St Louis Fed president James Bullard can't do simple arithmetic. If he could, he'd understand that his rate target will add trillions to annual gov't spending, causing inflation to skyrocket. Trade and invest using the concepts of MMT. Get a 30-day free trial to MMT Trader. https://www.mmteconomics.com/ Mike Norman Twitter https://twitter.com/mikenorman Mike Norman Economics: https://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/ Understanding the Daily Treasury Statement video course....

Is economics nothing but a library of models? Chameleons arise and are often nurtured by the following dynamic. First a bookshelf model is constructed that involves terms and elements that seem to have some relation to the real world and assumptions that are not so unrealistic that they would be dismissed out of hand. The intention of the author, let’s call him or her “Q,” in developing the model may be to say something about the real world or the goal may...

from Asad Zaman Milton Friedman was a powerful magician. His words charmed people into believing that night was day, against the evidence of their own eyes. Friedman’s maxim that “inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon” is widely believed by economists, even though it is abundantly obvious that costs of production, especially energy costs, play a major role in creating inflation.                                              Pinochet meets Friedman (STF/AFP/Getty...

Assumes (tacitly) 1) that objective "fact-checking" is possible to achieve and 2) that a majority of consumers of information will deem the so-called fact-checking credible. Both of these implicit assumptions seem questionable evidential  in light of mistakes and anecdotally (based on responses when sending people to purported fact-checking sites).New words addressing this have become internet memes, like "truthiness" and "gaslighting."Liberty Street EconomicsBreaking Down the Market for...

Sunak has proclaimed, according to the BBC, “Where we are now is that the unions are asking for a 17% pay rise – and I think most people watching will recognise that clearly that’s not affordable”.Most people if they do recognise this, have, of course, been brainwashed and I’m beginning to conclude that it is remarkable that the people can be lied to and deceived with such breathtaking confidence by our ruling elite, while remaining unquestioned by the media.In fact, where we are now is that...

America is touched by a peculiar form of collective madness that sees military action as creative rather than destructive, desirable rather than deplorable, and constitutive to democracy rather than corrosive to it….Actually, the US is an empire (successor to the British empire) rather than the liberal democracy it presents itself as.The difference between America and fascist states is that in fascist states corporations are at the service of the state and in the US the state is at the...

Yves here. We trust you’ll enjoy this wide-ranging but compact interview with Michael Hudson on Lebanon’s Almayadeen TV. The topics include Europe’s de-industrialization, the Fed fighting the wrong war and hurting innocent bystanders, the rise of new power blocs, and debt....Naked CapitalismMichael Hudson Answers Questions on Europe’s Self-Immolation, Fed’s Malpractice, Changing World OrderQuestions from Almayadeen TV, Lebanon by Mohammad Itmaizeh

This article continues the previous discussion of bank net interest margins. In it, I discussed how changes in the yield curve changed the net interest margin (NIM) for banks. This showed up historically — when bank balance sheets were shattered by the combination of holding long-dated mortgages with low fixed coupons versus having a sky-high short-term rate imposed by deranged Monetarists. In this article, I address a common macroeconomic story: yield curve inversions cause recessions by...

Ever since the COVID mRNA vaccines (Moderna and Pfizer) proved themselves, I became convinced they are the future of viral vaccines. Looks like a polyvalent flu vaccine is in the works that may obviate annual strain-specific vaccines.“In this work, we developed a nucleoside-modified messenger RNA (mRNA)–lipid nanoparticle vaccine encoding hemagglutinin antigens from all 20 known influenza A virus subtypes and influenza B virus lineages. This...