Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power

Randy Wray wades in yet again to contend with disinformation about MMT.

Economists should stop pretending to be scientists and go back to the core of the discipline—as a field of inquiry and way of thinking

Today’s Water Cooler, including Biden and the working class, Gabbard, Harris, Sanders, Yang, AOC, voting machines, reparations, durable goods, producer prices, inflation expecations, construction, ongoing 737 debacle, Wells Fargo, Amazon, SEIU, cash, Varsity Blues, chat, quantum time reversal

Federal prosecutors indicted fifty people yesterday for college admissions fraud at several elite institutions, including Georgetown, Stanford, and Yale. Serious discussion of how college admissions procedures foster inequality is long overdue.

The latest installment in Justin Mikulka’s excellent series on fracking. The industry continues to promote new and improved saviors – this time, it’s Microsoft – to rescue it from an inconvenient truth: no one’s making any money, despite the high environmental costs incurred.

Things continue to go badly for Theresa May’s Brexit.

The ECB again rides in to try to paper over fundamental problems with the EU’s structure and to offset is austerity bias by restarting QE. But the EU needs more government spending. Will it take another crisis to get there?

By Lambert Strether of Corrente. Readers, this is a little top-heavy on politics, but I really had to do a pantry clearout! –lambert Politics “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51 “They had one weapon left and both knew it: treachery.” –Frank Herbert, Dune […]

Musing on why the level of crude propagandizing known as fake news has gotten worse.

Using laboratory experiments, the column shows that privacy matters, and increases the overall appeal of money.

CalPERS still can’t justify its new private equity business model, and has even retreated to calling it just a concept, yet it wants the board to sign a blank check at next week’s meeting.

On the remarkable surge of interest in and attacks against MMT by mainstream economists and pundits.

Another Boeing 737 aircraft crashed minutes after takeoff in Addis Ababa yesterday, killing all 157 passengers on board, in circumstances similar to last October’s Lion Air crash in Indonesia. Consequences for Boeing depend on what the just-recovered voice and data recorders reveal.