Category Archives: Economic fundamentals

Philip Pilkington: The Japanese Stimulus – Will It Work?

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil

There’s a lot of talk flying around about the Japanese stimulus. Some appears to be misguided, some appears to be sensible.

Joe Firestone: The Great Austerity Swindle!

By Joe Firestone, Ph.D., Managing Director, CEO of the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI), and Director of KMCI’s CKIM Certificate program. He has taught political science as the graduate and undergraduate level and blogs regularly at Corrente, Firedoglake and Daily Kos as letsgetitdone. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

Our Congresspeople, corporate CEOs, tea partiers, most economists, Pete Peterson’s minions, and even our President, tell us that we’re running out of money; and that we can’t keep running huge deficits, and increasing our national debt forever, because eventually, our creditors will just cease lending us our dollars back….

Dan Kervick: US Double-Dip Death Watch Continues

By Dan Kervick, who does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

I thought I would take a break from the latest outburst of debt ceiling mania to call attention once again to the bipartisan plan of budget austerity and recession-tempting economic devastation that will be implemented in March in one form or another, and from which the debt ceiling debate is designed to distract us.

IMF Admits More Mistakes

By Delusional Economics, who is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.

I’ve commented numerous times over the the last 3 years that I considered the IMF’s position on Europe dangerously misguided as I felt it was based more on ideology than evidential analysis (see more here). The results have been so bad that the IMF is being forced to admit to the errors of its ways.

Latvia’s Economic Disaster as a Neoliberal Success Story: A Model for Europe and the US?

By Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson. Michael Hudson was Professor of Economics and Director of Research at the Riga Graduate School of Law. He is a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City. His latest book is Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents. Jeffrey Sommers is visiting faculty at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. He is an Associate Professor of Political Economy & Public Policy at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. The authors have advised Latvian politicians and government officials up to the Prime Minister level. Both have published extensively in the Latvian press.

A generation ago the Chicago Boys and their financial supporters applauded General Pinochet’s anti-labor Chile as a success story, thanks mainly to its transformation of their Social Security into Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) that almost universally were looted by the employer grupos by the end of the 1970s.

Today’s most highly celebrated anti-labor success story is Latvia. Latvia is portrayed as the country where labor did not fight back, but simply emigrated politely and quietly. Can this really be a model for the United States or Europe’s remaining social democracies? Or is it simply a cruel experiment that cannot readily be emulated in larger countries un-traumatized by Soviet era memories of occupation?

Michael Hudson: America’s Deceptive 2012 Fiscal Cliff, Part III– Why Today’s Fiscal Squeeze Imposes Needless Austerity

By 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. His latest book is “The Bubble and Beyond.”

The financial sector promises that privatizing roads and ports, water and sewer systems, bus and railroad lines (on credit, of course) is more efficient and will lower the prices charged for their services. The reality is that the new buyers put up rent-extracting tollbooths on the infrastructure being sold. Their break-even costs include the high salaries and bonuses they pay themselves, as well as interest and dividends to their creditors and backers, spending on stock buy-backs and political lobbying.

Public borrowing creates a dependency that shifts economic planning to Wall Street and other financial centers. When voters resist, it is time to replace democracy with oligarchy.

Deprogramming Progressives Indoctrinated into Supporting Austerity

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. Jointly posted with New Economic Perspectives

A little bit of economics can be a truly terrible thing, for the introductory classes in micro and macro-economics are the most dogmatic and myth-filled part of the neo-liberal curriculum. Dogmas that have been falsified for 75 years (such as austerity) are taught as revealed truth. The poor indoctrinated student is then launched into the world “knowing” that austerity is the answer and that mass unemployment and prolonged recessions are small prices to be paid (by others) to achieve the holy grail of a balanced budget. Students are taught that national budgets are really just like household budgets. These dogmas are not simply false, they are self-destructive and cruel. Neo-liberal economics is so bad and has gone downhill at such a rapid rate that it now worships the economic analog to bleeding patients – austerity – as a response to a Great Recession. Millions of people are indoctrinated annually into believing this long-falsified nonsense, and that includes people who consider themselves progressives.

Yanis Varoufakis: Will the Real Economy Rebound, Following Wall Street’s Resuscitation? And What of Europe?

By Yanis Varoufakis, a professor of economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his blog

Another Spanish newspaper, El Confidencial, were kind enough to interview me on the global and European crisis, on the occasion of the Global Minotaur‘s Spanish translation-edition. Here is the interview, in English (the actual article will appear in Spanish, of course). Read on…

Conservation Not Technology will be our Savior – Chris Martenson (Part 2)

In part 2 of our interview with Chris Martenson, economist and editor of the popular financial website Peak Prosperity, Chris talks about:

• How tight oil is being oversold
• An idea for solving the storage and bBattery problem
• How price, not technology, has unlocked boom reserves
• Why it’s about conservation now, not new technology
• Why we should be concerned about another financial meltdown
• Future opportunities for investors
• Why exporting natural gas is a terrible idea
• Why Governments should help renewable Energy innovation
• Why net energy returns are the MOST important thing

Wolf Richter: A Revolt Against Corporate Welfare Programs For Multinationals In France

“Paradox” is what the New York Times called France’s ability to attract more foreign investment than any country other than China and the US. A paradox because it shouldn’t. Investors should be scared off by labor laws, tax rates, the cost of labor, and mud-wrestling bouts over nationalizing some industrial plants. But turns out, multinational corporations pay practically no income taxes in France. And it has reached the boiling point.