John Aravosis — Oklah. GOP Senator takes own constituents hostage, demands budget cuts or no tornado aid

You have to give Oklahoma Republican US Senator Tom Coburn high marks for consistency, if not compassion.

In the face of a major tornado disaster in his home state, that has taken the lives of 24 Oklahomans, including at least 9 children in a devastated elementary school, Coburn says he won’t support disaster relief for his home state unless the budget is cut elsewhere.

Yes, Coburn is taking his own constituents hostage as budget-cutting human shields.

It’s not the first time Coburn has taken hostages. Last winter, Coburn joined Oklahoma’s other far-right GOP Senator, Jim Inhofe, in voting against the Hurricane Sandy relief bill.

AmericaBlog
Oklah. GOP Senator takes own constituents hostage, demands budget cuts or no tornado aid
John Aravosis

Way beyond moron level.

Republicans don’t really care about spending money like a (or for a) drunken sailor, so long as it’s for tax cuts and the Defense Department.  Then after their years of massive spending bankrupt us – like Reagan did, and then Bush II – suddenly the Republicans are deficit hawks, asking us to cut all of our programs while leaving theirs in tact.

Alex Kane — How America's National Security Apparatus -- in Partnership With Big Corporations -- Cracked Down on Dissent

A new report is an eye-opening look into how the U.S. counter-terror apparatus was used to track the Occupy movement.

Counter-terror police officers collaborated with corporate entities to combat protests. Undercover police officers monitored and tracked the Occupy movement. A right-wing corporate-backed group hired a police officer to help protect a conference. These are some of the details revealed in anew report published by the Center for Media and Democracy’s Beau Hodai, along with DBA Press. The revelations are based on government documents the group obtained.

The report, titled "Dissent or Terror: How the Nation's Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street,” is an eye-opening look into how the U.S. counter-terror apparatus was used to track the Occupy movement in 2011 and 2012 and also help protect the business entities targeted by the movement. The report specifically looks at the activities of “fusion centers,” or law enforcement entities created after 9/11 that transform local police forces into counter-terror units in partnership with federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security. The fusion centers devoted a lot of time--to the point of “obsession,” the report notes--to monitoring the Occupy movement, particularly for any “threats” to public safety or health and to whether there were “extremists” involved in the movement.

The documents obtained for the report from government agencies reveal “a grim mosaic of ‘counter-terrorism’ agency operations and attitudes toward activists and other socially/politically-engaged citizens over the course of 2011 and 2012,” writes Hodai. He adds that these heavily-funded agencies indisputably view Occupy activists as “terrorist” threats. Additionally, Hodai writes that “this view of activists, and attendant activist monitoring/suppression, has been carried out on behalf of, and in cooperation with, some of the nation’s largest financial and corporate interests.”

AlterNet
How America's National Security Apparatus -- in Partnership With Big Corporations -- Cracked Down on Dissent
Alex Kane

Soft fascism becoming hard fascism.

Jeff Cox — It's Back: Shadow Banking Hits Post-Crisis Highs

The move back to some of the less traditional forms of banking comes as regulators and lawmakers push for greater regulation and higher capital requirements....

"The shadow banking market is coming back relatively strongly and it will be a dominating force in the financial markets a couple years from now," said Dick Bove, vice president of equity research at Rafferty Capital Markets.

CNBC NetNet
It's Back: Shadow Banking Hits Post-Crisis Highs
Jeff Cox | Senior Writer

Arturo Garcia — Sen. Inhofe: Aid for Oklahoma ‘totally different’ from Sandy relief requests

Sen. Inhofe: Aid for Oklahoma ‘totally different’ from Sandy relief requests (via Raw Story )

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) seemed to contradict his colleague Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) stance on Tuesday on federal assistance for victims of the Moore, Oklahoma tornado, suggesting that there will be help coming. But he also differentiated that need from his opposition to aid for victims of Hurricane…

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Has Jim Rogers gone insane? Watch my new video!

