Wolf Richter: Like So 2000 – Wall Street Pumps Crashed Internet Stocks
Internet stocks are down since March, so they must be a buy….right?
Read more...Author Archives: Yves Smith
Richard Alford: Not Only Are Economists in Policy Roles Bad at Forecasting, They Also Do a Poor Job of Allowing for Error
Understanding the odds and possible impact of forecasting error should be a important element of policy design. But it isn’t!
Read more...Links 5/13/14
The Economics of Apologies
Apologies really do matter, but they can’t be offered on the cheap.
Read more...Piketty’s Wealth Tax is Real, and It Works
Most economists deride Thomas Piketty’s recommendation of a wealth tax as the remedy to inequality. It might help if they did some empirical research.
Read more...Andrew Ross Sorkin, Timothy Geithner, and the Three Card Monte Model of Propaganda
Truth be told, I had really wanted to ignore Andrew Ross Sorkin’s artfully packaged Timothy Geithner puff piece in the Sunday New York Times magazine. But it makes for a useful study in a not-well-recognized propaganda technique, three card monte.
Read more...Has America’s Use of Finance as a Foreign Policy Tool Backfired?
How America’ s abject fealty to the financial services industry, and its promotion of open capital markets in emerging economies, privatization and its tolerance of tax havens, have destroyed US credibility in Eastern Europe.
Read more...Links 5/10/14
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a Hoax
Yves here. On the occasion of an all-time high, a hard look at how the Dow Jones Industrial Average is constituted is in order.
Read more...The Height of World War I Servicemen
Height in England before World War II was seen as a class marker. But is that the whole story?
Read more...Links 5/9/14
Rhode Island Senate Considering “Maximum Wage” Legislation
Why Rhode Island’s maximum wage proposal is a potential big step toward reducing income inequality.
Read more...Why QE May Have Done Net Damage
Quantitative easing has been a controversial policy even among the financiers who benefitted from it.
Read more...Is the Strong Dollar the Real Cause of the Collapse of US Manufacturing and Secular Stagnation?
Yves here. I managed to miss this VoxEU post from last month, and it is still timely. It argues that economists have generally been using the wrong measure of relative dollar strength to assess how the level of the currency played into the loss of manufacturing jobs and insufficient internal demand, now better known as “secular stagnation”.
Read more...Michael Hudson: Stockholm Syndrome in the Baltics – Latvia’s Neoliberal War against Labor and Industry
How Latvia, a test case for neoliberal colonialism, has proven to be a test case of how finance-serving policies crush labor and enterprise.
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