Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Yesterday, I posted about geoengineering the oceans as a promising form of carbon capture. But why do we need carbon capture at all? Can’t we just conserve our way out of global warming?No.Here are a couple of reasons why the *only* way to avert climate disaster is to start removing carbon from the atmosphere:1. The half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is ca. 120 years. What that means is that if all sources of CO2—man-made, forest fires, vulcanism,...

Angry Bear (I) found this in my in box this Friday morning. Not much of a scoop now as the world knows about the issue. Let’s talk about why this tech outage occurred. There does not appear to be a backup for failure of systems when one of significance fails. This baffles me as we always had a backup system in the past even if it was a manual lookup and a paper transaction. It appears we are too dependent on one layer of information and have...

by Tom Walker Econospeak Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading — part 2.3  Inversion Marx stated repeatedly in the Grundrisse that capital inverts the relationship between necessary and superfluous labour time. Capital both creates disposable time and expropriates it in the form of surplus value, reversing the nature-imposed priority of necessity before superfluity and making the performance of...

By Tom Walker Econospeak Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading — part 2.4 Marx’s remarkable, yet largely neglected statement that “[t]he whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time” and his subsequent analysis of the relationship between disposable time, superfluous products, and surplus value suggests an alternative analysis of alienation that identifies disposable time itself as...

by Lloyd Alter Carbon Upfront! The size an style of these vehicles will not make you embrace them as an alternative form of transportation. The concept is solid though. The savings to be achieved is realistic. The impact on our environment would be enormous. It is about time America abandons the too big, too fast, and too often phase we have in our heads. Doug Ford, the Premier of the Province of Ontario where I live, is trying to...

There is another version to this which I may get into in the comments section. CDS were not known at the time to be dangerous investments by Wall Street Banks. Besides Long Term Capital, AIG was offering CDS insuring other CDS. The problem arose when AIG’s credit default swaps did not call for collateral to be paid in full due to market changes. “In most cases, the agreement said that the collateral was owed only if market changes exceeded a certain...

by Tom Walker Econospeak Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading — part 2.7 The revolutionary class “The working class is either revolutionary or it is nothing,” Marx wrote to German politician J.B. von Schweitzer and copied “word for word” in a letter to Engels. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels wrote “the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.” Marx cited that...

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading — part 2.8 by Tom Walker Econospeak In “The Trinity Formula,” in chapter 48 of volume 3 of Capital, Marx returned to the contradiction between the forces and relations of production. This time, however, it was not to deplore or analyze the fetters but to examine the realm of freedom that would become possible when “socialized man, the associated producers, govern the...

Short answer: Lending, government deficits, capital formation, and holding gains by Steve Roth Originally Published at Wealth Economics I ended my last post with an apparent conundrum: “One person’s spending is another person’s income.” It seems to imply that spending and income must be equal. And since saving equals income minus spending, saving must be…zero? That’s obviously not the case. As I pointed out, other people’s spending is not...

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading — part 2.9 by Tom Walker Econospeak Framing the revolution as being about disposable time brings Marx closer to Walter Benjamin’s remark about revolution being “the act by which the human race traveling in the train applies the emergency brake.” Benjamin’s “On the concept of history” was composed in the wake of Benjamin’s despair at the Hitler-Stalin pact that sealed...