Sina (Xinhua) English — High public debt raises fiscal crisis risk: IMF official

More R-R out of the IMF today.

Carlo Cottarelli, Director of IMF's Fiscal Affairs Department, ... said the ratio of public debt to gross domestic product (GDP) has surpassed 90 percent in some advanced economies, and high debt would hamper economic growth.

Wake him up.

Sina (Xinhua) English
High public debt raises fiscal crisis risk: IMF official

Lucrezia Reichlin, Adair Turner and Michael Woodford — Helicopter money as a policy option

With persistently weak economic conditions becoming the norm in Europe, economists are considering increasingly unconventional policy options. One tool that has yet to be taken out of storage is ‘helicopter money’, i.e. the overt monetary financing of government deficits. This column recounts a policy debate on helicopter money that was held at LBS in April 2013 among three of the world’s leading monetary economists.

VOX.eu
Helicopter money as a policy option
Lucrezia Reichlin, Professor of Economics at London Business School, Adair Turner, Member of the UK Financial Policy Committee, and Michael Woodford, John Bates Clark Professor of Political Economy, Columbia University

More stabbing in the dark, but at least they recognize that fiscal policy is needed instead of relying on monetary policy. But they are so bound up in "central bank independence" they are blindsided.

Ian Millhiser — The Supreme Court Agreed To Hear A Case Today That Will Probably Nuke Separation Of Church And State

I can't think of a better way to kill religion than to have government support it.

Think Progress
The Supreme Court Agreed To Hear A Case Today That Will Probably Nuke Separation Of Church And State
Ian Millhiser

Lars P. Syll — The Great IS-LM Obfuscation

As all students of economics know, time is limited. Given that, there has to be better ways to optimize its utilization than spending hours and hours working through or constructing irrelevant economic models. I rather recommend my students to allocate some time to study great forerunners like Keynes and Minsky, helping them to construct better, real and relevant economic models – models that really help us to explain and understand reality.

The Great IS-LM Obfuscation
Lars P. Syll | Professor of Social Studies and Associate Professor of Economics, Malmo University

Daniel Dennett's seven tools for thinking

6 DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME ON RUBBISHSturgeon's law is usually expressed thus: 90% of everything is crap. So 90% of experiments in molecular biology, 90% of poetry, 90% of philosophy books, 90% of peer-reviewed articles in mathematics – and so forth – is crap. Is that true? Well, maybe it's an exaggeration, but let's agree that there is a lot of mediocre work done in every field. (Some curmudgeons say it's more like 99%, but let's not get into that game. 

A good moral to draw from this observation is that when you want to criticise a field, a genre, a discipline, an art form …don't waste your time and ours hooting at the crap! Go after the good stuff or leave it alone. This advice is often ignored by ideologues intent on destroying the reputation of analytic philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology, macroeconomics, plastic surgery, improvisational theatre, television sitcoms, philosophical theology, massage therapy, you name it.

Let's stipulate at the outset that there is a great deal of deplorable, second-rate stuff out there, of all sorts. Now, in order not to waste your time and try our patience, make sure you concentrate on the best stuff you can find, the flagship examples extolled by the leaders of the field, the prize-winning entries, not the dregs. Notice that this is closely related to Rapoport's rules: unless you are a comedian whose main purpose is to make people laugh at ludicrous buffoonery, spare us the caricature.

Fabius Maximus — Ben Bernanke sees the great slowdown in technological progress

Today let’s revisit the slowdown in technological progress. The first post about this — 5 years ago — was wildly controversal. Now it is so uncontroversial that even the Chairman of the Fed can discuss it.

“Economic Prospects for the Long Run“
By Ben S. Bernanke, Chairman of the Fed
Speech at Bard College, 18 May 2013 — Excerpt:

Fabius Maximus
Ben Bernanke sees the great slowdown in technological progress

That clinches it. I now feel confident in predicting that we are on the threshold of major technological advances that will transform civilization.

James Kwak — Liberty for Whom?

