Category Archives: Free markets and their discontents

Did Intrade Do an MF Global?

By Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics, Barnard College, Columbia University. Cross posted from his blog

Yes, Virginia, HFT and Liquidity are Not All They Are Cracked Up to Be

You may have seen a big outbreak in the academic literature and business media of defenses of liquidity for liquidity’s sake, evidently prompted by increased interest in and in the EU, implementation of transaction taxes as a way to tame speculation and secondarily raise revenues.

Gas and Stock Prices: Tied Together By Speculators?

If you are old enough to remember the 1970s, the idea that gasoline and stock prices would be correlated seems bizarre.

Nathan Tankus: Germany, the “German View” of Hyperinflation and the Ghettoization of Dissent

By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus

Money is a social construct. It also facilitates many complex, interrelated social relations. As a result, it’s difficult to pin down for the average person what the effects of a particular policy will be, especially with regard to economic policy. While inflation may have negative effects in certain times or places, it’s difficult to figure that out just by looking around a city or country. As a result when politicians or other figures with agendas want to talk about inflation, they inevitably go for the most visceral descriptions available. For some number of decades now, the example they go to do decry inflation is people carrying around “wheelbarrows full of money” to go buy something such as bread. One of their favorite examples is Weimar Germany. So let’s talk about it.

Thirty Years of Financial Inefficiency

Arjun Jayadev at Triple Crisis provides a quote from Thomas Phillipon that somehow never sees the light of day in the financial press:

…the unit cost of intermediation is higher today than it was a century ago, and it has increased over the past 30 years. One interpretation is that improvements in information technology may have been cancelled out by increases in other financial activities whose social value is difficult to assess.

Invia i Pagliacci! Ci Devono Essere Pagliacci! [the single]

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Even though, as the headline shows, I have little Italian, and less Italian politics, I’m so chuffed that Beppe Grillo did well in yesterday’s Italian elections — even though he was neither a wizened, permanently tanned, and unrehabilitated whoremonger nor a Goldman Sachs alumnus (sorry for the redundancy) — that I thought I’d do a wrap-up before conventional wisdom completely congeals. Alert readers will, of course, correct and amplify this post in comments!

Richard Wolff Discusses the Failure of Capitalism with Bill Moyers

The fact of this talk is telling in and of itself: that a mainstream commentator would devote an entire segment to the idea that capitalism isn’t working. While that idea may seem obvious to many NC readers, it was supposed to remain relegated to the sphere of deviance (see Daniel Hallin’s spheres of discourse for more detail).

Big Bank Welfare Queens Unprofitable Without Government Subsidies, So Why Don’t We Regulate Them Like Utilities?

Quite a few readers excitedly sent a link to a Bloomberg editorial, “Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion a Year?” which summarizes a study by Kenichi Ueda of the International Monetary Fund and Beatrice Weder di Mauro of the University of Mainz that the editors used to extrapolate that the five biggest US banks are “barely profitable” if they weren’t able to borrow at artificially cheap rates thanks to the market perception that they are too big too fail.

The Bloomberg article, while analytically flawed, still winds up being too charitable.

Why Obama Refuses to Kill the Sequester

The game of chicken both the Republicans and Democrats are playing with the sequester and the budget/deficit talks is striking. One of the truly bizarre elements is that neither side is signaling the faintest interest in dealmaking of any kind. As I indicated the week before last, the lack of any sense of urgency was obvious: Congress had a holiday last week, and there were no real negotiations or even an exchange of proposals, virtually guaranteeing the sequester would take place as scheduled.

Banks on the Counter-Attack in the Food and Finance Debate

By Jennifer Clapp, Professor in the Environment and Resource Studies Department and CIGI Chair in Global Environmental Governance, Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo, Canada. Cross posted from Triple Crisis

NGOs have stepped up their critique of large investment banks’ involvement in agricultural commodity derivatives markets in recent months. Now, it appears that the banks are starting to fight back.