For a while now I have been arguing that Europe’s policies for reducing the public debts of fiscally stressed member-states can be described as a Ponzi austerity scheme. In this post I attempt precisely to define ‘Ponzi austerity’.
Read more...Yves here. As Hugh said via e-mail:
Read more...The report is actually two reports fundamentally at odds with each other.
It’s like taking a hammer to a tomato. One report says the tomato got smashed. The other report says the tomato got bigger. Which are you going to believe?
If a bad job market wasn’t damaging enough, the cost of paying off student loans does much more harm to the long-term prospects of young people than is commonly realized.
Read more...Yves here. This article is a portrait of official denial, which is then dutifully taken up and amplified by the media (well, not universally, but widely, as Ilargi’s post also demonstrates). It corroborates one of my pet theories: that we are at the end of an economic paradigm. The powers that be lack the will and imagination to do anything other than patch it up and put it back into operation. That simply assures more frequent breakdowns until the system is beyond repair.
Read more...Yves here. As much as the post below is a very useful recap of data in terms of the impact of QE, I need to hector “Unconventional Economist” for being pretty conventional. His headline question, whether intentionally or not, reinforces the notion that it was reasonable to think that QE, or super low rates generally (as in ZIRP) would lead to increase lending….
Read more...By Yanis Varoufakis, professor of economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his blog
On 30th October, in its Report to Congress on Economic and Exchange Rate Policies, the US Treasury took a swipe at Germany, accusing it of exporting economic depression to the rest of Eurozone and, indeed, to the global economy. The German Finance Ministry responded the next day with a statement that: “There are no imbalances in Germany that need correction. On the contrary, the innovative German economy contributes significantly to global growth through exports and the import of components for finished products.” There are few occasions in any argument where one side is completely right and the other comprehensively wrong. This is one of them!
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...As Lambert says, get a cup of coffee, or maybe two. This is a long piece, but that is in part because it includes many damning vignettes from the Eurocrisis, so this is the antithesis of a dry read.
Read more...By Gerald Minack, a former global equity strategist for Morgan Stanley. Cross posted from MacroBusiness
Rising political polarisation in the US has gone hand-in-hand with rising income inequality, falling top-end tax rates, lower taxes on business, rising leverage and higher asset prices. These trends may be coincidental, but they seem to reinforce each other.
Read more...Yves here. This Real News Network interview with Yilmaz Akyüz, chief economist at the South Centre and former director and chief economist at UNCTAD, focuses on the conundrum of the Fed’s need to exit from QE from an international perspective, and layers in the further complication that China is not going to keep up its investment spending at the same level. Akyüz argues that “….we have problems at the end of the crisis which are as big as the ones during the crisis, and these problems are largely due to mismanagement of the crisis, particularly in the U.S. and Europe.”
But I’m not sure it’s as simple as mismanagement.
Read more...Yves here. This post by Michael Bordo and Howard James finds significant parallels between the 1920s and the economic and policy conflicts facing the Eurozone, which does not speak well for them being resolved tidily.
Read more...I hope Naked Capitalism readers will check out our new article at Aljazeera, The shutdown is over, but the austerity fight continues.
Read more...The latest Bill Moyers broadcast features the widely-respected lead editorial writer of the Financial Times, Martin Wolf, who discusses the Federal shutdown/debt default negotiations and the prospects for the coming budget talks.
Read more...You cannot make this stuff up.
Obama gave his usual adult talking to the children, meaning American citizens, type of speech to mark the cease-fire in the budget battle so that the two sides can work out a peace accord. These speeches are unpleasant to read because the blarney is so thick it could be packaged and sold as an industrial lubricant. But underneath the greasy veneer is the message that the Important People in the Beltway, meaning Obama, Democrats, and “responsible Republicans” in Congress must dedicate themselves to the pursuit of prosperity…of the 1%.
Read more...A lot of readers, when we’ve discussed the budget/shutdown/debt ceiling negotiations, have done the equivalent of declaring it all to be kabuki, that the fix is in.
While I have no doubt that any resolution of this impasse is certain to make matters worse for what is left of the endangered species known as the American middle class, what is going on in DC is not a pretty scripted stagefight.
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