Obama’s energy plan ignores methane as a greenhouse gas. That reflects the Administration and EPA buying into Big Oil and “clean energy” propaganda so as to permit more fracking.
Read more...How the Fed has gotten itself caught in its own underwear by ignoring Hyman Minsky and in persisting in the clearly failed strategy of super lax monetary policy rather than calling for more government spending.
Read more...Over the last year, some deep truths about oil and the oil industry have begun to bubble to the surface. Not necessarily that they were ever hard to see, but they were easy to obscure and maybe more importantly, without too much effort, ignore. No longer.
Read more...How major energy companies are selling their former first world product, fossil fuels, to the third world, replaying Big Tobacco’s ploy.
Read more...Yves here. If you live in an advanced economy, and are at least middle income, you probably don’t give much thought to the availability of food. Expect that to change in the coming years. Agribusiness is a major driver of food insecurity. Successful experiments show that relocalization of food production can be an effective remedy.
Read more...How Latvia, a test case for neoliberal colonialism, has proven to be a test case of how finance-serving policies crush labor and enterprise.
Read more...Leverage-on-leverage vehicles were the big driver of the global financial crisis. Some investors are going back to their overly-risky ways.
Read more...On the danger that China’s overgrown shadow banking system poses to the economy, and the practical and political obstacles to curbing it.
Read more...By Peter Van Buren, who blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. He writes at his blog, We Meant Well and has a new book Ghosts of Tom […]
Read more...Is the conflict in the Ukraine more about economics than geopolitics, namely, about preserving US hegemony at the expense of the BRICS?
Read more...Yves here. The RT show Boom/Bust has an informative conversation with Yanis Varoufakis on the conundrum of the recent successful Greece bond offering.
Read more...Yves here. This post summarizes a paper that argues that derivatives, specifically credit default swaps, exacerbated the severity of the European sovereign debt tsuris. This sort of analysis deserves a wider audience, precisely because the prejudice of both neoclassical and neoliberal economists is that markets are ever and always virtuous, and that prices are never wrong unless someone is interfering (with labor unions the preferred bad example).
Read more...In this Real News Network report, Michael Hudson discusses the news blackout in the US as far as critical developments in the Ukraine are concerned, and how the distortions and gaps in reporting exceed those in the runup to the Iraq War.
Read more...How the Troika is overriding national constitutions and popular will to strip-mine Europe’s periphery countries on behalf of banks.
Read more...Wolf Richter and Gillian Tett worry about evidence of credit mania in the US.
Read more...