James Kwak jumps into the fray in commenting on Corey Robin's "Nietzsche’s Marginal Children: On Friedrich Hayek" at The Nation.

The Baseline Scenario
Liberty for Whom?
James Kwak
(h/t Mark Thoma at Economist's View)

Mises and Hayek's "liberalism" is really conservatism in disguise, since the basis of political liberalism is that all are created equal, while the basis of political conservatism is that some are better then others and therefore deserve the privilege they are able to garner.

Paul Krugman — How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled

In normal times, an arithmetic mistake in an economics paper would be a complete nonevent as far as the wider world was concerned. But in April 2013, the discovery of such a mistake—actually, a coding error in a spreadsheet, coupled with several other flaws in the analysis—not only became the talk of the economics profession, but made headlines. Looking back, we might even conclude that it changed the course of policy.

The New York Review of Books
How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled
Paul Krugman | Professor of Economics, Princeton University

Jillian Rayfield — What is Paper Terrorism? Anti-Gov't Nuts File Tens of Thousands of False Docs as "Sovereign Citizens"

That’s why the FBI has labeled sovereign citizens a “domestic terrorist movement,” and it’s why the White House established a new “Interagency Working Group to Counter Online Radicalization to Violence” in February of this year. The group organizes efforts to crack down on potentially violent individuals and movements, like sovereign citizens, ”who use the Internet to recruit others to plan or carry out acts of violence.”

That’s also why local police departments have been taking additional measures to instruct officers on how to deal with sovereign citizens, including hiring specialized trainers like Detectives Rob Finch and Kory Flowers. Finch and Flowers have been making the rounds across the country, training approximately 15,000 police officers and 5,000 public officials in how to recognize and deal with a sovereign citizen who might, when pushed, resort to violence. ”To them, a police officer is just a man in a Halloween costume,” Finch recently told the Los Angeles Times.

AlterNet
What is Paper Terrorism? Anti-Gov't Nuts File Tens of Thousands of False Docs as "Sovereign Citizens"
Jillian Rayfield | Salon

Libertarianism taken to the extreme.

Jeff Cox — The Market Is Not the Economy: What the Fed Misses

"We've made rich people richer," Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher told CNBC in a Monday interview.... 

"This is great for the (Warren) Buffetts and for others who can take advantage of this multiple of great money and cheap money that's been available," he added. "The question is, what have we done for the working men and women of America?"....

As for the "wealth effect" the Fed had hoped to achieve by boosting the stock market with $85 billion of money creation every month, it indeed, as Fisher suggested, has been skewed to upper income levels....

A skeptic on the current Fed approach, Fisher said the tide won't turn until government fiscal policy complements Fed monetary policy.

CNBC NetNet
The Market Is Not the Economy: What the Fed Misses
Jeff Cox | Senior Writer

Institutional Momentum Still Carrying FDIC - and Public - Astray

Commentary by Roger Erickson

FDIC fails public w long history of not acting on whistle-blowing complaints.

If feedback is ignored, innocent fraud drifts into Control Fraud territory, simply by statistics. Public Purpose is pursued only with guidance by completely democratic feedback. Once off that path, everything else is public fraud, by definition.

In Case You Thought Intelligence Was Breaking Out - 17 Sovereigns Peg Their Currency to $US

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Rodger Mitchell draws attention to this lunacy in a very educational rant about rampant misunderstanding of the purpose of taxes in a fiat currency regime.

What Currencies Are Pegged to the Dollar?

The opening line reveals all. "The purpose of a currency peg is to facilitate international trade and foster economic growth."  NOT!

At this point, if you immediately ask why foster international trade, and exactly whose economic growth is being facilitated, by how much, then there's hope for the future of you, your family and your country.

If you DON'T ask those questions, and instead blithely accept the BIG BAMBOOZLE foisted by the large-merchant guild ... well, then you've already accepted defeat, before the 'education' and 'negotiations' even start! Outlandishly aggressive lies are the 1st rule of ruthless sales and con jobs.

