It has been commonplace to speak of central bank independence — as if it were both a reality and a necessity. In the case of the Fed, this notion does not stand up to scrutiny.
Read more...Stock speculator Jay Gould remarked, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” That, sports fans, is the real foundation of the generational warfare propaganda effort.
Read more...The European Union is riddled with fatal flaws and defects. Chief among them is the single currency which, rather than serving as the Union’s springboard to global dominance, could well be its ultimate undoing.
Read more...We’ve both written and spoken about the wildly mislabeled “trade” deals that the Obama Administration is still trying hard to conclude, despite its abject failure to meet an arbitrary deadline of year end 2013.
Read more...Since I imagine many of you are staying indoors even more than usual on a winter Saturday due to the nasty weather in the Northeast and Midwest, I though a video double-header was in order.
Read more...Simon Johnson wrote a remarkably blunt article for the Atlantic in May 2009 titled The Quiet Coup. In case you managed to miss it, it remains critically important reading. He provided an update of sorts in a New York Times column today.
Read more...For decades, citizens have been sold on the mantra that the hungry private sector can do a better and cheaper job of providing services than “inefficient” government.
Read more...As most people who have passing familiarity with student debt in the US know, it’s a millstone that is brutally difficult to remove. But it turns out that even the limited ways out are often not available in practice thanks to the hyper-aggressive conduct of a key government contractor.
Read more...The problem of who should bear the costs of climate-change-induced rises in flood frequency in coastal communities is difficult even before throwing in the not-trivial problem that is it also highly politicized.
Read more...Yves here. This essay achieves the difficult task of working through some of the implications of Arrow’s impossibility theorem, which might alternatively be called “the inescapability of politics theorem” in an accessible manner. In fact, one of the conclusions that the author Raphaële Chappe focuses on is that how well a society “does politics” matters, that the structure and health of institutions matter. Thus it’s perverse that economics, which readers of this blog understand full well is really political economy, has virtually no interest in questions of governance (the closest it comes is in principal/agent and game theory and information asymmetry).
Read more...Apparently, it has been impossible to sell Greece any weapons at all, not even a water pistol, without bribing officials at the Defense Ministry. Corruption is so pandemic that Transparency International awarded Greece once again the dubious honor of being the most corrupt country in the EU. For 2013, Greece ended up in 80th place of the 177 countries in the survey, same as China. But it takes two to tango.
Read more...A new Bloomberg story, Americans on Wrong Side of Income Gap Run Out of Means to Cope, is a zeitgeist indicator: the normally-well-insulated-from-realty investing classes have noticed that large swathes of what was once the middle class aren’t just downwardly mobile but are struggling.
Read more...What do you flag as the standout events of 2013 and why?
Read more...By Lambert Strether of Corrente
And in a genius PR move, the White House describes Obama’s act of successful shopping avoidance as “symbolic.” As indeed it is, although not in the way the White House thinks, or could be said to think. WaPo has the details:
Read more...By George Bailey, who has worked in senior compliance roles at Big Firms You’ve Heard Of and is also a member of Occupy the SEC
The first few legs in the in the Volcker Rule repeal relay race are now under way.
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