Don Quijones: “Uncreative” Destruction – The Troika’s Hostile Takeover of Europe
How the Troika is overriding national constitutions and popular will to strip-mine Europe’s periphery countries on behalf of banks.
Read more...Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class
Planned Obsolescence Disguised as Innovation, Oligopoly Disguised as a Free Market, and the Enrichment of Oligarchs
We are delighted to feature this post from Roy Poses, who with his colleagues at Health Care Renewal, have been providing consistently high quality analysis of the often dubious practices and economics of the health care system.
Read more...Paul Ryan’s “New” Austerity Budget
Paul Ryan’s austerity budget is demonstrably failed economic policy in a new bottle.
Read more...University of Southern Maine, Facing Organized Opposition from Students and Faculty, Rescinds Proposed Cuts
By Lambert Strether of Corrente. Good news, which I hope travels fast to other universities. Maine Sunday Telegram: University of Southern Maine President Theodora Kalikow on Friday rescinded the 12 faculty layoffs that had prompted weeks of protests, saying she’s open to alternative plans for finding up to $14 million in cuts. (I know! I […]
Read more...Matt Stoller: How Uber Creates an Algorithmic Monopoly to Extract Rents
We are not setting the price. The market is setting the price. We have algorithms to determine what that market is.<
Read more...Wolf Richter: America’s Structural Unemployment Crisis in Two Charts
The enormous number of people who work only part-time for economic reasons is one the tragedies of the unemployment crisis in this country. And that started before the financial crisis.
Read more...Bill Black: The Kamikaze Economics of Forcing Austerity on the Ukraine
We all understand why Russia is waging economic war on the Ukraine, but why is Obama doing so?
Read more...IMF Imposing Even Tougher Austerity Conditions on New Loans
How the IMF has been devising even nastier versions of its austerity hairshirt in recent years.
Read more...Philip Pilkington: Misdirection – Galbraith on Thomas Piketty’s New Book on Capital
Yves here. The best review so far on Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital in the Twentieth Century is by Jamie Galbraith, and we’ve featured it in Links. But the article itself is long and a bit wonky, so Pilkington’s recap is a useful distillation of Galbraith’s piece.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Europe’s Latest Policy on Irish and Greek Banking losses – Two Swindles Too Similar for Comfort
The Irish and the Greeks are, in many ways, very different people. And yet, caught up in the Euro Crisis, their fortunes have become too close for comfort.
Read more...Bill Black: Deflation Dementia
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...Was Marx Right?
We participated in a Room for Debate forum at the New York Times, on the topic of “Was Marx Right?” Readers are likely to say, “But of course!” Yet Marx had such a large opus and his forecasts were so bold that any fair reading has to come to more nuanced conclusion.
Read more...Cokie Roberts Picked a Fight With Alan Grayson on the TransPacific Partnership. Guess Who Won?
I’m clearly too feral to have the proper responses, but I’ve long considered Cokie Roberts to be too lightweight to be worth paying attention to. But since lightweight goes over well in many parts of America, Cokie still has a large following. And it’s separately worth paying attention to a fight she picked over Obama’s stalled trade deal, the TransPacific Partnership. The fact that people with popular followings are still defending it says the Administration remains keen to revive it, so opponents need to guard against becoming too complacent.
Read more...Joe Firestone: Inequality – Envy or Honest Outrage?
Yves here. Even though I applaud Joe for his effort to take on the “class warfare as jealousy” meme, I think it needs to be attacked much more aggressively.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Think Big, Think Bold – A Green New Deal
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”.
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