Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 27, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 27, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things

Bill McKibben [New Yorker, via The Big Picture 3-26-2022]

The truth is new and counterintuitive: we have the technology necessary to rapidly ditch fossil fuels….

…the era of large-scale combustion has to come to a rapid close. If we understand that as the goal, we might be able to keep score, and be able to finally get somewhere. Last Tuesday, President Biden banned the importation of Russian oil. This year, we may need to compensate for that with American hydrocarbons, but, as a senior Administration official put it,“the only way to eliminate Putin’s and every other producing country’s ability to use oil as an economic weapon is to reduce our dependency on oil.” As we are one of the largest oil-and-gas producers in the world, that is a remarkable statement. It’s a call for an end of fire.

“Beauty and wonder of science boosts researchers’ well-being”

[Nature, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-21-2022]

“Scientists’ ability to experience wonder, awe and beauty in their work is associated with higher levels of job satisfaction and better mental health, finds an international survey of researchers. Brandon Vaidyanathan, a sociologist at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC, and his colleagues collected responses from more than 3,000 scientists — mainly biologists and physicists — in India, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States. They asked participants about their job satisfaction and workplace culture, their experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and the role of aesthetics in science. The answers revealed that, far from the caricature of scientists as exclusively rational and logical beings, “this beauty stuff is really important”, Vaidyanathan says. “It shapes the practice of science and is associated with all kinds of well-being outcomes.'”

Fed headed for crack up? [video]

Mike Norman [Mike Norman Economics 3-26-2022]

Mike doing some projections this week on by how much or perhaps how fast the Fed can increase its policy rates while avoiding insolvency, ie a situation where their current interest income would be exceeded by their current interest payable…

You can see here current UST yields are less than the Fed’s overnight rates (inverted) out to 8 weeks … no bueno…

To be safe they may want to somehow pivot from the current perhaps implied policy of an acceleration in the increase in their policy rates to a policy of acceleration in their rate of asset/liability reduction… keep an eye out for this pivot…

Biden Says The Quiet Part Out Loud 

Thomas Lifson [AmericanThinker.com, via Mike Norman Economics 3-22-2022]

(the not-so-hidden agenda. reassertion of unquestioned American primacy in the world. Not that this is anything new.)

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 20, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 20, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Orwell Was Right (excerpt)

Matt Taibbi [TK News, via Naked Capitalism 3-14-2022]

The ideal citizen of Orwell’s Oceania bubbled with rage a mile wide and a millimeter deep and could forget in an instant passions that may have consumed him or her for years. We just did this, with a pandemic that had the country steaming with indignation until it was quietly declared over the moment Putin rolled over Ukraine’s borders. We switched from “the pandemic of the unvaccinated” to “Putin’s price hikes” in a snap. National outrage moved a few lobes over with zero fuss, and now we hate new people; instead of “anti-vax Barbie,” we’re barring Russian and Belarussian kids from the Paralympics.

“At least NINE House Democrats test positive for COVID after party held maskless retreat in Philadelphia”

[Daily Mail, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-18-2022]

I include this under “Strategic Political Economy” because it illustrates the extreme arrogance and stupidity of USA ruling elites — including Democratic Party elites. The have failed completely to confront an epidemic by refusing to even consider major expenditures such as reworking the ventilation systems and air filters of all buildings. As Lambert Strether noted: “Closed, close-contact, crowded, lots of talking, probably shouting and singing, no masks. What did they think was going to happen? The outcome they all worked so hard to create; that’s what happened.” 

Say hello to Russian gold and Chinese petroyuan 

Pepe Escaobar [Vineyard of the Saker, via Mike Norman Economics 3-15-2022]

It was a long time coming, but finally some key lineaments of the multipolar world’s new foundations are being revealed.

On Friday, after a videoconference meeting, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and China agreed to design the mechanism for an independent international monetary and financial system. The EAEU consists of Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia, is establishing free trade deals with other Eurasian nations, and is progressively interconnecting with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

For all practical purposes, the idea comes from Sergei Glazyev, Russia’s foremost independent economist, a former adviser to President Vladimir Putin and the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Commission, the regulatory body of the EAEU.

