Puzzling over the Great Divergence of real and nominal yields. Ever since the Great Depression, nominal yields have been persistently above real yields Yet in the previous 200 years, despite periods of fiat currency and high inflation, real and nominal yields didn’t diverge. Why do they now?
Read more...Greece, which has undertaken the most severe austerity, has experienced the deepest economic contraction. But the policy quackery continues.
Read more...Is nervousness and an apparent spending pullback limited to New York City affluenza, or do readers see a change in mood in their communities?
Read more...Nicholas Shaxson explains how a “Competitiveness Agenda” is being used to set industrial policies that favor the creation of what used to be called “national champions,” as in Really Big Companies. Never mind that neoliberals officially oppose anything so interventionist as industrial policy….
Read more...Why “neoliberal” is the framework that best describes our new, post 1980 form of capitalism.
Read more...Debunking the uniformed and regularly hysterical mainstream treatment of government debt and deficits.
Read more...Sometimes one chart really does tell you what you need to know.
Read more...Leo Panitch and Chris Hedges discuss how nature of imperialism today is financial power.
Read more...Why the Fed should delay its long-anticipated “liftoff”.
Read more...Why the three big charges commonly made against Corbyn’s “People’s Quantitative Easing” or PQE, are all wet.
Read more...Mind you, the rating agencies are far from the only neoliberal enforcers as far as emerging economies are concerned. But it is nevertheless instructive to compare an official rationale with data.
Read more...Conventional theory suggests that hierarchy and state institutions emerged due to increased productivity following the Neolithic transition to farming. This column argues that these social developments were a result of an increase in the ability of both robbers and the emergent elite to appropriate crops. Hierarchy and state institutions developed, therefore, only in regions where appropriable cereal crops had sufficient productivity advantage over non-appropriable roots and tubers.
Read more...Mexico’s problems could again ripple through Latin America where eroding confidence, volatility, and US dollar strength are already hurting economies and markets.
Read more...Now that 495 of the S&P 500 companies have reported second quarter earnings, something has become abundantly clear: 2015 is going to be a nasty year for corporate revenues.
Read more...China’s market drama started in June this year with the collapse of the Shanghai stock exchange, followed by frantic interventions by the Chinese authorities. As if the estimated $200 billion already spent on propping up stock prices were not enough, China found itself in another battle with the market, defending the RMB against depreciation pressures after the PBoC devalued the RMB by nearly 2% on August 11. The cost of the foreign exchange intervention to keep the RMB stable is estimated at $200 billion.
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