Yves here. Varoufakis’ post may seem a bit off topic for this blog, but he has provided a history of censorship in Greece as seen through his personal relationship with the recently-shuttered state broadcaster ERT. And that is a more useful reference point for Americans (and likely most Anglo-Saxon readers).
Read more...Is it merely a coincidence that the troika rode its Trojan horse into Athens again on the very day Angela Merkel went awfully close to an absolute majority in German elections? I’m sure it is. But it’s still very bad news for the Greeks, who now have their perhaps last chance to throw out the international financial system and decide their own fate, before most of their valuables have been sold off to foreign interests. Greece is where democracy started, and the way things are going, it may be where it will end as well.
Read more...The German word for election, Wahlen, comes from the word “choice”, and in this general election there wasn’t really one. And that’s too bad for the rest of Europe.
Read more...It is unpleasant to face up to the fact that quite a few of the people who are lauded as courageous were not as brave as their PR would lead you to believe.
Read more...On Rolling Jubilee’s failure to live up to its plan of action and promises of transparency, and how they reacted when we asked them some pointed questions about that.
Read more...Five long years have passed since the demise of the once venerable firm of Lehman Brothers. To mark the occasion, Wall Street, the United States Treasury Department, the White House, and their several political proxies and spokespersons have taken to the mass media to instruct the public in the “lessons” to be drawn from the financial crisis of 2007-09. Regrettably, we are witnessing the propagation of several self-serving falsehoods in the hope that the public can be induced to embrace them now that the immediacy of the events in question is in the past. Some of the lessons are so flagrantly false that they demand immediate correction.
Read more...Here we go again. Washington, and to a lesser degree, Mr. Market are all a twitter over the display of macho in the latest round of the Team Dem versus Team Republican professional wrestling bout budget battle.
Read more...To quote famed short seller David Einhorn: “No matter how bad you think it is, it’s worse.” On the “corruption among what passes for our elites” front, this story about self-dealing in the privatization of the Postal Service gives an indication of how bad things really are.
Read more...This post debunks the idea that reducing military spending would be damaging to the economy.
Read more...Yves here. I’ve not weighed in on the second anniversary of the start of the Occupy Wall Street anniversary because, truth be told, the movement has gone so local and has so many different faces that I’m not certain it’s possible to make good generalizations without doing a lot of investigation.
This short interview seeks to address one of the expectations for OWS, that it become a political force, and why it was never met
Read more...Yves here. One of the things that makes it difficult to have intelligent conversations about politics is the way terminology has become debased, particularly in terms of what basic words like “left” and “progressive”. At least in the US, a good deal of this confusion results from the deliberate mislabeling of where political figures stand to exaggerate differences between the parties and camouflage the degree to which politicians serve big corporate interests rather than those of what is left of the middle class.
Jayati Ghosh discusses another axis that contributes to muddled categorization: that in emerging economies (and some of the patterns she describes are also present in left-leaning thought in advanced economies) is that old Socialist belief structures are being replaced by different lines of thought.
Read more...By Satyajit Das, a former banker and author of Extreme Money and Traders Guns & Money
Benn Steil (2013) The Battle Of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, And The Making of The New World Order; Princeton University Press
Neil Irwin (2012) The Alchemists: Inside The Secret World Of Central Bankers; Headline Publishing Group
Economist Brad DeLong observed in 2008: “It is either our curse or our blessing that we live in the Republic of the Central Banker”.
Read more...While it’s a relief to have Larry Summers out of the running for the Fed chairmanship, it’s also important not to labor under any delusions about Janet Yellen, the nominee presumptive.
Read more...One of the aggravating facts of life in bureaucracies is having to contend regularly with misrepresentation. And I don’t mean faux friendly corporate bromides like “We’re here to help,” but weasely, technically accurate but substantively misleading statements. A Treasury reply to some questions from Elizabeth Warren is a classic in this genre.
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 posed from Benzinga
The last ditch efforts to save Larry Summers’ prospective nomination to run the Fed and the comments about his withdrawing from consideration have prompted further discussions of financial regulation. The thrust of the comments is that Summers’ big regulatory idea was that capital requirements are the key and other forms of rules are worthless because they are easy to evade.
The last ditch efforts to save Larry Summers’ prospective nomination to run the Fed and the comments about his withdrawing from consideration have prompted further discussions of financial regulation. The thrust of the comments is that Summers’ big regulatory idea was that capital requirements are the key and other forms of rules are worthless because they are easy to evade.
It’s not only not a good idea, it’s not good because capital requirements can be gamed just like other rules.
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