Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here. Share this:Like Loading...

From The Conversation Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s plan to build seven nuclear power plants in Australia has attracted plenty of critical attention. But there’s a striking feature which has received relatively little discussion or criticism: the nuclear plants would be publicly owned and operated, similar to the National Broadband Network (NBN). On the contrary, it received enthusiastic endorsement from free-market advocates such as The Australian’s Judith Sloan, who...

From The Guardian The release of recent data suggesting that inflation appears to be stuck at 4%, above the Reserve Bank of Australia’s target range of 2% to 3%, has raised plenty of concern among economic and political commentators. These commentators might be surprised to learn that many, perhaps most, macroeconomists who have looked at the question have concluded that a 4% inflation rate would be the ideal target, at least providing that wages and other incomes kept pace....

One has to wonder whether the misspelling is purposely done to attract attention or is a true misspelling of dementia. If you can not spell it correctly, how can you accuse a successful president who sidestepped a pandemic, kept a nation going during the pandemic, and has many other accomplishments over the past years. Pennsylvania Billboard Claims Joe Biden Has Dementia, Spells It Wildly Wrong, – Newsweek This is getting pretty wild as the...

After decades of lobbying and advocacy by Canadian trade unions, the federal Parliament unanimously passed legislation to ban the use of replacement workers (or ‘scabs’) during strikes and lockouts in federally regulated industries (covering about 1 million workers in industries like including finance, interprovincial transportation, and telecommunications). The legislation will take effect in June, 2025. It was supported by all parties in the House of Commons: Liberals, NDP, Greens,...

by Dean Baker Center for Economic and Policy Research That’s what readers must conclude after reading this Washington Post’s piece on President Biden’s plans to increase corporate taxes and taxes on the rich. At one point, the piece reports the response to these plans from Rep. Steven Scalise (R-La), the second-ranking Republican in the House: “He tries to act like it’s not going to affect certain people, but when you raise taxes, it hits...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The July 4 landslide defeat of the neoliberal pro-war British Conservatives by the neoliberal pro-war Labour Party poses the question of just what the media mean when they describe the elections and political alignments throughout Europe in terms of center-right and center-left traditional parties challenged by nationalist neo-fascists. Political differences between Europe’s centrist parties are Continue Reading The post The Need for a New...

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...

Deaton on labour shortages and wages ZEIT: Today, the debate focuses on the labor shortages facing many industrialized countries. Angus Deaton: I am always cautious when people talk about a scarcity of labor but don’t talk about wages. The argument always is: Americans don’t want to do these jobs, Germans don’t want to do these jobs. So we have to have migrants. But in many cases, it is not that Germans or Americans don’t want to do these jobs, but that...

Stocks will follow the economy. Be patient, and there were things to buy today.