reduction increases bank deposits while banks capital still under pressure from the Fed rate increasing psychos…

TGA:

TGA topped at around 550b coming up out of debt ceiling and rolled over taking financial asset prices with it since late July…  I think TGA should be back up to mid 400s as of yesterday’s Treasury operations…  

These morons who can’t apply 8th grade Algebra caused another mini March “bank crisis!” here (Citi shares back to March lows) but hopefully it’s over this week if TGA bottomed and being adjusted back up over 550b…

We Did Not Evolve to Be Selfish—and Humans Are Increasingly Aware We Can Choose How Our Cultures Can Evolve — April M. Short

The good news is that humans evolved often as cooperative and “prosocial” beings, so looking to the past and better understanding our cultural evolution as a species might help illuminate the best ways forward across the board. This is the basis of a paper published in April 2023 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) titled, “Multilevel Cultural Evolution: From New Theory to Practical Applications.” Rather than focusing on the genetic code and physical evolution of humans, the paper explores the advanced and groundbreaking—but seldom discussed—field of cultural evolution.

The paper’s senior author David Sloan Wilson, a distinguished professor emeritus of biological sciences at Binghamton University, New York, and the founder of the school’s Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) program, told the Independent Media Institute in May 2023 that the authors of the article wrote it “to show that a synthesis, which has already taken place for the study of biological evolution, is now in progress for the study of human cultural evolution, with wide-ranging practical applications.”

One problem is that humans are prosocial in their in-groups, originally based on kinship, but competitive with out-groups, e.g., other tribes and nations in the original sense of kinship.  Now that social, political, and economic issues have become more systemic as globalization unfolds, it is vital to extend prosociality throughout the system as a whole.

Prezensa
We Did Not Evolve to Be Selfish—and Humans Are Increasingly Aware We Can Choose How Our Cultures Can Evolve
April M. Short

1.2% of adults have 47.8% of the world’s wealth while 53.2% have just 1.1% — Michael Roberts

Every year, I bring to the attention of readers of my blog, the results of the latest Credit Suisse Wealth Report. It is produced by economists Anthony Shorrocks (with whom I graduated at university), James Davies and Rodrigo Lluberas. It is the most comprehensive study of global personal wealth and inequality between adults around the world.

"Wealth" implies ownership. This is the size of the ownership class globally.

Michael Roberts Blog — blogging from a marxist economist
1.2% of adults have 47.8% of the world’s wealth while 53.2% have just 1.1%
Michael Roberts

Look Out: Ukraine Will Cost More than Half a Trillion More if the War Ends Tomorrow— Stephen Bryen

"Military Keynesianism." (article by Jan Taporowski, Professor of Economics and Finance, SOAS

Visiting Professor of Economics, University of Bergamo, and Professor of Economics and Finance, International University College)

Weapons and Strategy
Look Out: Ukraine Will Cost More than Half a Trillion More if the War Ends Tomorrow—Will US Voters Support More Huge Outlays?
Stephen Bryen

Also

Barbara Ehrenreich was a remarkable writer and thinker. Her book, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (1997), is one of the most original and thoughtful studies of war and its nature. She traced humanity’s affinity to war, our predilection for it, not to our vaunted status as predators but to our vulnerable status as prey to other predators in the wild. Our early human ancestors were fearful creatures, and for good reason. Humans learned to band together as a way of conquering other predators and controlling their fear; once those predators were mostly banished to fleeting memories and occasional nightmares, we could turn on each other, becoming predators (and prey) to ourselves.

If you haven’t read her book, I urge you to check it out. Stimulating it is. And so too is an afterword she wrote to the paperback edition of the book, available at TomDispatch and which I read last night. Once again, Ehrenreich doesn’t disappoint....

Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative is also relevant here. Can humans rise above their evolutionary traits? David Sloan Wilson,  SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology (Emeritus) at Binghamton University, argues, yes, in his work on prosociality as an evolutionary trait, agreeing with Aristotle that humans are a prosocial species as a matter of their evolutionary development. 

Prosociality is a requirement for civilization, for instance. Ironically, conflict is now becoming civilizational consciously as Western liberalism attempts to impose its civilization on other civilizations. This is one underlying factor in the development of BRICS+.

Bracing Views

Atavistic War

W. J. Astore, Lieutenant Colonel (USAF ret.), taught at the Air Force Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, and currently at the Pennsylvania College of Technology

William Mitchell — The growing incidence of financial insecurity and inequality

I am in the final stages of moving office and it has been a time consuming process. And one of my regular research colleague, Professor Scott Baum from Griffith University, who occassionally provides blog posts here, sent me some research which he had written up in blog post form and with time short today, here is Scott’s latest guest spot. Today he is going to talk about a new analysis of financial insecurity that we are currently doing.

William Mitchell — Modern Monetary Theory
The growing incidence of financial insecurity and inequality
Guest Post

Lavrov Explained How Russia Envisages BRICS’ Global Role — Andrew Korybko

This is Russia’s most direct debunking of the Alt-Media Community’s false perceptions about BRICS thus far. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov published an article in South Africa’s Ubuntu Magazine on the eve of the 15th BRICS Summit that’ll be hosted in that country. Titled “BRICS: Towards a Just World Order”, he explained how Russia envisages its global role and built upon the efforts earlier this month by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov to clarify false perceptions of BRICS. This includes the Alt-Media Community’s (AMC) most popular one imagining that it’s driven by de-dollarization and is resolutely anti-Western.

Lavrov began by describing the global systemic transition to multipolarity, particularly its economic-financial dimensions, so as to set the context within which this week’s BRICS Summit is taking place. Of pertinence, he mentioned that “not only Russia, but also a number of other countries are consistently reducing their dependence on the US dollar, switching to alternative payment systems and national currency settlements.”

The abovementioned trend isn’t de-dollarization like the AMC understands it to be in the sense of advancing a political decision aimed at phasing out the use of that currency in totality. Rather, it can more accurately be described as diversification from the dollar in order to hedge against forex and other risks posed by dependence on it. While they might appear identical to the average member of the AMC since both goals decrease the dollar’s share in the economy, their motivations are entirely different....

Andrew Korybko's Newsletter 

Lavrov Explained How Russia Envisages BRICS’ Global Role 

Andrew Korybko

See also

India Punchline
India doesn’t want BRICS to dismantle the world order built by the West
M. K. Bhadrakumar | retired diplomat with the Indian Foreign Service and former ambassador

Geopolitics 101 — Unprecedented Uproar: How One Ballad is Igniting a New Revolution Against the Elite

The protest song comes back. Will it spark a new protest movement and new trend, or is this just a voice crying in the wilderness? Anyway, it seems to have social-political-economic implications worth calling attention to.

Low-wage worker-author-performer with mental health issues rejects $8 million offer from the industry after his song goes viral.

Oliver Anthony - Rich Men North Of Richmond (3:10)

Geopolitics 101
Unprecedented Uproar: How One Ballad is Igniting a New Revolution Against the Elite

Related

Incidentally, here is the patriotic song igniting Russia now. It is not only a patriotic song but also a song of defiance in the face of the attempt of the combined West to "cancel" Russia and its civilization.

Shaman "I am Russian" (Я РУССКИЙ) with English Lyrics (3:34)

(Re)consider Hong Kong — Godree Roberts

Hong Kong as global financial center for those wishing to avoid Western dominance.

Here Comes China
(Re)consider Hong Kong
Godree Roberts