If a Control Fraud asks for capitulation as a prerequisite to negotiations, and gets it, how can they lose, no matter where the subsequent 'negotiations' go? As always, a foolishly uninformed population and their options are soon parted.

We have work to do. The terms of our social contract absolutely have to be reset, because our own uber-merchant lobbies are asking for the capitulation and demise of whole nations - including ours - and, amazingly, we are agreeing, up front, to the terms of the surrender! As is, our current electorate wouldn't recognize PublicPurpose if it was handed to them by fiat! It wasn't always this way, in the US or other countries.

There's flat out no future for anyone if our current direction continues. We have to save our own Control Frauds from themselves, just like in 1932. I sincerely hope that YOU are up for this. The general welfare of the next 7 generations - including your grandchildren - depends on what happens within the next 2 years.


ps: The authors add to the confusion with the following line, revealing themselves as steeped in the innocent self-fraud of gold-std thinking. "The dollar became the world's reserve currency after WWII because represented the largest physical gold reserves."

Response: no, No a thousand times NO! Why did a collection of nations who had just - one and all - saved their economies by LEAVING the gold std, decide upon the sole remaining superpower economy's currency as the international trading standard? Economic power and guaranteed convertibility surely was an aspect. Static assets such as gold reserves were and remain irrelevant to countries on fiat currency regimes, backed ENTIRELY by the far more valuable dynamic assets of a people. Contrary to popular belief, the world did not return to a functional gold std after Breton Woods in 1944. Inter-gov exchange of $US for gold was requested by confused people from all the losing economies, but that does NOT a worldwide gold-std make. The 1st government to actually use the function significantly (France) was simply turned down (when Nixon & Connolly closed the gold window - showing equal ignorance about fiat currency operations.). None of that mattered in reality, only in the thinking of people who didn't understand the bigger options available to fiat currency issuers. The bigger issue - by far - was and remains rampant confusion and the Control Fraud it enhances, innocent or not.

Here's a modern day philosophy question. "If an entire sovereign nation bypasses it's rapidly expanding options, and there's no Control Frauds left to steal anything ... does it still let out a whimper as it dies?"

Revisiting the Basic Concept of Return-on-Coordination, and Wondering Why It's Missing From "Economics"

Commentary by Roger Erickson

A steady trickle of emails arrive, asking for more feedback about the basic concept of "return-on-coordination for beginners," and what the implications are for fiat currency operations and MMT. So here's a revisit to accumulating discussions - from the perspective of biology, military, and ecology fields. Please add your comments, with relevant references from other fields.

Return-on-coordination = growing teamwork. There's lots of literature on teamwork of course. However, there's far less discussion of scalable, growing teamwork in teams of steadily increasing size. There's some relevant discussion of teamwork scalability, but mostly in ecology and military fields (e.g., "mobilization" processes in war campaigns).

So why not a similar literature about coordination as a dynamic form of capital? And more discussion of the scalability of teamwork in growing teams, nations and cultures?

One problem is that few think about all teams being members of bigger teams, etc, etc, on up to a nation being the current peak metric for competing teams. Nation-teams are the "moment" of adaptive modeling among humans. A more evolved world depends on countries racing to find a "better" way, one that other countries can emulate. Experimental results are always found first in model systems - not from experiments done on the entire system.

If you want to know about the economics of coordination, start with Walter A. Shewhart. "In all complex systems the highest cost, by far, is the cost of coordination."

Cost of coordination.

So if that's the highest cost. An obvious corollary is that the highest investment return, by far, is the return-on-(investment in)coordination.

It amazes me that there's so little written about the return-on-coordination. Maybe most people in the know have always assumed the corollary to cost-of-coordination was obvious - while beginners who simply don't get the connection accumulate?

