Yves here. This post, while informative, omits a critical piece of the calculus made by the West (or at least the US, in pushing Europe to fall into line) in its escalation of the conflict in Ukraine.
Read more...Is the “Consumer Confidence” index really a good proxy for the health of “the economy”?
Read more...I would have liked to see some table pounding and shouting about pseudo-scientific constructs like the “Natural Rate of Unemployment” — what’s “natural” about it? — or a heartfelt plea for a well-funded study to find out how the permanently disemployed actually eat, and find shelter, and stay alive — System D? — or even a dim recognition that regulating the economy by throwing people out of work is just as barbaric and inhumane as the medieval remedy of bloodletting.
Read more...ECB President Mario Draghi is recognizing that the recovery in the Euro area remains uniformly weak.
Read more...Railway privatization was sold to the public on the basis it would “provide better value for money for the public who travel by rail.” Who could have predicted it wouldn’t work out?
Read more...Yves here. Quite a few readers have contended that the commitment by the BRICS countries to create a developing country challenger to the World Bank represents a serious blow to the dollar hegemony.
While rising anger against the US use of its currency/banking system dominance to further geopolitical ends is well warranted, translating that into effective counter-measures is something else completely.
Read more...You’d think the housing market is in fine shape, based on the sizzling optimism of the National Association of Home Builders, which just released its Housing Market Index. It rose to 55 in August – above 50 means more builders view conditions as good than poor – the third month in a row of gains, and the highest level since January.
Think again.
Read more...As the recovery takes hold in the US, Europe appears stuck in a never-ending slump. With the ECB systematically undershooting its inflation target and recent signs that inflation expectations could become de-anchored, the bulk of commentators in the blogosphere are again calling for more monetary actions. Noticeably, some have completely lost hope in the ability of the European institutions to turn this situation around and are now calling for countries to simply break away from the EMU trap.
Read more...Yves here. While it’s not hard to imagine that war is bad for economies as well as living things, this post gives an overview of some of the costs that the proxy war in Ukraine is inflicting on the economy and hence on the population. Note that this tally does not include the impact of the efforts to render cities in the east uninhabitable by destroying water supplies and other critical infrastructure.
Read more...People have no money. So there’s no aggregate demand. So there’s no recovery.
Read more...The spectacle of insanely authoritarian policing in Ferguson, as well as media jitters over ISIS and ongoing reports of action in Gaza and Ukraine, has shifted attention a bit away from simply lousy economic results from Europe. That fragility could play in a nasty way into blowback from sanctions against Russia.
Read more...J.D Alt examines how far a community could get without private banks….and it’s less far than you probably think.
Read more...I have long complained that the likes of Paul Krugman have grossly misinterpreted the meaning of the term ‘liquidity trap’. These economists seem to think that we are currently in a liquidity trap despite the fact that yields on bonds are extremely low across the board.
Read more...Yves here. In contrast with the way that political repression is gradually becoming the new normal in America, Don Quijones chronicles how rapidly it is being put in place in Spain to curb protests against austerity and bank-favoring policies. The extreme form of shredding democracy to protect commercial interests was Chile, where as a writer put it, “People died so markets could be free.”
Read more...Even though there has been a big uptick in news stories on rising economic inequality, and more chatter among economists about the idea that high levels of inequality are associated with lower growth, much of the messaging has come from the Democrats desperate to use the one dog whistle that might rally their badly abused base. Even though inequality has risen under Obama, thanks to policies that favored rescuing banks and enriching the medical-industrial complex over helping ordinary citizens, the Democrats are all too willing to rely on their perceived lesser-evilism relative to the Republicans. After all, it was only Romney’s billionaire warts that kept Obama from what would otherwise have been a well-deserved 2012 defeat.
But while the Administration has been pushing inequality as a useful campaign theme (the signal was inviting Thomas Piketty to meet with Treasury Secretary Jack Lew), in parallel, it also appears that some of the expressions of concern about inequality among the policy classes are genuine.
Read more...