Just three countries have so far introduced CBDCs, according to the IMF, and two of them are already having serious issues. The roll-out of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), while still in its early stages, is not going as smoothly as the central banking community may have hoped. The latest central bank to admit to serious difficulties is the Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) whose governor Richard Byles has acknowledged that the rollout of the country’s CBDC, the Jam-Dex, has been a lot slower...

FYI. The information space is narrowing.Naked CapitalismGoogle Demands That We Censor Our ContentYves Smith

.[embedded content] Ett av de grundläggande feltänken i dagens diskussion om statsskuld och budgetunderskott är att man inte skiljer på skuld och skuld. Även om det på makroplanet av nödvändighet är så att skulder och tillgångar balanserar varandra, så är det inte oväsentligt vem som har tillgångarna och vem som har skulderna. Länge har man varit motvillig att öka de offentliga skulderna eftersom ekonomiska kriser i mångt och mycket fortfarande uppfattas som förorsakade av för...

 Biden still has a big “inflation!” political problem…. Story at National Pulse:As the U.S. economy braces itself for the third year of an inflation surge that has substantially hiked the cost of living and sharply depressed real wages, most registered voters believe President Biden’s policies will cause prices to rise.   A poll by CBS News and YouGov released Sunday shows that 55 percent of registered voters believe Biden’s policies will trigger price increases. Only 17 percent of...

Revealing Marx's Secret Economic Model

The USPS Network Consolidation Plan: What’s at Stake for Southern Oregon, Save the Post Office, Steve Hutkins In 2023, two years into the 10-year plan, USPS reported that the agency had committed $7.6 billion out of a total $40 billion restructuring budget and plans were on track to open 60 new Regional Processing and Distribution Centers across the country in the coming years. Through this consolidation plan, many postal processing and...

Utility theory — explaining everything and nothing Despite the rise of behavioral economics, many economists still believe that utility maximization is a good explanation of human behavior. Although evidence from experimental economics and elsewhere has rolled back the assumption that human agents are entirely self-interested, and shown that altruism and cooperation are important, a prominent response has been to modify individual preference functions so...

How economists reshape the world [embedded content] To yours truly, the real value of Appelbaum’s meticulously researched history of how economists have come to increasingly influence public policies in modern societies, is that it shows how fundamentally ideological economics is. Of course, you never hear anyone at our seminars telling the lecturer that the assumptions on which his models are built are only made for ideological reasons. But that does not...

Record February and March 1 fiscal flows driving speculation.

But once, we were here … .[embedded content] One of the greatest movie scenes ever. Both the movie and soundtrack of this magnificent classic are epic. [embedded content] In loving memory of my brother, Peter ‘Uncas’ Pålsson.