A U.S.-Saudi Move to Lower Oil Prices to Hurt Russia?
Could the U.S. unleash a flood of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve that would drive down prices in order to punish Russia?
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Yanis Varoufakis: Think Big, Think Bold – A Green New Deal
Yves here. One of the common frustrations expressed by the NC commentariat is that we spend a lot of time on diagnosis and not as much on solutions. I actually don’t think our emphasis on forensics and analysis is misplaced. Too often, people are uncomfortable with examining deep-seated problems and thus rush to devise remedies that are incomplete or worse, counterproductive.
A second frustration, which I sympathize with, is that many of the solutions recommended by economists to our current problems (income disparity, high unemployment, increasing looting of the private sector and government) is based on restoring growth, which will make redistribution and other measures less contentious. Readers correctly point out that more growth is a 20th century remedy, when the 21st century is faces with global warming (meaning an need to start containing and better yet, reducing energy consumption) and resource constraints.
Yanis Varoufakis addresses both issues in his outline of what he calls a “Green New Deal”.
Read more...Has Anglo-American Capitalism Run Out of Strategies?
In this Real News Network interview, George Irvin, research professor at the University of London takes a broad historical perspective to show how the rise of a low-wage, debt driven economy and the pressure to reduce the role of government have painted Anglo-Saxon capitalism in a corner.
Read more...These Charts Show What is Wrong With American Capitalism
For the last 30 years, neoliberals have fixated on a simple program: “Get government out of the way,” which meant reduce taxes and regulations. Business will invest more, which will produce a higher growth rate and greater prosperity for all. The belief was that unfettered capitalism could solve all ills.
That’s not how this children’s story is turning out.
Read more...Mathew D. Rose: Hello European Deflation! Good-bye Periphery!
What do the Catholic Church and the Eurozone have in common? More than one thinks
Read more...Joe Firestone: Progressives Re-Arrange the Deck Chairs for Obama’s Austerity Budget
With friends like the austerity-loving Congressional Progressive Caucus, who needs enemies?
Read more...Philip Pilkington: Thinking Makes It So – The IMF Bailout of the UK in 1976 and the Rise of Monetarism
Monetarism began it’s rise to world prominence in the ever-conservative Bundesbank in 1974. But it would be the government of Margaret Thatcher in the UK, elected in 1979, that would truly launch monetarism in central banking. After Thatcher’s monetarist experiment undertaken between 1979 and 1984 every economics student would be taught to recite the various monetary aggregates by heart for at least a decade or two.
This is what accounts for the monetarist bent we see in the economists of the last generation. Basically any economist trained between roughly 1980 and 1995 would be heavily exposed to monetarist dogma. And only those that read alternative accounts of money creation — namely, the theory of endogenous money — would be fully immunised. This explains, for example, why certain economists that champion Keynesian policies — like Paul Krugman — actually speak in monetarist tones.
Read more...Neo-liberalism Expressed as Simple Rules
And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. For some definition of “we.”
Read more...Gaius Publius: Neoliberalism, “Just Desserts,” and the Post-Climate-Crisis Economy
Gaius examines the connections between neoliberalism and the convulsions that climate change will bring to the world.
Read more...The Jobs Report Covering February 2014: Seasonal Signs of Life But Nowhere Near Full Employment
Yves here. Due to a communication failure between Lambert and me, you are getting Hugh’s report on the monthly employment release late. Apologies!
Read more...Joe Firestone: No, Virginia, the Austerity Era Is Not Over
If the President’s budget were enacted by Congress, and OMB’s projections over the next decade hold, it would almost certainly mean economic stagnation punctuated by recession over the next decade. Would it also mean austerity?
Read more...Tax Havens Make US and Europe Look Poorer than They Are, Exaggerate Size of “Global Imbalances”
Peculiarly, despite the importance of tax havens, a pathbreaking paper published in 2013 by Gabriel Zucman of the Paris School of Economics, The Missing Wealth of Nations: Are Europe and the U.S. Net Debtors or Net Creditors? (hat tip Dikaios Logos) has received perilous little attention. Perhaps that’s because, among other things, it undercuts the Bernanke-flattering claim that “global imbalances” were a major driver of the financial crisis.
Read more...Don Quijones: Corporate Colonialism – Winners and Losers of Global ‘Free’ Trade
I think of globalisation as a light which shines brighter and brighter on a few people, and the rest are in darkness, wiped out
Read more...Randy Wray: MMT and External Constraints
To fix or to float, that is the question.
Read more...Wage Shares Fall in the US, Germany and Many Other Countries While Financial Shocks Hit Emerging Economies
ves here. This Real News Network interview with Yilmaz Akyuz, formerly the Director of the Division on Globalization and Development Strategies at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), describes how the problems that produced the financial crisis have morphed into new, no less troubling problems. One key part of this discussion focuses on how China has adapted to its considerably smaller trade surplus, and why having Germany as the new excessive exporter poses new perils to the global economy.
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