Gold Crash Signals End but End of What?
Whither gold?
Read more...Category Archives: Economic fundamentals
Obama Honors Thatcher with TVA “Privatization” Plan, Kicks Ordinary People in the Stomach Again
Nathan Tankus is a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus
President Obama adopted a reflective tone to mark the passing of Maggie Thatcher. Commenting on her death, he stated “the world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty.” In Obama’s proposed budget, we found out what the terms “freedom” and “liberty” mean: the freedom for the old to go hungry and the freedom of the poor to go cold.
Read more...Europe’s Stark Choice: Resignation or Revolution
Contributed by Don Quijones, a freelance writer and translator based in Barcelona, Spain. His blog, Raging Bull-Shit, is a modest attempt to challenge some of the wishful thinking and scrub away the lathers of soft soap peddled by our political and business leaders and their loyal mainstream media.
Catalonia’s riot police unleashed the untamed fury of the state upon the protestors and cleared Barcelona’s Plaza Catalunya of all occupants. A dense ring of shell-shocked people gathered around the square. I was one of them. A child riding on his father’s shoulders held up a sign: “No soy anti sistema, el sistema es anti yo,” it said (I’m not anti-system; the system is anti-me).
Read more...Why Germany (Mistakenly) Thinks it Can Kill Its Export Markets Through Austerity and Still Prosper
I’ve mentioned repeatedly that Germany wants contradictory things: it wants to stop financing its trade partners (the periphery countries in Europe) and yet wants to continue to run large trade surpluses. I took this to be a sign of German wishful thinking, or just politicians figuring the incoherent strategy can still be maintained for the duration of their time in office.
A post by Yanis Varoufakis show that the Germans at least have better delusions that I realized.
Read more...Troika Demands Another €6 Billion from Cyprus, Making “Rescue” Bigger Than GDP
Nothing like dramatic proof that austerity is a failure
Read more...The GFC is Dead, Long Live the GFC!
By David Llewellyn-Smith, founding publisher and former editor-in-chief of The Diplomat magazine, now the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics website. Cross posted from MacroBusiness
PIMCO famously coined the phrase to “the new normal” to capture what it saw was a structural change to global markets in the wake of the GFC. It was to be period defined by lower returns on assets owing to a combination of delevering, deglobalization, and reregulation. Today that looks like fantasy.
Read more...Obama Moves Forward with Cutting Social Security and Medicare as We Lecture Europe Otherwise
It must be really hard to be an Obama defender these days, at least if you are not on a big corporate payroll.
Read more...BBC on Child Poverty in the US
One of the ongoing frustrations in being (of necessity) a heavy consumer of what passes for media in the US is how insistent and disconnected the official narrative is with conditions on the ground. This BBC documentary gives a much-needed counterpoint.
Read more...Bill Black: The New York Times Thinks Bleeding Cyprus is “Strong Medicine”
Yves here. I’m overdue for a post on the propagandizing against Cyprus. Black describes one element of this barrage.
By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posed from Benzinga
I’m announcing the New York Times award for incompetence in macroeconomic reporting (IMR, pronounced like “screamer”).
Read more...Time to Look Behind the Curtain and See Who is Against Full Employment
Have you noticed how political leaders are nowhere near as upset about unemployment as they ought to be? What gives?
Read more...QE Forever?
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in a provocative column, argues that the monetary authorities are not going retreating from QE, and that might not be a bad thing. But in its current form, it probably is.
Read more...Euro-da-Fé
By Dan Kervick, who does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
(Brussels) Nonplussed by this week’s unemployment report showing the Eurozone jobless rate rising to an unprecedented 12%, members of the European Parliament and Europe’s national governments pressed ahead on Wednesday with passage of a stringent new package of austerity measures. Dubbed “hyperaustérité” or “Übersparpolitik” by its backers, the new program of ruthless cuts and social demolition promises to deliver even higher levels of joblessness, misery and hopelessness than has been achieved so far by earlier rounds of austerity.
Read more...Bill Greider on Why Paul Krugman Was So Wrong
A good piece in the Nation by Bill Greider, which focuses on Krugman’s long standing support of free trade, and how, contrary to his predictions, the results were not positive for ordinary American workers.
Read more...Richard Alford: Fed Policy – Old Wine in New Bottles
Yves here. This is an important post, in that it describes how the Fed, despite the unconventional look of some of its measures, is using more extreme variants of traditional policy approaches, and why that is not such a hot idea.
Read more...Destruction of Cyprus Economy Proceeding Ahead of Schedule
When I first heard about the Cyprus ritual execution bailout, I had thought that the widespread predictions that the island nation’s economy would contract by 20% to 30% over the next two years were off base.
