Yves here. The post below does not quite nail the rather large topic it opens up, that of how financial markets differ from markets for goods and what the implications are for regulation (George Cooper’s The Origin of Financial Crises is very crisp on these topics) but I thought it would provide for conversational grist for NC readers.
Read more...We’ve been mystified with the housing bull argument that things really are getting better. While real estate is always and ever local, and some markets may indeed be on the upswing, there are ample reasons to doubt the idea that an overall housing recovery is in. For instance, the recent FHFA inspector general report stated:
Read more...By Lynn Parramore, a contributing editor at Alternet. Cross posted from Alternet
If the ghost of Ayn Rand were to suddenly manifest in your local bookstore, the Dominatrix of Capitalism would certainly get a thrill thumbing through the pages of E.L. James’ blockbuster Fifty Shades of Grey.
Read more...Yves here. While this post by Rajiv Sethi contains some important observations about valuation, I’d like to quibble with the notion that there is such a thing as a correct price for as vague a promise as a stock (by contrast, for derivatives, it is possible to determine a theoretical price in relationship to an actively traded underlying instrument, so even though the underlying may be misvalued, the derivative’s proper value given the current price and other parameters can be ascertained).
Read more...By Paul Davidson,the author of “The Keynes Solution: The Path to Global Economic Prosperity” and the editor of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Cross posted from Alternet
Recently I went to a well-known restaurant in Evanston, Illinois. This restaurant has a reputation for providing excellent food and service. But the night I was there, it was less than half full. I asked the manager if he would he hire more waiters and chefs if his taxes were reduced and/or government removed the existing regulations controlling the way his restaurant could operate. His answer was that even if his taxes were reduced and regulations eliminated, he would only hire more staff if more customers came in for dinner. On the other hand, if there were twice as many customers for dinners than there were on this night (and there were many more customers before the recession began in 2007) he would gladly double the number of workers he employed even if his taxes were not reduced or regulations changed.
That’'s how things work in the Real World.
Read more...By Douglas K. Smith, the co-founder of Econ4 and author of “On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We In An Age Of Me. Cross posted from Alternet
The long-running General Electric slogan sums up what capitalist cheerleaders love to say about markets: "We bring good things to life."
But is it really true? In reality, some capitalists have figured out how to profit by actually bringing bad things to life.
Read more...By Stephanie Kelton, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.
I’ve grown increasingly frustrated by the near universal cry for more action from the Fed. My friend and fellow blogger Marshall Auerback has quipped that it’s as if every mainstream progressive received the same White House memo. I imagine it looked something like this:
Read more...By Michael Hudson and Jeffery Sommers, a distinguished professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee respectively, who have both advised members of Latvia’s government on alternatives to austerity. They are also contributors to the forthcoming book by Routledge Press: The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-Economic Costs of the Neoliberal Baltic Model. Cross posted from the Financial Times by permission of the authors
Austerity’s advocates depict Latvia as a plucky country that can show Europe the way out of its financial dilemma – by “internal devaluation”, or slashing wages. Yet few of the enthusiastic commentators have spent enough time in the country to understand what happened.
Read more...Marc Lavoie is a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of numerous books on post-Keynesian economics. His latest work ‘Monetary Economics’, written with the late Wynne Godley, is now available in paperback from Amazon.com.
Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington
Philip Pilkington: Monetary Economics quite consciously departs from the neoclassical paradigm while at the same time setting itself the high task of producing concise and coherent models. So, let’s start from the beginning: why did you and Godley feel the need to depart so forcefully from the neoclassical paradigm? T
Read more...By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil
What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
– Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ‘The Communist Manifesto’
Calls for balanced budgets in the present environment have long appeared somewhat confused, of that we have had little doubt for some time now as balanced budgets seem to exacerbate the problems they target rather than solve them and may lead to higher debt-to-GDP levels due to the reduction in real economic growth that they lead to.
Read more...Emerging economies are increasingly flexing their muscles over stratospherically-priced life-saving drugs
Read more...Yves here. It is frustrating to watch the refusal of the officialdom to deal with a persistent, high level of unemployment. Ronald Reagan was more concerned and more aggressive when unemployment breached 8%. By contrast, pundits provide excuses for the Administration’s passivity by blaming joblessness on structural unemployment, when various studies have debunked that (one simple proof: if unemployment were structural, you’d expect to see tight job markets in some sectors/job types and slack in others, but when you cut the data, you find high unemployment across the board).
This article helps to puncture some of the misperceptions about unemployment in America and provides some practical ideas.
Read more...By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller.
On Tuesday, Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker humiliated his Democratic opponent, Tom Barrett, by easily turning back a popular recall attempt sponsored by unions and liberal activists. The numbers in the election, which were supposed to be close, were ugly, in favor of the Republican. But this wasn’t just any Republican, Scott Walker is THE Republican, the politician who made his governorship a referendum on a hard right agenda, in a blue state.
Read more...It appears that New Zealand’s company incorporation regime has soiled itself, lavishly, again. This time, the Russian mafia appear to be involved.
Read more...We’ve featured past Real News Network segments on the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. UNCTAD has increasingly become a forum for struggles between advanced economies and developing economies over what the rules of the road should be in trade. UNCTAD was early to call the benefits of financialization into question, and has also been taking issue with the comparatively small take countries in the “south” get from extended supply chain production. This, needless to say, is a vision that is a direct challenge to how multinational like to conduct their affairs, so it should be no surprise that the big, rich countries are trying to bring UNCTAD to heel.
Read more...