Simon Johnson wrote a remarkably blunt article for the Atlantic in May 2009 titled The Quiet Coup. In case you managed to miss it, it remains critically important reading. He provided an update of sorts in a New York Times column today.
Read more...Nothing could have been a more potent metaphor for the current investment climate than the headline, “Macau gambling revenue hits record $45 bn in 2013.”
Read more...A new Bloomberg story, Americans on Wrong Side of Income Gap Run Out of Means to Cope, is a zeitgeist indicator: the normally-well-insulated-from-realty investing classes have noticed that large swathes of what was once the middle class aren’t just downwardly mobile but are struggling.
Read more...f you come to San Francisco or Silicon Valley and look around, you’d arrive at the conclusion that California is booming, that companies jump through hoops to hire people, that they douse them with money, stock options, and free lunches. But in the rest of the state, the picture isn’t that rosy.
Read more...Yves here. We described the funding mismatch with Chinese wealth management products during the first liquidity crunch earlier in the year, but given that most readers aren’t familiar with these structures, it’s good to have another summary as to how they work and more discussion of why they pose a risk to the Chinese economy. They are troublingly similar to structured investment vehicles, which were one of the detonators of the credit crisis in the US and UK.
Read more...Yves here. I thought this essay on money was useful in and of itself, and it also contains a useful primer on the views of major schools of thought in orthodox economics.
Read more...Yves here. As Wolf describes, in our brave new work of super-low interest rates, the 10 year Treasury breaching 3% was regarded with fear and loathing by the officialdom. Now with the Fed’s reassurances that the Fed funds rate will remain at just about zero for the foreseeable future, the stock market has popped the Champagne. But will the impact of the withdrawal of support for bond prices impact stocks sooner than the current rally would have you believe?
Read more...Yves here. One of the big problems with the growth v. “de-growth” debate is how terrible our measures of productive activity are.
Read more...Lambert here: This should be fun!
By Vincent Huang*, a graduate student in the Economics Department at UMKC. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives.
The discrepancy between the orthodox (primarily neoclassical) and the heterodox (Post Keynesian, Chartalism, MMT, etc.) schools of thought rests fundamentally in their different perception in the way the capitalist economy functions. Such discrepancy can be described in the contrast between C – M – C’ and M – C – M’.
Read more...The Fed’s announcing the taper was supposed to be an earth-shaking event. But that actually sorta happened last summer when Bernanke first used the “t” word and interest and mortgage rates made an impressive upward march in a short period of time.
From my considerable remove, what was noteworthy about the Fed’s announcement yesterday is how terrified it seems to be of creating an upset.
Read more...A look at some predictions for Europe in 2014.
Read more...An interview with Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, on the Renegade Economists radio/podcast
Read more...Iceland is widely portrayed as a post-bubble success story, but the reality is more conplex.
Read more...Yves here. Even though Yanis Varoufakis has savaged the Trokia’s austerity policies that are driving Greece and other periphery countries into economic and social distress as well as fueling the rise of extreme right wing parties, some readers of this blog have criticized him for advocating reforms to pull the Eurozone out of its nosedive […]
Read more...What worries me most about the world today, in the last weeks before Christmas and New Year’s Day 2014, is that all the plans we make for our futures and more importantly our children’s futures are DOA.
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