Richard Koo of Nomura published an important piece earlier this week which got some attention in the financial blogosphere (Clusterstock, FT Alphaville). It takes issue with a critical part of the economist optimists’ case, namely, that consumer deleveraging is about done and therefore the economy is likely to perform much better in the next few years.
Read more...As we anticipated, the Republicans have climbed down on making the debt ceiling the key battle line in their plan to impose spending cuts. Good Democrats applauded that move as a sign that Obama had displayed toughness and prevailed.
It’s not quite that simple.
Read more...By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil
There’s a lot of talk flying around about the Japanese stimulus. Some appears to be misguided, some appears to be sensible.
Read more...By Joe Firestone, Ph.D., Managing Director, CEO of the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI), and Director of KMCI’s CKIM Certificate program. He has taught political science as the graduate and undergraduate level and blogs regularly at Corrente, Firedoglake and Daily Kos as letsgetitdone. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
Our Congresspeople, corporate CEOs, tea partiers, most economists, Pete Peterson’s minions, and even our President, tell us that we’re running out of money; and that we can’t keep running huge deficits, and increasing our national debt forever, because eventually, our creditors will just cease lending us our dollars back….
Read more...A important shift in the Republicans’ negotiating stance over the austerity fight (do we go Dem lite or Republican high test?) was duly noted in the Financial Times a day ago, but a search in Google News (“debt ceiling”) suggests a lot of other commentators have not yet digested its significance, so it seemed worthy of a short recap here.
Read more...By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
It is good to be Angela Merkel.
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former New York Fed economist. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side.
The US has experienced numerous disasters both natural and man-made. Unfortunately, the authorities have not always availed themselves of the opportunity to learn from these episodes.
Read more...By Joe Firestone, Ph.D., Managing Director, CEO of the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI), and Director of KMCI’s CKIM Certificate program. He has taught political science as the graduate and undergraduate level and blogs regularly at Corrente, Firedoglake and Daily Kos as letsgetitdone
Yesterday, Ezra Klein mouthpieced for Treasury and Fed reported in the Washington Post that:
The Treasury Department will not mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to get around the debt ceiling. If they did, the Federal Reserve would not accept it.
Needless to say, it’s not surprising that a reading of the underlying statutes suggests Obama was free to use the platinum coin to circumvent the debt ceiling, and conveniently scapegoats the Fed to hide his own preference for imposing austerity.
Read more...By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2012/12/kill-the-fiscal-cliff-instead-of-the-economy.html“>New Economic Perspectives
Austerity in response to the Great Recession has proven to be an economic weapon of mass destruction.
Read more...By Dan Kervick, who does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
I thought I would take a break from the latest outburst of debt ceiling mania to call attention once again to the bipartisan plan of budget austerity and recession-tempting economic devastation that will be implemented in March in one form or another, and from which the debt ceiling debate is designed to distract us.
Read more...Some readers were decidedly unhappy about a New York Times op-ed over the weekend by Gary King and Samir Soneji that argued the need to reform Social Security was even more urgent than the catfood futures sellers thought because people are going to live longer than the budget mavens assume. Given the op-ed space limits, the authors couldn’t supply much in the way of backup for their views, but the argument was that improvements in longevity due to the decline in smoking and improved cardiovascular health were not adequately reflected in the data.
It’s not clear that we should take this forecast all that seriously.
Read more...The Real News Network has conducted a series of interviews on the fiscal cliff deal, and the two most recent are worthwhile in and of themselves, and are also good tools for persuading those who fallen for the idea that Obama got a good deal to reexamine their view. With the Vichy Left now trying to soften up the public for Social Security and Medicare “reform,” it’s particularly important to keep an accurate scorecard on what has already gone down.
Read more...By Delusional Economics, who is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.
I’ve commented numerous times over the the last 3 years that I considered the IMF’s position on Europe dangerously misguided as I felt it was based more on ideology than evidential analysis (see more here). The results have been so bad that the IMF is being forced to admit to the errors of its ways.
Read more...By James Stafford, editor of OilPrice. Cross posted from OilPrice
In the interview James talks about:
Read more...• The political implications of America’s oil & gas boom
• How the shale boom will impact climate change
• Why China may be forced to change its political system
• An easy way to solve the debt crisis
• Why we should expect a comeback from coal in the future
• Why we must invest in renewable energy
• Why cheap energy isn’t vital to economic growth
• How Obama’s second term will alter the energy landscape
• Why we need to focus on conservation
• Why we shouldn’t take note of the doom and gloom predictions
By Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson. Michael Hudson was Professor of Economics and Director of Research at the Riga Graduate School of Law. He is a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City. His latest book is Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents. Jeffrey Sommers is visiting faculty at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. He is an Associate Professor of Political Economy & Public Policy at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. The authors have advised Latvian politicians and government officials up to the Prime Minister level. Both have published extensively in the Latvian press.
A generation ago the Chicago Boys and their financial supporters applauded General Pinochet’s anti-labor Chile as a success story, thanks mainly to its transformation of their Social Security into Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) that almost universally were looted by the employer grupos by the end of the 1970s.
Today’s most highly celebrated anti-labor success story is Latvia. Latvia is portrayed as the country where labor did not fight back, but simply emigrated politely and quietly. Can this really be a model for the United States or Europe’s remaining social democracies? Or is it simply a cruel experiment that cannot readily be emulated in larger countries un-traumatized by Soviet era memories of occupation?
Read more...