This Real News Network interview with Peter Lee, an Asia Times Online columnist who has been covering China for 30 year, is a welcome antidote to some of the superficial, stereotype-laden coverage of North Korea, not just what its posturing means for the US but other major players in East Asia.
Read more...Whither gold?
Read more...Contributed by Don Quijones, a freelance writer and translator based in Barcelona, Spain. His blog, Raging Bull-Shit, is a modest attempt to challenge some of the wishful thinking and scrub away the lathers of soft soap peddled by our political and business leaders and their loyal mainstream media.
Catalonia’s riot police unleashed the untamed fury of the state upon the protestors and cleared Barcelona’s Plaza Catalunya of all occupants. A dense ring of shell-shocked people gathered around the square. I was one of them. A child riding on his father’s shoulders held up a sign: “No soy anti sistema, el sistema es anti yo,” it said (I’m not anti-system; the system is anti-me).
Read more...Nothing like dramatic proof that austerity is a failure
Read more...Wow, did I miss it? Didn’t we have a crisis just a bit over four years ago? And wasn’t one of the big drivers the fact that banks were overlevered and took on too much risk?
Well, not only do we seem to be rerunning that playbook, banks are using strategies right under regulators’s eyes last time around to create phony capital. Worse, are pulling the exact same tricks they did last time around. Worse, regulators seem to be doing nothing to stop it.
Read more...By Dan Kervick, who does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
(Brussels) Nonplussed by this week’s unemployment report showing the Eurozone jobless rate rising to an unprecedented 12%, members of the European Parliament and Europe’s national governments pressed ahead on Wednesday with passage of a stringent new package of austerity measures. Dubbed “hyperaustérité” or “Übersparpolitik” by its backers, the new program of ruthless cuts and social demolition promises to deliver even higher levels of joblessness, misery and hopelessness than has been achieved so far by earlier rounds of austerity.
Read more...Although the TransPacific Partnership negotiations are being kept firmly under wraps, what little has leaked out is so appalling that it legitimates Alex Jones-type fears about world government, or more accurately, a market state where the interests of globe-spanning businesses come first. The TPP expands on NAFTA’s extreme investor-state regime that allows foreign companies to directly challenge a government’s derivatives regulation, capital controls, and other financial, health, and environmental policies.
We’ll be writing more about the TPP, and this Real News Network segment provides a good introduction.
Read more...When I first heard about the Cyprus ritual execution bailout, I had thought that the widespread predictions that the island nation’s economy would contract by 20% to 30% over the next two years were off base.
The IMF says that Slovenia will need to issue €3 billion in bonds this year. The country may be forced to seek painful assistance from the Troika. Will Germany be the heavy as it was with Cyprus?
Read more...Cyprus has imposed temporary capital controls. This column sheds light on how temporary and how damaging they are likely to be, based on Iceland’s experience. The longer controls exist, the harder they are to abolish. Icelandic capital controls, which have been ‘temporary’ for half a decade, deeply damage the economy by discouraging investment.
Read more...By John C.K. Daly, the chief analyst for Oilprice.com. Cross posted from OilPrice
As the practice of hydraulic fracturing to produce natural gas continues to spread not only in the U.S. but worldwide, the scientific community has increasingly focused on the environmental consequences of the technique. The most worrisome side effect of “fracking” is the rise of earthquakes in areas where the practice is extensive.
Read more...By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus
Remember, things are darkest before they go completely black.
Read more...Yves here. The longer you look at the Cyprus “rescue,” the worse it looks. As you can learn from our compendium in today’s Links, the Cypriot economy is already reeling. It’s straining under the extended bank holiday, which is scheduled to end Thursday. Moreover, the impact of losses radiating from number two bank Laiki are already propagating through the island.
And that’s before we get to the wider ramifications. Whether Germany understands it or not, it has delivered a fatal blow to the Euro project. How long it continues is anyone’s guess, but the Balkanization of the financial system that the Eurocrats have set in motion means they won’t be able to go the US/Japan zombification route.
Read more...In March 2007, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said that he thought the impact of losses on subprime mortgages was likely to be contained. It took five months for events to start proving him wrong. August 2007 marked the onset of the first acute phase of the global financial crisis, when the asset backed commercial paper market seized up.
Last week, in a press conference, Bernanke indicated that he thought the likelihood of the crisis in Cyprus having larger ramifications was limited, and avoided using the “c” word. But the message was similar to that of March 2007.
So are we likely to see the sort of delay between the assessment and the onset of trouble, as we did in 2007, or is Cyprus a nothingburger, as the Troika and many investors contend?
Read more...