Edward Harrison here. Yves is away so I am doing the links today. I’m trying to make it a good mix of economic and non-economy stuff, so I hope NC readers appreciate that. I especially liked the psychology links because of what they signify about the way to make economic and political arguments. Enjoy.
German Security Lapse: Communications Error Enabled Explosive Package To Go Unchecked Spiegel
Lamont: Ireland ‘will be bailed-out’ BBC
Man Who Joked About Bombing Airport via Twitter Convicted Mashable
Matt Taibbi: Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners Matt Taibii
Google Offers Staff Engineer $3.5 Million To Turn Down Facebook Offer Tech Crunch
Jeremy Grantham has ‘already started to sell’ Credit Writedowns
Is there a zero bound? The “mysterious” world of negative nominal interest rates New Economic Perspectives
Moody’s didn’t get the memo re: China FT Alphaville
Let the Games Begin: Bowles-Stimson, Defense, and the Way Forward Capital Gains and Games
New Rules for Hot Money Nouriel Roubini
Moral heuristics, public policy, and self-defeating tribalism and Tragedy of the technocrats Steve Randy Waldman
Where the Bubbles Are Jesse Eisinger
Balanced Arguments Are More Persuasive PsyBlog
What should we do about cannabis? VoxEU
The Influence of Fleeting Attraction PsyBlog
Removing Your Personal Information From Google Search Engine Land
Wirtschaftsboom: Brüderle wirbt für kräftiges Lohnplus Spiegel
Capital controls won’t stop inflows beyondbrics
Install Android 2.2 Over the Air on a Jailbroken iPhone 3G Lifehacker
A golden opportunity for monetary reform Robert Skidelsky, FT
Interview With German Finance Minister Schäuble: ‘The US Has Lived on Borrowed Money for Too Long’ Spiegel
Here are three I missed at first but wanted you to see. Thanks, Richard.
Tomgram: Juan Cole, The Asian Century? Juan Cole
Vikram Pandit Has No Clothes Simon Johnson
18 comments
Comments are closed.
Just wanted to say it was great to see Edward on BBC this morning (except for that drilling in the background :)
Yeah, that drilling was really, really irritating, wasn’t it. Cheers.
Probably Matt Taibbi’s best article so far, amazing read.
anybody know what happened to Mike Shedlock’s blog? this is the current message
Blog has been removed
Sorry, the blog at globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs.
Wow. I’ll ping Mike and see if I can get any info. A great reason not to team up with Blogger and Google, by the way.
My guess is he went on some type of blogging rampage after the Tea Party came out in favor of earmarks and massively increased government spending. He sure did buy into the Tea Party BS.
Great mix Edward !
In the Natives are Restless department, I wanted to post a follow-on to yesterday’s comments on the f-u Deficit Commission piece.
[snipped from:http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/11/over_50_000_students_protest_in0
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, you wrote recently in the Huffington Post that protest works and that this is having an effect on the government. Could you explain?
JOHANN HARI: Well, one of the things that’s really inspiring about this is how big and how inventive the protest and fightback movement is. And I think this is really helpful for American viewers, where the only fightback that we’re seeing over here from you guys seems to be from this massive exercise in false consciousness, the Tea Party, where people claim to be standing up frontally and they’re in fact installed in office later, stooges for Wall Street and other vested interests. Here, there’s been a much more interesting fightback.
I’ll give you a good example. One of the biggest corporations in Britain is called Vodafone, a cell phone company. And for over six years now, they have been basically refusing to pay taxes on a massive part of their business. They’ve been claiming that it’s routed through Luxembourg, where they pay almost no tax. But it isn’t. And Private Eye, the investigative magazine, calculated they had racked up a bill of six billion pounds to the equivalent of the IRS here. That would be enough to cancel all the cuts in housing benefit that are going to force 200,000 people out of London alone this year. And there was, when this came—but what happened is when the Conservatives came to office, George Osborne, David Cameron’s finance minister, effectively canceled their outstanding tax bill. He reduced it to a sixth of what was legally due. So, it’s a really striking illustration of the priorities: you know, give a massive tax cut to an exceptionally rich corporation and crack down on the poor. Now, when this was revealed by Private Eye and my column and a few other places, including the Financial Times, there was a spontaneous mass movement of real anger among young people. They organized on Twitter, and they did something really inventive: they went to the Vodafone stores all across Britain on a specified day and shut them down. They said, “If you want to operate on our streets, in our country, you pay our taxes.”