Here are a variety of comments and posts that mention the systemic return-on-coordination, in various contexts.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1050011-fiscal-cliff-and-deficit-conversation-misses-the-point#comment-12560061
(note the next response, by zmoney; at least 1 person gets the obvious)

http://econintersect.com/b2evolution/blog2.php/2012/12/16/redefining-fiscal-policy-outcomes-so-that-our-definition-of-successful-investing-isn-t-depriving-our-grandchildren-of-options

http://econintersect.com/b2evolution/blog2.php/2012/08/30/in-economics-a-gaping-separation-between-theory-and-operations

USMC on Warfighting (see section on "decisionmaking")
http://community.marines.mil/news/publications/Documents/MCDP%201%20Warfighting.pdf

USMC on Campaigning
http://www.clausewitz.com/readings/mcdp1_2.pdf

USMC on Strategy
http://www.clausewitz.com/readings/mcdp1_1.pdf#zoom=100

No one researches this more than militaries, who don't always share their latest writings. However Older Military articles can be found here:
http://www.clausewitz.com/readings/Readings.shtml

Further links:

http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/2012/08/return-on-coordination.html

http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/2012/10/how-to-explain-return-on-coordination.html

http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/2012/12/fiat-is-miraculous-no-its-called-return.html


Finally, some formal Autocatalysis articles, from the field of ecology
(self catalyzing = return-on-coordination, which turns into the question of what is being catalyzed by whom, short vs medium vs long term).
http://people.biology.ufl.edu/ulan/pubs/Dual.pdf
http://people.biology.ufl.edu/ulan/pubs/Goerner.pdf
http://people.biology.ufl.edu/ulan/pubs/FISPAP.pdf

Carola Binder — Europeans' Biggest Problem

Half of Germans and French thought that rising prices were a top issue, even when inflation was just 2.5%. The EC Consumer Survey, asks people how much they think prices have risen in the past 12 months. In May 2012, 28% of German, 36% of French, and 40% of Austrians thought that prices had risen "a lot." 

Neil Irwin recently wrote that "The leading economies of the industrialized nations may not have a lot in common, but they are all afflicted by this: Inflation is too low." Even though inflation is too low, a lot of people think it is high-- and think that rising prices personally affect them more than unemployment. Public opinion is a powerful force, so we see policymakers being more reluctant to raise inflation when it it too low, than to lower it when it is too high.

Quantitative Ease by Carola Binder
Europeans' Biggest Problem

The moron problem. Morons can be counted on to get it 180° out. The EZ is hopeless.

Jeff Gundlach: "We Are Drowning In Central Banking"

Zero Hedge
Jeff Gundlach: "We Are Drowning In Central Banking"

The "bubble" that Gundlach sees in central banking is the result of pushing monetary policy to the extreme, which is not working to stimulate domestic economies. The Fed admittedly tried to stimulate the economy by increasing the wealth effect through driving equities higher than they would be otherwise, as well as supporting housing through low mortgage rates. That has not worked to increase nominal aggregate demand or even to keep the inflation rate at the Fed's target of 2% and now deflation threatens.

The sectoral balance approach reveals that if the domestic private sector wishes to net save, including deleveraging, then the government or the external sector must make up the difference due to demand leakage to saving.

However, in a political environment of fiscal austerity, the government's hands are tied by the political process. That leaves the external sector, meaning increasing exports.

Not everyone can increase exports in a global economy that is slowing, as Gundlach observes. Therefore, some countries will attempt to increase exports by lowering prices indirectly through currency devaluation.

Germany was able to devalue some time ago by switching from the DM to the euro, ensuring its position as a net exporter. China supported its export industries through a peg to the dollar that prevented the currency from rising in the market relative to China's growing position.

Now Japan has taken steps to bring down the value of the "too strong" yen, apparently with the blessing of Washington, or at least without objection.

Is the world approaching the point there is going to be push back? Gundlach thinks it's a strong possibility.

It's time to recognize the insufficiency of monetary policy, as Bernanke himself has admitted, and move to a sectoral balances-functional finance approach fiscal policy in order to offset demand leakage to saving and stimulate effective demand instead of pursuing a mercantilist policy that will only lead to further international imbalance, political recrimination, and possible trade war.

