Mr. Market was not happy with today’s jobs report. While it was not that bad, the ADP report earlier in the week had led investors to hope for better details.
Read more...How the IMF has been devising even nastier versions of its austerity hairshirt in recent years.
Read more...Yves here. Das wrote this post to commemorate the anniversary of the collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, which killed over 1100 garment workers.
Read more...Yves here. This piece by Bill Black not only does a great job of kneecapping some typically poor MSM reporting, but it’s also valuable as a high-level overview of the insanity of European economic policies.
Read more...Yves here. Michael Hudson gives a short, persuasive explanation of the real reason the US and the IMF are bailing out the Ukraine. Hint: it’s not the reason you read in the American press.
Read more...Some people often ask why I complain about Krugman. “Hey Phil, Krugman is a good guy. He likes government spending. You like government spending. Therefore you must like Krugman,” says our budding young Socrates. Well, I’ll tell you why….
Read more...Could the U.S. unleash a flood of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve that would drive down prices in order to punish Russia?
Read more...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...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...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...What do the Catholic Church and the Eurozone have in common? More than one thinks
Read more...With friends like the austerity-loving Congressional Progressive Caucus, who needs enemies?
Read more...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...And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. For some definition of “we.”
Read more...Gaius examines the connections between neoliberalism and the convulsions that climate change will bring to the world.
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