Good to see you here, Ed. Maybe give Yves some web design advice :)
Yes, we need to get Yves on this! By the way, here’s a post I just saw that I like:
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/11/12/looking-at-the-deficit-commissions-tax-plans/
The WSJ has become very politicized in its reporting. You cannot read the news there without a filter now that Murdoch is in control.
Re the moral perplexity of the technocrats (“of the center”, no less….):
That’s pretty funny, watching these prissy mandarins scratch their pointy heads over, god forbid, “morality”. (Or “moral heuristics”, which I imagine is a more congenial term for them.)
It all reminds me of the German staff officer in 1918 who slapped his head saying, “And to think all along there were these ideas we were fighting against, that we never even thought of. And that’s why we’re losing the war!”
Yes, when your entire system is nothing but organized crime, your elites nothing but gutter thugs at a costume ball, and your job in the ivory tower is to justify and abet crime with academic drivel like “economics”, and your whole life has been devoted to burrowing ever more deeply into the fissures of the wonkish embellishment of robbery, enslavement, and murder, I guess it does get a little confusing when anyone starts behaving in the exotic ways you can imperfectly model only according to your “moral heuristics”.
That sure makes things harder on the technocrats of corporatism, AKA the economic hard right, or, sorry, “the center.”
Video of Florida Robo-Signers:
http://bit.ly/cH82cN
Re: Hare Schaublechen:
Since 1945 the US Armed Forces have been the de facto guarantors of order in the ‘World at Large.’ Commerce of the sort discussed in Der Spiegel, dis blog, and all over the ostensibly civilized World can’t happen in a disorderly world. Please take note of the end of the Roman Empire and the Medieval culture that followed. Although US forces are subsidized directly and indirectly by other nations, US taxpayers pay a huge annual fee for the forces.
The US has occupied a privileged position in the world. Our financial pecadillos have been overlooked.
Is this a fair deal? This reader thinks it’s been about level. (And yes, there has been plenty of blood and dirty dealing in the deal.)
Schauble’s hectoring comes from a nation that brought the world to the brink of complete calamity 70 years ago, AND was one of the chief beneficiaries of America’s armed largesse. And one whose banks have behaved every bit as irresponsibly as our own. As such, it’s particularly galling.
This is NOT a defense of American triumphalism. It was the irresponsible adventurism of Bush/Cheney et al that soured the tacit agreement that the US would be subsidized as the world’s police force. We’re paying the price. Including the spectacle of Schaublechen’s hectoring.
‘Fair deal’
Addendum: the bargain has been a fair deal for NATO members, the ANZAC, Taiwan, S.Korea, Japan, and elites around the world. It’s NOT a fair bargain for the often voiceless, off-to-side masses whose labor and resources have been exploited by us, the privileged.
I liked the fact that Der Spiegel said “You can’t possibly believe what you’re saying.” to Herr Schaeuble. Can you imagine that in American media?
Re Taibbi’s latest,
Here’s hoping “Too Big for Fraud” goes more viral than ‘Vampire Squid”.
My dream video clip for is a sitdown with Yves, Taibbi, and Bill Black hosted by Ratigan, (on NPRs This American Life, for good measure, ha).
Juan Cole’s article on Tomgram, “The Asian Century?” about Obama’s mostly fruitless trip is rather sad. It paints a fairly tragic impression of American decline and irrelevance. Rising Asian powers “chart their own course even if in public they continue to humor a somewhat addled and infirm Uncle Sam.”
America’s own elite are increasingly detached from the country’s wellbeing even as they harness it militarily for private gain. Thus the US serves its primary purpose as an arms dealer and mercenary force. Ouch.
Outstanding article by Matt Taibbi! So glad he connected with April Charney and Mr. Kowalski who are earnestly trying to fight the good fight at Jacksonville Legal Aid. Since Taibbi explains the issues so clearly, I am hopeful that more people (including witless judges) will understand that the rule of law is at stake here.
World Chaos – Global Success Story?
http://www.thedailybell.com/1521/World-Chaos-Global-Success-Story.html