In case you missed it, it’s ugly out there. US markets swooned as an unexpectedly weak manufacturing report, the ISM, was so bad it couldn’t be attributed solely to bad weather and deepened investor funk.
Read more...Emerging markets-related disruption continued overnight, as the Nikkei fell nearly 2%, pounded by the rise in the yen due to its status as a flight currency. Other Asian markets took a hit as well, with only Australia emerging relatively unscathed.
Read more...Today is the day when bloggers are asked to promote less-well-trafficked sites they like.
Read more...Here’s the scoop: When it comes to climate change, there is no “story,” not in the normal news sense anyway.
Read more...Yves here. I’m of two minds about featuring a post about Peter Schiff, since criticizing him treats him as being a more legitimate commentator than he is. But some targets ask so hard for a debunking that it’s hard to resist.
Read more...Yves here. Billionaire Tom Perkins, who made the widely-pilloried claim that rich people like him were horribly victimized and on the verge of being slaughtered like Jews in World War II’s Germany, managed the impressive task of digging his hole even deeper in a follow up interview.
Bill Moyers, who among his many accomplishments was President Johnson’s press secretary, and his colleague Michael Winship put on their PR professional hat to describe where and how badly Perkins screwed up.
Read more...Now we learn one of the reasons Germans are so keen to punish periphery countries. Germans don’t get enough retail therapy!
Read more...While this site has been critical of the (Un)Affordable Care Act as a further subsidy to an already bloated medical-industrial complex, we do need to give the devil his due. One of the sections of the law that appears to have been genuinely beneficial is Medicaid expansion. However, as most readers well know, the results are inequitable, with poor people in Republican states that refused to take up this provision being left out in the cold.
Read more...Yves here. Please welcome Igancio Portes to NC. He’s a sophisticated young writer who has a sharp eye for power dynamics and is keenly interested in why the left (the genuine left as opposed to the fake version we have in the US) so often fails to achieve its intended results when it gets control of a government. He’ll be providing posts from time to time on Latin America, which is too often covered in a cursory and propagandized manner in the mainstream English language press.
Read more...As Bernanke is about to take leave of office, attacks on his policies are becoming louder, thanks to financial markets turmoil resulting from the Bernanke/Geithner approach to the crisis: do whatever it takes to restore as much of status quo ante as possible. The problem, of course, is that status quo ante is what got us in this mess in the first place.
Read more...Alciphron is the title of the book by the philosopher George Berkeley that was most popular in his own time and is probably his least popular in ours. But in the Seventh Dialogue, Berkeley sketches out some very interesting ideas on human language — something that he recognised as being an absolutely central philosophical question and one that bears directly upon economics.
Read more...Yves here. I must admit to being mystified and intrigued by Eve Online, which I have to confess I’d never heard of before today. First of course is the large number of people who find it appealing to spend significant amounts of leisure time in a realm designed to be ruthless and savage. Don’t they get enough of that at their day jobs? It used to be the most common narrative of entertainment was the hero’s journey. We now see rising popularity of amusements that celebrate ruthlessness and a breakdown or lack of social norms (such as the Game of Thrones)
The second curiosity is that 500,000 people have spent real money in meaningful amounts and invested time in a pseudo-economy where the funds are stranded. And now to add insult to injury, some have taken really big losses.
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