By Yanis Varoufakis, a professor of economics at the University of Athens. Originally posted at Australian Broadcast Corporation’s The Drum
In the long, unending wake of the global financial crisis, desperate governments and central banks are trying their hand at experimental economic policy mixes. Japan and the eurozone offer a glimpse of how radically different anti-crisis experiments can be.
Read more...By Hugh, who is a long-time commenter at Naked Capitalism. Originally published at Corrente. A complete archive of Hugh’s reports can be found here.
Short Form: In seasonally adjusted terms, 165,000 jobs and unemployment dropping to 7.5% are OK, but not great results. At that job creation rate and taking population growth into account, it would take about 2 years to reduce by one million those currently unemployed. The BLS estimates current unemployment at 11.815 million. I calculate it at 20.542 million. So perhaps I should not say OK but rather next to nothing is being done to address the jobs situation.
Read more...Yves here. I had really wanted to write this piece, but Lynn Parramore beat me to the punch. There’s been almost universal enthusiasm for Brown-Vitter, legislation proposed by Sherrod Brown and David Vitter to get tough with the too-big-to-fail banks. The legislation is sufficiently stringently written that if it were enacted (big if), it would force the banks to make changes to maintain anything remotely resembling their previous profit margins. Goldman and Morgan Stanley would probably drop their banking licenses and the other US systemically dangerous banks would presumably downsize by hiving off major operations.
So what’s not to like? The problem is that the enthusiasts haven’t looked behind the curtain. This bill is being pushed, hard, by big insurers, who would be major winners.
Read more...It’s been far too long in coming, but Jamie Dimon may finally be getting his comeuppance.
Read more...Paul Jay of the Real News Network interviews Dr. Margaret Flowers, a pediatrician from Baltimore who advocates for a national single payer health system, Medicare for all, and Kevin Zeese, co-director of It’s Our Economy, an organization that advocates for democratizing the economy. Originally published at Real News Network.
Both Zeese and Flowers are long-time activists; I remember when Dr. Flowers got herself arrested in Max “Train Wreck” Baucus’s Senate hearing room because he’d scheduled no testimony from single payer advocates; and here they both say some things on health insurance and ObamaCare that are new to me.
Read more...By Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist and a member of the Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Group. Cross posted from mathbabe
I recently read and article off the newsstand called The Rise of Big Data, It was written by Kenneth Neil Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger and it was published in the May/June 2013 edition of Foreign Affairs, which is published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). I mention this because CFR is an influential think tank, filled with powerful insiders, including people like Robert Rubin himself, and for that reason I want to take this view on big data very seriously: it might reflect the policy view before long.
I’m glad it’s not all rainbows and sunshine when it comes to big data in this article. Unfortunately, whether because they’re tied to successful business interests, or because they just haven’t thought too deeply about the dark side, their concerns seem almost token, and their examples bizarre.
Read more...By Reda Cherif, economist at the IMF, and Fuad Hasanov, economist at the IMF. Originally published at VoxEU.
Europe’s austerity-first approach has triggered research-based efforts to evaluate the effectiveness of debt-reduction strategies. This column, based on a US empirical study, suggests that an ‘austerity shock’ in a weak economy may be self-defeating. Public-debt reduction historically occurs gradually amid improved growth. If policymakers, firms and households respond as in the past, we should expect lower deficits amid higher growth and, eventually, decreasing debt ratios.
Read more...Wellie, we finally witness an exception that proves Krugman’s rule about hopeless partisan rancor. Republicans and quite a few Democrats gave the raspberry to Obama’s nomination of Mel Watt to replace Ed DeMarco as the head of the FHFA, which oversees Fannie and Freddie.
Read more...Yves here. This post is the first in a series by Gaius. It starts by looking at the larger climate picture over larger swathes of time and showing what level of temperature changes led to mass extinction events.
Read more...By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus
Discussions of centralized planning in the West often take it for granted that the Soviet Union and similar social systems are the only ones with centralized planning. This is a basic (albeit ideological) confusion that results from the belief that markets and centralized planning are incompatible. This is not the case
Read more...Yves here. Take note in particular the discussion of the state of play in Italy. Even though other countries under the German yoke are complaining, Italy is the one that can credibly defy Germany, and the Germans know it.
I welcome comments from people who are following European media. I’m not sure that Latta’s failure to round up supporters matters much. I’d imagine he wants to position himself as Berlusconi’s messenger rather than a staunch ally.
By Delusional Economics, who is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.
As I mentioned earlier in the week Italy may have a new parliament but there is very familiar person who appears to be pulling the strings, and how long such an arrangement can last is questionable.
Read more...By David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, the co-authors and co-editors of seven books and 85 articles on a variety of industrial and occupational hazards, including Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution and, most recently, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children. Rosner is a professor of history at Columbia University and co-director of the Center for the History of Public Health at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. Markowitz is a professor of history at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Cross posted from TomDispatch
A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can’t escape it in our cars. It’s in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, young and old. And there’s a reason why you’ve never read about it in the newspaper or seen a report on the nightly news: it has no name — and no antidote.
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