Daniel Little — What About Marx?

So what about it? Is Marxism relevant today? Yes, if we can avoid the dogmatism and rigidity that were often associated with the tradition. Power, exploitation, class, structures of production and distribution, property relations, workplace hierarchy -- these features certainly continue to be an important part of our social world. We need to think of Marx's corpus as a multiple source of hypotheses and interpretations about how capitalism works. And we need to recognize fully that no theoretical framework captures the whole of history or society. Marxism is not a comprehensive theory of social organization and change. But it does provide a useful set of hypotheses about how some of the key social mechanisms work in a class-divided society. Seen from that perspective, Marxist thought serves as a sort of proto-paradigm or mental framework in terms of which to pursue more specific social and historical investigations.

Understanding Society
What About Marx?
Daniel Little | Chancellor, University of Michigan at Dearborn

My comment there.

Anyone doubting the power of Marxian analysis and the continuing influence of Marx should become familiar with Michal Kalecki, who anticipated Keynes but was unrecognized at the time since he wrote in Polish. Later he traveled to Sweden, then England where he taught at LSE and Cambridge, influencing Piero Sraffa, also a Marxian, and Joan Robinson, and emerging the Post Keynesian tradition, which is now a major contender to neoclassical economics, New Keynesianism, and Austrian economics. In fact, some Post Keynesian acknowledge the influence of Marx and Marxians over Keynes, and they reject interpreters of Keynes like John Hicks ISLM model so dear to Paul Krugman and the Keynesian-neoclassical synthesis of Paul Samuelson. Since Marx is still persona non grata and association with him a career killer for Western academics, his influence is often not attributed public or minimized. But this is becoming less the case now that it is obvious that the mainstream approach to economics and economic policy has failed and its proponents are strongly resisting reconstruction. So don't count Marx out yet.

Lord Keynes — Endogenous Money under the Gold Standard

[Marc] Lavoie makes an important and perhaps not well understood point about money under certain gold standard regimes:

Social Democracy For The 21St Century: A Post Keynesian Perspective
Endogenous Money under the Gold Standard
Lord Keynes

Another myth punctured.

Julia Pergolini — Not Your Grandma’s Wooden Nickel [complementary currencies]

The American idiom “Don’t take any wooden nickels!” predates the 1930s, but that era’s bank crises did lead to the actual use of wooden currency. When local banks failed or were inaccessible in the Pacific Northwest, some merchants and towns issued wooden money as a stopgap. The wooden nickels circulated as IOUs until the banks became accessible.

The principles behind the wooden nickel are still at work in today’s alternative currency movement. Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne, authors of Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity into Prosperity, argue that the more than 4,000 alternative and complementary currencies in circulation worldwide have the power to help communities solve their monetary woes. The currencies—minted as a complement to (rather than a replacement for) money backed by national governments and usually administered by an independent local agency—not only provide local liquidity in the event of a cash shortage, but can also boost local economies.

In These Times
Not Your Grandma’s Wooden Nickel
Julia Pergolini

Is the Airforce Suggesting They Choose Drone Pilots the Same Way We Choose Politicians and Lobbyists? ... Select for sociopaths?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Drone pilot burnout triggers call for recruiting overhaul

The show must go on. Gotta keep stocks up for the drone makers and political bribes flowing to the [Immoral] Systems Caucus. Why don't we hear those guys demanding drone austerity?

There's Public Purpose in austerely draining all other options in favor of drones? In other species, drones are expendable, and thrown out to die every year, after political sex (or even before, if austerity really bites).

Paul Bloom — The Baby In The Well: The case against empathy

The case is against empathy as the sole explanation for morality, although it does figure prominently in a comprehensive moral theory.

The New Yorker
The Baby In The Well: The case against empathy
Paul Bloom
(h/t Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism)

See also Book Talk: Of apes and atheists - is empathy evolution? by Ed Stoddard at Reuters.

