Yves here. It’s hardly uncommon for big international pow-wows like the G20 to produce grand-sounding statements that when read carefully call for unthreatening, which usually means inconsequential, next steps. But this G20 just past was revealing, in a bad way, about the state of international political economy.
Read more...Executive rentiers and their media lackeys are invoking the canard that they can’t find decent investment opportunities. The truth is that they’ve exhausted the first and second lines of value extraction, that of labor-squeezing and disinvestment, and aren’t prepared to accept the lower but still attractive returns of taking real economy risks.
Read more...“Privatization” and “public-private-partnerships” for infrastructure and other public assets are scams driven by private greed and public cowardice.
Read more...Your humble blogger may be reading more than is warranted into the synchronistic timing of stories in two different newspapers about financing highway construction. But it nevertheless looks sus.
Read more...How the Troika is overriding national constitutions and popular will to strip-mine Europe’s periphery countries on behalf of banks.
Read more...Economists Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson discuss how oligarchs and the Russians will be the true beneficiaries of an IMF bailout of Ukraine.
Read more...All this talk about the 99% versus the 1%? I say the easiest—and likely the most useful—thing to do is just forget the 1%.
Read more...By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Here’s something to listen to with your morning coffee; it’s a lecture on co-operatives, with Q&A following, by Gar Alperowitz at the New Economy Summit in Boone, NC, in April of this year. I like the title, because the agency in “What Then Must We Do” is explicit, in contrast (intentional or not) to [Anglophone usage of] Lenin’s famous “What Is To Be Done” (sez who?) where lack of agency signals the Bolshevik’s intent to tell people what was to be done. We know how that movie ended; there were a lot of movies that ended that way in the 20th Century. The video:
Read more...I’m normally not big on “one chart says it all” posts, but this one is so striking I made an exception.
Read more...Yves here. This article focuses on the critically important of how the real danger to the economic welfare of young people is not the cost of retirement programs like Social Security and Medicare but the failure to generate enough jobs now and invest in infrastructure and education.
Read more...Yves here. Mirabile dictu! A VoxEU article discusses, admittedly in suitably dense economese, how economists create and enforce biases against taxation by using terminology that presupposes that it’s bad. And as Lambert noted after he saw it went up here: “That post got Tyler Cowen really ticked off, so it must be good.”
Read more...Michael Hudson was so incensed by what he called a “Blairesque” speech by Obama on Wednesday that he took it upon himself to comment on its all-too-frequent sleights of hand and outright fabrications
Read more...Michael Hudson looks at the implications of ending QE in the context of the past 30 years of bubble blowing.
Read more...By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus
Now that pubic libraries have “done their jobs” (in FIRE sector terms) they can do one more thing for finance and real estate: be killed for private sector fun and profit.
Read more...By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus
Since the Reagan/Thatcher era, it is common to view politics over infrastructure as simply a battle between right wing forces attempting to privatize infrastructure and others trying to defend it (I covered the latest attack by President Obama on the TVA). However, this is only the recent history of United States infrastructure policy.
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