Author Archives: Yves Smith

“Immigration Reform” = “Surveillance Reform” as Military Tactics Move Inland From US Borders

Yves here. The latest post at TomDispatch, Creating a Military-Industrial-Immigration Complex, How to Turn the U.S.-Mexican Border into a War Zone by Todd Miller, describes how the US border with Mexico, which is being defined more and more generously, has become an R&D lab for US security operations, as well as a new profit opportunity for defense contractors, who are looking for ways to repurpose combat equipment for domestic use. To put none too fine a point on its, the police state will be perfected on illegal immigrants or in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time Americans mainly of color, and then deployed on the rest of us. The 17 city paramilatary crackdown on Occupy was just the warm-up act.

Read more...

Yanis Varoufakis: Europe Resorts to Authoritarianism to Paper Over Banking and Austerity Failures

Yves here. Because the European slow-motion train wreck is turning out to be particularly slow, it’s almost become background noise in the US, almost a lesser version of the now two lost decades in Japan. But what is happing in Europe is less benign and less likely to be able to continue anywhere near that long.

Read more...

The Fed (Sort of) Speaks, but is the Bond Market Really Listening?

Yves here. As has become typical of late, the markets reacted sharply to the release of the FOMC minutes on Wednesday and Bernanke’s remarks later. For a really good effort at parsing the minutes, see Fedwatcher Tim Duy. The one clear conclusion was how unclear the minutes were:

Read more...

Michael Hoexter: Politically Fashionable Carbon Gradualism vs. Reality

Obama has unfortunately been backed by a segment of the environmental and policy community that believes or wants desperately to believe that fracked natural gas is cleaner and otherwise preferable to coal. But it’s already too late for this and other “carbon gradualist” strategies to be viable.

Read more...

Aging Demographics to Crunch Global Growth

Yves here. I don’t mean to make an object lesson of the author of this piece, van Onselen, since the point he is making, about demographics as a driver of growth, is valid from the vantage point he is taking (that of investment time horizons, which by nature are comparatively short).

But this perspective is simultaneously frustrating to contend with.

Read more...

New York Times Does Hatchet Job on MMT

I’m a bit late to get to an article in the New York Times that ran on one of the slowest news days of the year, last Saturday, Warren Mosler, a Deficit Lover With a Following. Since Bill Black has since issued a good kneecapping, I’ll soon turn the mike over to him, but I wanted to add some points about the approach used in this heavy-handed exercise propaganda.

Read more...