In America we are witnessing as never before the swift dismantling of the liberal democratic principles that we have had in place for the past 70 or so years. The rhetoric is strong. The people who want to have your pension, your pay raises and your health care money directed to them are coming for you. . . . → Read More: The votes we can’t afford
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It’s worth thinking about how governments could decide to organize their finances. From New Economics Perspectives: …nations can’t run out of money and can buy anything for sale in their own borders, including all labor resources, that means that their governments can spend what they need to spend to help solve the problems they encounter. They can afford job guarantees for anyone wanting . . . → Read More: Job Guarantee, free education, universal health care… what more could you want? Following up on my previous post on Debt and Civilization, I read David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 years. It is a very important book. It lays out a case that we have not yet fully heard: that debt, as a human construction, is something which has been overlaid on our social relationships in such a way as to produce confused mixtures of . . . → Read More: Debt: The First 5000 Years I may start reading the American Conservative more if they keep putting out such well thought out and researched articles as this one by Richard Unz: China’s Rise, America’s Fall. In it Unz takes the book from Acemglou and Robinson, Why Nations Fail, and applies it to the American Conservative’s cover theme of China’s Rise and Merica’s Decline. He points out: Against the . . . → Read More: China’s Rise, America’s Fall Michael Hudson traces the history of debt, war and credit in this interview that we review. . . . → Read More: Debt and civilization Mike Konczal has a good synopsis of a new paper by JW Mason and Arjun Jayadev that suggests: [T]he conservative theory explaining increased household borrowing in terms of shorter time horizons and a general lack of self-control, and the liberal theory explaining it in terms of efforts by those further down the income ladder to maintain consumption standards in the face of a . . . → Read More: Debt did not spiral upwards due to poor household decisions Bill Black has continually been on the watch for what he calls “control-frauds” which are just frauds by management of a company to hide illegal and/or greedy behavior. In a new article Anti-Employee Control Fraud in New Economic perspectives he departs from his usual target of banking to look at the recent news about Apple’s supply chain. Businesses that pursue anti-employee behavior in . . . → Read More: Anit-Employee Control Fraud I have heard it said by my friends that the mortgage crisis was caused by individuals taking on more mortgage than they could pay for, then refusing to pay up when the music stopped. In Everything You Need to Know About Wall Street, in One Brief Tale Matt Taibbi nails this, this way: At one point during these deals, Verschleiser reamed out his . . . → Read More: Bad loans made boldly Bloomberg continues reporting into Secret Fed Loans Helped Banks Net $13B. THe FOIA information that Bloomberg has acquired shows that the Fed gave the banks lines of credit, loans and access to the discount window to the tune of $7.7 trillion, yes that’s trillion. In their own calculation Bloomberg thinks that the banks netted profit of $13 billion on this largesse from the . . . → Read More: Secret Fed Loans Helped Banks Net $13B – Bloomberg Mostly the recipe for getting stability back in serious single country situations is repudiation of sovereign debt (i.e. default), revaluation of the currency (i.e. a new currency), recapitalising the banks in the new currency, forcing the citizens to use the new currency (i.e. repudiating private debts in old currency or restating them at a penalty rate in the new currency) and starting from zero again. How would that work in Europe, the USA and China in roughly a 5 year time frame? Would some global financial order come into place then? I am sure some would try to make that happen. . . . → Read More: Depression and inflation possible? |
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