Yearly Archives: 2013

Chinese Interbank Markets Having a Heart Attack, Repo and Shibor Skyrocket, Could Trigger Bigger Unraveling

The Chinese central bank is playing very high stakes poker. China’s interbank markets have been highly stressed for the last two days. An effort by the central bank to tighten in order to put a crimp on shadow banking activities looks to be spiraling out of control as one-week repo rates hit nearly 8.3% up 144 basis points in a day, and one-week Shibor has risen from its June 5 level of 4.8% to just shy of 8.1% today.

Wolf Richter: One Part Of Japan’s Abenomics Salvation Is Already A Fail

Japan’s attack in the Currency War was supposed to make it more competitive in international trade – but that, it failed to do. In fact, the opposite occurred.

Links 6/19/13

More Obama Administration Secrecy: Rep. Grayson Can’t Discuss Classified Trans-Pacific Partnership Draft

OK, you remaining Obama fans: tell me why we should trust the biggest baiter and switcher in the history of the Presidency, particularly when he insists on unprecedented levels of secrecy? Because he has nice teeth and cute kids?

ObamaCare Icebergs: Burgeoning Medical Debt and the Wobbly Start-Up of the Federally-Run Exchanges

An article by doctors David U. Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandle, published by the Boston Fed, gives a stark picture of the extent and severity of medical indebtedness in the US, and why Obamacare won’t remedy that problem. And we’ll discuss later that getting the machinery running looks likely to be another serious shortcoming with the program.

Extreme Energy, Extreme Implications: Interview with Michael Klare

If oil and gas is a profoundly dynamic phenomenon, then so too must be environmental risk and conflicts over natural resources—and we are not getting the full picture from the mainstream media, according to Michael T. Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, TomDispatch blogger, and author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Metropolitan Books, 2008). As risk multiply, conventional sources evaporate and we are left with “extreme” energy, renewables may be the only way to avoid war and disaster.

Links 6/18/13

Coming to a Broke Municipality Near You: The Greek, Um, Jefferson County, Solution

Jefferson County’s sewer system train wreck is now looking an awful lot like the periphery country in Europe mess.

Robert Wade: Elite Denial of Corruption and Inequality – World Bank Case Study

Yves here. While readers may think development policy has limited relevance to US and advanced economy readers, the IMF and World Bank have been and continue to be vehicles to make the world, particularly smaller or otherwise more influenceable regimes, more friendly to the interests of US multinationals. And at the same time US companies are taking down a record share of GDP in profits, the country’s ranking in inequality is worse than that of many developing economies. New York City is more unequal than China, and as the chart below shows, is also more unequal than Russia, famed for its oligarchs, and India, which still has hundreds of millions living in abject poverty.

So the World Bank’s efforts over time to exclude issues like corruption and inequality from its analysis have direct and obvious parallels to policy discussions here. Wade’s anecdotes of the way the World Bank refused to even allow the “c” word to be acknowledged are striking.

Michael Hoexter: Summer Heat – The Movement Against Ripping the Face off the Earth for a Brief Fossil-Fueled “Party”

Civilization requires agriculture, which is dependent on a few sensitive species to produce a surplus of food for masses of people with comparatively lower levels of labor or mechanical work. If we make the climate inhospitable to these species, as well as to ourselves, via fossil fuel use and degradation of the carbon buffering capacity of the environment, we will make it vanishingly likely that our own success as a species will continue.

Links 6/17/13

Techies’ Efforts to Own #Snowden/NSA Surveillance Narrative = #Fail

Some Silicon Valley figures, along with some Democratic party-aligned media outlets, have tried assailing Glenn Greenwald, and indirectly, Edward Snowden, by trying to discredit certain aspects of the Guardian account of NSA surveillance in the US. But the tech pedants’ efforts to take down Greenwald and Snowden aren’t simply petty and disingenuous, they are ultimately destructive of the interests of American technology companies and American security.

Vale David Hirst

Yves here. Steve Keen sent this note along with his post:

The journalist David Hirst was both one of the few to warn of the crisis, and someone who became a good friend. He died last week, as a long term consequence of internal injuries sustained about ten years ago in the USA, when he tried to stop a woman being bashed.

His spouse asked me to see if I could get the attached published on NC, which was one of his favourite sites.

If you know David’s writing, you’ll understand what a loss this is. And if you missed his prescient and incisive commentary before and during the crisis, I hope you’ll sample his work below and get a sense of what a talent he was. Either way, I trust you’ll join me in sending condolences to David’s widow and his family, as well as to Steve.