Michael Shedlock (hat tip furzy mouse) described a new gimmick for those who want to skirt international law: live in a fancy ship, 12 miles offshore from San Francisco, with all the tech amenities. He summarizes the pitch:
Read more...By Yanis Varoufakis, Professor of Economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his blog
Europe is being torn apart by a titanic clash between (a) the unstoppable popular rage against misanthropic austerity policies and (b) our elites’ immovable commitment to more austerity. Precisely how this clash will play out no one knows, except of course that the odds do not seem to be on the side of the good. While at the mercies of this crushing uncertainty, it is perhaps useful to take a…short quiz.
Read more...One of the dangers of trying to understand what is going on in the Eurozone if you are a hapless but interested American isn’t simply that you’d have to be fluent in a lot of languages to keep on top of the media, but the media themselves are, as NC readers know well, not exactly reliable. Look at how much dictation from business and political leaders masquerades as news in the US. And we have a less controlled press than, say, Italy does.
So I will give readers some fresh data points and let you duke it out.
Read more...The Wall Street Journal reports tonight that there has been a big increase in homeless families, particularly in New York City.
Read more...Even though we were keen about how voter repudiation of austerity in the Italian elections last week was throwing a wrench in the Troika’s austerity plans, we also warned, based on the example of Greece, that they’d try to neutralize the results. That effort is already underway.
Read more...Richard Smith recommended this video by Bill Emmott, the editor of the Economist from 1993 to 2008. I was an enthusiastic reader of the Economist before Emmott took the helm of the magazine and quit reading it in the early 2000s, after it had moved to the right and had that slant permeating its coverage (and mind you, I was apolitical back then).
Nevertheless, there is a lot of useful detail on the power structure of Italy that may prove useful in interpreting the arm-wrestling of the next few months.
Read more...Jonathan Harris of the Global Development and Environment Institute has a new post at Triple Crisis, Green Keynesianism: Beyond Standard Growth Paradigms, in which he argues that pro-growth policies need to find a way to deal with environmental/resource constraints. On the one hand, a lot of NC readers will find that argument to be welcome, if a bit overdue, since quite a few members have been arguing that growth-oriented economic policies need to acknowledge environmental constraints.
Having read Harris’ well-intended post, I’m increasingly convinced that environmentalists have it backwards.
Read more...This Real News Network interview with Professor Dr. Heiner Flassbeck of Hamburg University (recently with UNCTAD) provides a cogent overview of why the impact of the sequester and any budget deal will be to weaken an already-struggling economy. I personally enjoy Flassbeck; he’s articulate and manages to get more information into his interviews than most of experts while keeping his remarks accessible to a broad audience.
Read more...Reader craazyman asked for mathematician and sometimes guest writer Andrew Dittmer to explain what is going on in Europe. Unfortunately, Andrew has many projects and Europe is rather large and complicated to sort out right now. Nevertheless, he did decide to help by translating some lead editorials from the Corriere della Sera to shed light on the reaction of the elite media to the recent elections.
Read more...Yves here. It’s worth reading Jon Walker’s piece on the sequester gamesmanship along with Black’s take. It looks like Obama has administered a big self inflicted wound, although between his PR apparatus distancing him from reality, and it taking time for the sequester to hit the economy (as in it won’t generate the sort of quick pain needed to shift the political calculus), it will take a while for him to recognize that.
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. Jointly posted with New Economic Perspectives
Read more...At the end of 2011, Steve Waldman wrote:
Read more...It’s unlikely that the destabilizing of the political calculus in Europe resulting from impressive showing of anti-austerity candidates in Italy will end prettily or nicely. However, Europe had already put itself in the position of having only bad choices. So the question is who suffers, and the public in periphery countries are starting to rebel against being broken on the rack while Eurocrats and pampered German and French bankers feel no pain.
Read more...Corruption has now become so routine in Washington that improprieties far worse than Turbo Timmie’s implausible failure to pay taxes on income from his days working as a consultant to the World Bank barely evoke a yawn from the media. Apparently the fourth estate is either so bedazzled by star turns, like Michelle Obama presenting at the Oscars (!!!) or so cowed by the prospect of being cut off from information that it dutifully falls in line.
Read more...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.
Read more...By Yanis Varoufakis, professor of economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his blog
For six decades Germany was being pampered by a hegemonic America that oversaw the write-off of its wartime debts, the reversal of Allied designs to de-industrialise it and, above all else, the constant generation of the global demand which allowed German manufacturers to concentrate on efficiently producing quality, desirable wares.
Having taken all this for granted for too long, Germany’s elites are now finding it conceptually difficult to come to terms with the new ‘normal’.
Read more...