Peter Radford — The state of economics: Krugman is wrong

Where I disagree with Krugman in his blog today is his references to the economics profession.

In his discussion this morning he is critical of a defense of the hedge fund managers made by Jesse Eisinger. That defense rests on the notion that economists have no clue about the economy as demonstrated by their inability to predict the bubble and subsequent collapse. There were, of course, many economists who did predict the bubble, but they were not influential enough to have an impact. They remain mostly without influence due to their being outside the profession’s orthodox traditions. Krugman, however, defends the profession against Eisinger’s criticism, and this is where he goes wrong.

It does not matter that some economists were correct. The central orthodoxy of the profession, the source of most advice to policy makers and business people, and the basis of most commonly taught textbooks, totally missed both the possibility and then the existence of the bubble. Economics was horribly wrong. It hasn’t recovered since. Instead it is stuck in an unproductive self-examination that has yet to have much impact. Those who were wrong still pronounce and influence policy. They continue unabashedly to teach and perpetuate their errors. The profession, such as it is, is splintered into ideological warring camps making no progress towards a newer or more complete understanding of actual economies where things like asset price bubbles can, and evidently do, exist.

In short economics is a mess and is completely deserving of the skepticism Eisinger attributes to the hedge fund managers.

Real-World Economics Review Blog
The state of economics: Krugman is wrong
Peter Radford

Randy Wray — Deriving the Kalecki Profits Equation

Economonitor — Great Leap Forward
Ratings Agencies Still Clueless, Threaten To Downgrade Uncle Sam
November 8, 2012

L. Randall Wray |Professor of Economics, UMKC

(h/t y in the comments)

Here's the derivation.

Good to remind ourselves of this periodically.

4 Minute News from Suspicious Observers

Interesting daily news channel from Suspicious Observers that I've been trying to get in the habit of checking  out several times a week.

Good review of daily major tectonic, atmospheric, and solar system events condensed into a short video format.





"Economics" or "house law" should be tuned into the operation of these types of natural systems, THAT WE HAVE NO CONTROL OVER, and be engaged in the science of how we can design and calibrate our REAL responses to the environmental variation and often environmental destruction that occurs due to the phenomenon that the folks here at Suspicious Observers chronicle daily.

Instead, we see the economics academe trying to "model" our human economic systems that WE HAVE ABSOLUTE CONTROL OVER like they are trying to "predict the weather" or similar absurd activities like the world class disgraced morons that they are.

Barry Eichengreen — Open-Access Economics

Lessons to be gleaned from the Rogoff & Reinhart debacle if economic analysis is to continue to be taken seriously.

Project Syndicate
Open-Access Economics
Barry Eichengreen | Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former senior policy adviser at the International Monetary Fund

priceman — To Those Celebrating Their Proud Ignorance of the President's Austerity

MMT proponent priceman calls out ignorance and anti-intellectualism on the left.

Daily Kos — Money and Public Purpose
To Those Celebrating Their Proud Ignorance of the President's Austerity
priceman for The Amateur Left

Marshall Auerback on Japan and China

But the trickle could soon turn into a flood. The speculators of the world have been told by the new head of the BOJ, Haruhiko Kuroda, that they can now speculate with borrowed yen which has not only no cost but no currency risk. The borrowings, then, could be infinite. The foreigners increased their holdings of Japanese Government Bonds from four percent to nine percent in the two years before the break. No doubt much of that was sold on the break.

And the BOJ may well lose control of the pace of the descent in both the yen and JGB market. The Japanese domestics with a lag might start to sell big time. The faster and farther the yen falls the more likely that will happen. The situation is now very unstable. A deeper fall in the yen is going to force all of emerging Asia into a devaluation and that is gong to cause big problems down the road in places like Europe, particularly Germany.

Pinetree Capital — Macrobits
Are Japanese Investors Starting To Yen For Foreign Currencies?
Marshall Auerback

Marshall speculates on China being forced into an RMB devaluation due to the falling yen.

Watch Out For A Possible RMB Devaluation