Why aren't all these guys screaming "They're printing money?" Because they are!
Read More »Andrei Martyanov — Douglas Macgregor Hits It Out Of The Ball Park
Douglas Macgregor is a military policy realist. He analyzes the US military and its operational strategy (in contrast with grand strategy as implementation of policy). Reminiscence of the FutureDouglas Macgregor Hits It Out Of The Ball ParkAndrei Martyanov
Read More »Alexander Losev — Finance as an Operational Theater in US-China Trade War
How a global economic crisis could break out if the Sino-American trade war gets out of hand.While the analysis is not in paradigm with MMT, it is the way many if not most approach the issues and this cognitive bias gives a spin to behavior based on it.Valdai AnalyticsFinance as an Operational Theater in US-China Trade War Alexander Losev
Read More »Tyler Cowen — *Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World*
I sometimes say that generalists are the most specialized people of them all, so specialized they can’t in fact do anything. Except make observations of that nature. Excerpt: In an impressively insightful image, Tetlock described the very best forecasters as foxes with dragonfly eyes. Dragonfly eyes are composed of tens of thousands of lenses, each with a different perspective, which are then synthesized in the dragonfly’s brain. I am not sure Epstein figures out what a generalist really...
Read More »Branko Milanovic — “We had everything before us, we had nothing before us”.
Some philosophy in the broad sense that is neither MMT nor economics-related but important owing to its contemporary relevance in determining the social, political and economic dialectic that the world is experiencing at this point in time and which is shaping the future for some time to come.Are we in another Gramsci interregnum? The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. — A....
Read More »Fed Minutes
Interesting reveal in latest Fed minutes where we can now see the FOMC exhibiting some understanding of the Accounting relationship between the Treasury General Account fluctuation and Reserve composition here; excerpt: The deputy manager reviewed developments in domestic money markets. Reserve balances declined by $150 billion over the intermeeting period and reached a low point of just below $1.5 trillion on April 23. The decline in reserves stemmed from a reduction in the SOMA’s agency...
Read More »Links — 23 May 2019
Bloomberg View The New Assange Indictment Endangers JournalismEli Lake RT'Modern fascism is breaking cover': Journalists react to Assange Espionage Act charges Buzzfeed Legal experts say the new indictment against Assange is the first time the Justice Department has used the Espionage Act to charge a third party — not the government leaker — with publishing classified information. Press Freedom Groups Say The New Charges Against Julian Assange Are A Threat To JournalistsZoe Tillman The...
Read More »McKinsey — A new look at the declining labor share of income in the United States
Labor’s share of national income—that is, the amount of GDP paid out in wages, salaries, and benefits—has been declining in developed and, to a lesser extent, emerging economies since the 1980s. This has raised concerns about slowing income growth, inequality, and loss of the consumer purchasing power that is needed to fuel demand in the economy. The decline has been much discussed and the rising power of companies vis-à-vis workers—whether from new technology, globalization, the hollowing...
Read More »Matthew Ehret — Trump Attacks Military Industrial Complex and Calls for Infrastructure Investments in the Middle East
While Trump has too often accommodated this hive of neocons, his recent statements and repeated calls for cooperation with Russia and China demonstrate a sound push back which should be taken very seriously. In that Fox interview Trump said: “With all of everything that’s going on, and I’m not one that believes—you know, I’m not somebody that wants to go in to war, because war hurts economies, war kills people, most importantly—by far most importantly.”You know, in Syria, with the...
Read More »Trade war jitters (again) sends market down 1%. Yawn.
People reacting the same way every time.
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