The end of the post-World War II ´Pax Americana, an almost eighty-year period of peace for European countries allied with the USA, will soon lead the EU to end the prohibition of monetary financing of governments by the European Central Bank (ECB). This might take the shape of the ECB providing credit to an entity purchasing Eurobonds, which will further increases military spending. At this moment, there is based on the Maastricht treaty of 1992 a strict prohibition of monetary financing...

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...

Over the eight decades following the end of World War II, the US has taken part in dozens of land wars, large and small. The outcomes have ranged from comprehensive victory to humiliating defeat, but all have received extensive coverage. By contrast, the US Navy’s admission of defeat in its longest and most significant campaign in many decades, has received almost no attention. Yet the failure of attempts to reopen the Suez Canal to shipping has fundamental implications for the entire...

Blog The new national wealth fund could raise £100bn of private finance — here’s how Empowering the new national wealth fund to issue green bonds on private markets, could leverage £14bn of private sector investment for every £1bn of Treasury funding By Theo Harris 14 October 2024...

If you did not figure out where I am going by just reading the title, then I will explain a bit. Stock buybacks do not trump Quality. It is that simple. When you sacrifice Labor so as to have funding to buy back stocks, you may have picked the wrong person to toss. The person who inspects the product or builds that particular portion of the product correctly. This issue was in assembly somewhere along the way and was missed as an essential assembly...

from Dean Baker It is more than a bit bizarre reading pieces that talk about automation or job-killing AI as something new and alien. These are forms of productivity growth. They allow more goods and services to be produced for each hour of human labor. Productivity growth is usually thought of as a good thing. It’s the reason that we don’t have half the U.S. workforce employed in agriculture growing our food. Instead, it is around 1.0 percent of the U.S. workforce, and we grow enough to...

If we were to look at the costs of healthcare insurance for families and businesses, it has not remained the same percentage-wise for employers or employees. My initial sentence is a backwards way of saying costs are increasing faster than gains in income for either. Nothing has changed here and the foes to single payer in government and industry keep insisting this is the better way to provide healthcare. Edward Kennedy died too soon to help us...

Donald Trump and JD Vance are campaigning on xenophobia. There’s no evidence that immigrants are any sort of threat to America, and the data show that immigrants commit crimes at *lower* rates than American citizens. Sadly, though, fear of the other seems to work in America:“Jeffrey Balogh, a resident of Erie, said at that event that he feels strongly about Trump’s proposals on immigration. He shared that he felt uncomfortable recently when he went to...

by Lloyd Alter Carbon Upfront There is a sense of humor here being shown by Lloyd. He is asking Elon Musk to build differently than what he would do if planned by the market. Granted electric vehicles have been a part of what Tesla offers. Lloyd is asking Elon to go a step farther and build something smaller that the US car manufacturer behemoths have been building. Lloyd wants it even smaller and on a car suspension rack. It makes sense for...

Daniel Sanderson makes his return to the show this week to promote his new book and talk about Adam Smith being a Platonist! So is Daniel saying Adam Smith was a hardened fan of the Greek philosopher Plato???