Yearly Archives: 2013
Nathan Tankus: Marx on Ireland, Then and Now
There are many seminal thinkers who are so well known they’re never read. This category includes Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, Immanuel Kant, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Fredrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes and many, many others.
One thinker I’d like to focus on is Karl Marx.
Read more...I’m Three Hops from a Terrorist, and Therefore Probably in the NSA’s Dragnet. And You?
Last month, the Atlantic highlighted the fact that the NSA had ‘fessed up to the fact that its snooping operation was a lot more encompassing than it had previously admitted.
Read more...Four Headwinds to the US Housing Recovery
Yves here. This post from MacroBusiness describes three risks facing the American housing recovery, and I thought I’d add a fourth, which is the open question of how much longer private equity funds and other speculators will continue to bid up housing prices.
Read more...Why It’s Absurd that America Doesn’t Tax Wall Street’s Transactions
Yves here. The post below from Paul Buchheit makes a persuasive layperson’s case for a financial transactions tax. There is an equally sound case to be made from a financial markets viewpoint.
Read more...Links 7/23/13
The Decline and Fall of Detroit
The bankruptcy filing and underlying train wreck of the once prosperous city of Detroit carries so much symbolic and practical baggage as to be beyond the scope of a single post. So rather than attempt to do a deep dive, particularly since the media and various experts are still weighing in, I thought I’d offer some high level observations and let readers provide more information, observations, and links.
Read more...An Eye For A Rubber Bullet: The Dangers Of Non-Lethal Weapons
Yves here. While I prefer to emphasize finance and economics posts over more political ones during the week, this one on the peril posed by so-called non-lethal weapons struck me as important.
Read more...Iran Gets Creative Over Energy Payments from Turkey and Pakistan
Yves here. Although this post is nominally about how Iran is currently working around America’s and the EU’s sanctions, it points out that for the US to tighten the noose further would likely undermine some of America’s other geopolitical aims.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: The Annotated Wolfgang Schäuble (PR Versus Reality, European Periphery Edition)
Yves here. Varoufakis performs the important service of translating what is effectively a formal communication from Germany on its stance towards subject states, meaning the Eurozone periphery.
Read more...Links 7/22/13
Why Larry Summers Should Not Be Permitted to Run Anything More Important than a Dog Pound
I’ve been gobsmacked to see that not only is Larry Summers on various short lists of candidates to become the next Fed chairman, but that Summers is also supposedly closing in on the favorite, Janet Yellen.
Read more...Bill Black: Conservatives and Libertarians Should Support the Return of Glass-Steagall
Yves here. Aside from the foursquare case that Professor Black makes for reinstituting Glass-Steagall, another important set of arguments came in 2009 from Andrew Haldane, director of financial stability at the Bank of England.
Read more...Monday DataDive: June Reports on Retail Sales, Consumer Prices, Industrial Production, and New Housing Starts
By rjs, a rural swamp denizen from Northeast Ohio, and a long-time commenter at Naked Capitalism. Originally published at MarketWatch 666.
This week saw the release of reports on June retail sales and industrial production, important as both are tracked by the NBER business cycle dating committee, who make the official calls on US recessions. Real retail sales, adjusted for inflation with the CPI, which was also released this week and covered below, appears to have turned negative in June, while manufacturing looks like it may show negative quarter over quarter comparisons. Add those to the surprising downturn in new home construction, declining inventories, and the larger trade deficits in April and May, which appears to have continued in June, and the second quarter GDP is looking pretty ugly.
Read more...Beyond Debt and Growth: An Interview with Robert Pollin
Yves here. As readers likely recall, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst wrote a paper, “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,” which revealed serious methodological problems with one of the linchpin papers used to justify cutting government spending even in times of recession. Robert Pollin here discusses some of the bigger issues in the political and economic debates on austerity and the aftermath of the financial crisis.
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