Author Archives: Yves Smith
Sherrod Brown Wimps Out on Secret Trade Negotiations In USTR Vote; Elizabeth Warren Takes Risk in Bucking Obama
Has Sherrod Brown started to follow Obama’s lead in the bait and switch category? Elizabeth Warren showed a lot more spine than he did in an trade-related vote on Wednesday.
Read more...Chinese Interbank Markets Having a Heart Attack, Repo and Shibor Skyrocket, Could Trigger Bigger Unraveling
The Chinese central bank is playing very high stakes poker. China’s interbank markets have been highly stressed for the last two days. An effort by the central bank to tighten in order to put a crimp on shadow banking activities looks to be spiraling out of control as one-week repo rates hit nearly 8.3% up 144 basis points in a day, and one-week Shibor has risen from its June 5 level of 4.8% to just shy of 8.1% today.
Read more...Wolf Richter: One Part Of Japan’s Abenomics Salvation Is Already A Fail
Japan’s attack in the Currency War was supposed to make it more competitive in international trade – but that, it failed to do. In fact, the opposite occurred.
Read more...Links 6/19/13
More Obama Administration Secrecy: Rep. Grayson Can’t Discuss Classified Trans-Pacific Partnership Draft
OK, you remaining Obama fans: tell me why we should trust the biggest baiter and switcher in the history of the Presidency, particularly when he insists on unprecedented levels of secrecy? Because he has nice teeth and cute kids?
Read more...ObamaCare Icebergs: Burgeoning Medical Debt and the Wobbly Start-Up of the Federally-Run Exchanges
An article by doctors David U. Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandle, published by the Boston Fed, gives a stark picture of the extent and severity of medical indebtedness in the US, and why Obamacare won’t remedy that problem. And we’ll discuss later that getting the machinery running looks likely to be another serious shortcoming with the program.
Read more...Extreme Energy, Extreme Implications: Interview with Michael Klare
If oil and gas is a profoundly dynamic phenomenon, then so too must be environmental risk and conflicts over natural resources—and we are not getting the full picture from the mainstream media, according to Michael T. Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, TomDispatch blogger, and author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Metropolitan Books, 2008). As risk multiply, conventional sources evaporate and we are left with “extreme” energy, renewables may be the only way to avoid war and disaster.
Read more...Lynn Parramore: Meet America’s Most Shameless Defender of the 1 Percent, Harvard Economist Greg Mankiw
Readers were duly exercised about a paper published by Greg Mankiw which had to go through so many hoops to promote the idea that inequality was the result of merit as to be worthy of our Frederic Mishkin Iceland Prize for Intellectual Integrity.
Suffice it to say further ridicule of Mankiw is in order, and Parramore provides a useful contribution.
Read more...Links 6/18/13
NYU Administrators Create Student Debt Slaves to Subsidize Summer Homes, Ginormous Pensions
When union members demand decent pay levels and work conditions, they are charged with featherbedding and overmanning or the new neoliberal catchall, “demanding uncompetitive wages”. But when the upper crust loots institutions, the mainstream media is typically missing in action.
Read more...Coming to a Broke Municipality Near You: The Greek, Um, Jefferson County, Solution
Jefferson County’s sewer system train wreck is now looking an awful lot like the periphery country in Europe mess.
Read more...Robert Wade: Elite Denial of Corruption and Inequality – World Bank Case Study
Yves here. While readers may think development policy has limited relevance to US and advanced economy readers, the IMF and World Bank have been and continue to be vehicles to make the world, particularly smaller or otherwise more influenceable regimes, more friendly to the interests of US multinationals. And at the same time US companies are taking down a record share of GDP in profits, the country’s ranking in inequality is worse than that of many developing economies. New York City is more unequal than China, and as the chart below shows, is also more unequal than Russia, famed for its oligarchs, and India, which still has hundreds of millions living in abject poverty.
So the World Bank’s efforts over time to exclude issues like corruption and inequality from its analysis have direct and obvious parallels to policy discussions here. Wade’s anecdotes of the way the World Bank refused to even allow the “c” word to be acknowledged are striking.
Read more...Michael Hoexter: Summer Heat – The Movement Against Ripping the Face off the Earth for a Brief Fossil-Fueled “Party”
Civilization requires agriculture, which is dependent on a few sensitive species to produce a surplus of food for masses of people with comparatively lower levels of labor or mechanical work. If we make the climate inhospitable to these species, as well as to ourselves, via fossil fuel use and degradation of the carbon buffering capacity of the environment, we will make it vanishingly likely that our own success as a species will continue.
Read more...Techies’ Efforts to Own #Snowden/NSA Surveillance Narrative = #Fail
Some Silicon Valley figures, along with some Democratic party-aligned media outlets, have tried assailing Glenn Greenwald, and indirectly, Edward Snowden, by trying to discredit certain aspects of the Guardian account of NSA surveillance in the US. But the tech pedants’ efforts to take down Greenwald and Snowden aren’t simply petty and disingenuous, they are ultimately destructive of the interests of American technology companies and American security.
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