Yves here. It is gratifying to see economists take up the question of when laws work, and perhaps even more important, how to make laws work even when they conflict with social norms. In typical economists’ fashion, they contend that as far as businesses work, fines work but more rules don’t. On further examination, that conclusion may not be well founded.
Read more...A new book is causing a stir in New Zealand. It’s called “Dirty Politics“. From the blurb:
Early in 2014 Nicky Hager was leaked a large number of email and online conversations from Cameron Slater’s Whale Oil blog. Many of these were between Slater and his personal allies on the hard right, revealing an ugly and destructive style of politics. But there were also many communications with the prime minister’s office and other Cabinet ministers in the National Government. They show us a side of Prime Minister John Key and his government of which most New Zealanders are completely unaware.
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Climate-change denialism is but a species of externality denialism.
Read more...Yves here. China is cracking down on flight capital, starting with Australian banks. As the most casual readers of the business press know, the international wealthy, particularly Russians and Chinese, have been using residential real estate in “world cities” as their favorite lockbox. As we’ve written, it’s stunning to see how much real estate has been hoarded in London. Mayfair was depopulated during the petrodollar recycling of the 1970s; now much of Belgravia, Chelsea near Sloan Square, and Kensington are visibly underpopulated. Vancouver has been bid to the sky by Chinese flight capital. New York is a big destination for Russian and Chinese investors, and Chinese money has been pouring into Australian real estate.
The Chinese move may be an admission of stress on the financial system.
Read more...Robert Cowley, CEO of fake bank Investment Suisse, goes to jail for fraud
Read more...Back in the late 1980’s, Rupert Murdoch’s latest fiendish plan for world media domination (there’s a new one every decade or so) centred on pay TV. But as the 1990s rolled in, the media baron focused on a new world to conquer: crypto.
Read more...As anticipated, citizens in the nations that the US has been pressuring to join the toxic TransPacific partnership are taking note of stiffening opposition here.
Read more...Yves here. While this piece provides a solid overview of the fallen status of cars, it misses an obvious contributor to the lack of enthusiasm for them among the young: with weak incomes and in many cases, heavy student debt loads, an automobile is too large an expense relative to what they get out of it.
Read more...How a British Carbon Credit Pusher Got a Listing on a Danish Stock Exchange, Brokered by a New Zealand Financial Company Run by an Australian Residing in Switzerland
Read more...Macrobusiness flagged a short interview with Ann Pettifor, a highly-regarded international finance expert who is the Director of Policy Research for Macroeconomics on the ABC program The Business. Pettifor argues that economists are responsible for the bias today to over-rely on monetary policy to solve problems that can only be addressed by government spending. Leaning too heavily on monetary policy to try to address weak growth simply generates asset bubbles.
Read more...Yves here. While some of the concerns in this post are specific to Australia, they can be readily translated to other property regimes. The part that is missing, however, is that the US relies on “real estate taxes” which includes the value of the buildings on the land. Michael Hudson has advocated taxing land much more heavily, since unlike taxing capital or labor, it does not burden the economy with higher costs . As he explains in a 2009 interview:
Read more...Yves here. Steve Keen sent this note along with his post:
The journalist David Hirst was both one of the few to warn of the crisis, and someone who became a good friend. He died last week, as a long term consequence of internal injuries sustained about ten years ago in the USA, when he tried to stop a woman being bashed.
His spouse asked me to see if I could get the attached published on NC, which was one of his favourite sites.
If you know David’s writing, you’ll understand what a loss this is. And if you missed his prescient and incisive commentary before and during the crisis, I hope you’ll sample his work below and get a sense of what a talent he was. Either way, I trust you’ll join me in sending condolences to David’s widow and his family, as well as to Steve.
Read more...By Richard Smith, who would be a member of the International Consortium of Interfering Bloggers, if there was such a thing.
Read more...Dave here. Big apologies, apparently I cross-posted the wrong post. This is going to get me thrown out of guest-posting school!
This article is the second half of a two-part series. To see the first half, click here. Cross-posted from Business Spectator.
Krugman’s explanation of our crisis today is straight from the pages of John Hicks’s 1937 explanation of the Great Depression (though curiously, Hicks himself didn’t mention the actual state of the global economy at all in his 1937 paper, which attempted to explain the relationship between interest rates, and real output in goods and services and money markets.
Read more...Wow, this is ugly, and these two videos help explain why.
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