Author Archives: Yves Smith
The Three Card Monte of Generational Warfare
Stock speculator Jay Gould remarked, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” That, sports fans, is the real foundation of the generational warfare propaganda effort.
Read more...Death By A Thousand Cuts: The Silent Assassination Of European Democracy
The European Union is riddled with fatal flaws and defects. Chief among them is the single currency which, rather than serving as the Union’s springboard to global dominance, could well be its ultimate undoing.
Read more...Gambling for Resurrection in Iceland
Yves here. This is a nice piece of crisis-related forensic work. Too bad we’ve seen so little of this sort of thing.
Read more...Links 1/6/14
Administration Peddling Increasing Blatant Canards on Proposed “Trade” Deals
We’ve both written and spoken about the wildly mislabeled “trade” deals that the Obama Administration is still trying hard to conclude, despite its abject failure to meet an arbitrary deadline of year end 2013.
Read more...The Misdirected Outrage Over The Wolf of Wall Street
Martin Scorsese’s film about a boiler-room stockbroker who managed to reach the major leagues of financial services industry swindling, The Wolf of Wall Street, has garnered both strong box office sales and heated denunciations.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Seven Economic Views on Christmas Presents
A cheeky take on the usual clash between different ‘schools’ of economics, focusing on how each of seven such ‘schools’ might view Christmas…presents.
Read more...Satyajit Das: Strategy – The Idea of an Idea of an Idea
Yves here. Das reviews a book that has generally received extremely positive coverage and finds it wanting, in part due to being overly ambitious and inconclusive. But the big reason is that the book focuses on the idea of strategy, and Das finds that word, like “liberal,” has been used to mean so many different […]
Read more...Reminder: NYC Meetup This Wednesday, January 8, 6:00 PM. Be There!
If you live in New York City, I hope you can join Lambert and me this Wednesday from 6:00 to 8:30 PM. We’ll meet upstairs at the Old Town Bar, on East 18th Street between Broadway and Park, which is right off Union Square.
Read more...Links 1/4/14
Michael Sandel: The Moral Limits of Markets
Since I imagine many of you are staying indoors even more than usual on a winter Saturday due to the nasty weather in the Northeast and Midwest, I though a video double-header was in order.
Read more...Bill Moyers Talks with Thomas Cahill About the People’s Pope
In this segment, Thomas Cahill, author of the Hinges of History series and former director of religious publishing for Doubleday, discusses how Pope Francis is upsetting both conservatives in the Catholic Church and the public generally through his stress on traditional Christian values.
Read more...Links 1/3/14
Simon Johnson Reminds Us That the Banks’ Quiet Coup is Still Very Much in Place
Simon Johnson wrote a remarkably blunt article for the Atlantic in May 2009 titled The Quiet Coup. In case you managed to miss it, it remains critically important reading. He provided an update of sorts in a New York Times column today.
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