“Saudi Arabia Considers Accepting Yuan Instead of Dollars for Chinese Oil Sales”

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-15-2022]

“Saudi Arabia is in active talks with Beijing to price some of its oil sales to China in yuan, people familiar with the matter said, a move that would dent the U.S. dollar’s dominance of the global petroleum market and mark another shift by the world’s top crude exporter toward Asia…. China buys more than 25% of the oil that Saudi Arabia exports. If priced in yuan, those sales would boost the standing of China’s currency. The Saudis are also considering including yuan-denominated futures contracts, known as the petroyuan, in the pricing model of Saudi Arabian Oil Co. , known as Aramco.” • Since the dollar is now evidently a pure form of power projection by the United States, it’s not surprising that other sovereign states would want to get out from under it, if they can.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 13, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 13, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Eric Helleiner ─ The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History

Eric Helleiner interviewed by Mark Blythe [Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University]

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How the World Works

James Fallows [The Atlantic, December 1993]

Americans persist in thinking that Adam Smith's rules for free trade are the only legitimate ones. But today's fastest-growing economies are using a very different set of rules. Once, we knew them--knew them so well that we played by them, and won. Now we seem to have forgotten….

The more I had heard about List in the preceding five years, from economists in Seoul and Osaka and Tokyo, the more I had wondered why I had virtually never heard of him while studying economics in England and the United States. By the time I saw his books in the shop beneath the cherry trees, I had come to think of him as the dog that didn't bark. He illustrated the strange self-selectivity of Anglo-American thinking about economics.

TW: There is a simple answer to why Henry Carey and Friedrich List are unknown in USA today: the economics profession was corrupted. Michael Hudson explains what happened at Wharton to suppress and eventually bury the economic thought of Simon Patten. 

From the Archives: ‘How the World Works’

James Fallows, December 26, 2021

The United States knows how to help foster advanced, high-wage, high-employment, globally successful businesses. But it has forgotten how to talk about that process honestly, and instead sinks into familiar political and media slogans.

TW: For Carey and his followers, political economy included a moral dimension, including strong opposition to slavery and to Britain’s opium trade. The aim of political economy was not the allocation of scarce resources, but the building of civilization and the continual improvement of the human condition. As John Quincy Adams explained in “Society and Civilization” [American Whig Review, July 1845]:

Unceasing labor is not suitable to the nature or condition of man. Hours of relaxation and repose are necessary to relieve the labors of every day…. all the powers of the body and all the faculties of the mind of every individual, from the cradle to the grave, should be exercised to the utmost extent of which they are capable, in improving the condition of his kind. The duties of man consist in alternate action and meditation, mutually aiding and relieving each other; and both, directed with undeviating aim, to the progressive improvement of himself and his fellow creatures. Heaven has given him in charge, to promote the happiness and well-being of himself, his wife, his children, his kindred, his neighbors, his fellow citizens, his country, and his kind; and the great problem of legislation is, so to organize the civil government of a community, that this gradation of duties, may be made to harmonize in all its parts—that in the operation of human institutions upon social action, self-love and social may be made the same.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 6, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 6, 2022
by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-1-2022]

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[Twitter, via Avedon's Sideshow 4-6-2022]

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Putin the Apostate. We thought he would be our bastard. Then, he became his own bastard.

Matt Taibbi, February 28, 2022

I would like to point out that we already tried regime change in Russia. I remember, because I was there. And, thanks to a lot of lurid history that’s being scrubbed now with furious intensity, it ended with Vladimir Putin in power. Not as an accident, or as the face of a populist revolt against Western influence — that came later — but precisely because we made a long series of intentional decisions to help put him there…. I’ve been bitter in commentary about Putin in recent years because I never forgot the way the West smoothed his rise, and pretends now that it didn’t. It’s infuriating also that many of us who were critical of him from the start are denounced now as Putin apologists, I think in part because we have inconvenient memories about who said what at the start of his story. The effort to wipe that history clean is reaching a fever pitch this week. Before they finish the job, it seemed worth getting it all down….

The oligarch class was formalized in a stroke via a deal brokered at Davos in 1996…. The “relatively fair” privatization auctions were historic events. As my friends and former Moscow Times reporters Matt Bivens and Jonas Bernstein reported, “financiers” like Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky were loaned the capital to become controllers of, respectively, a third of the world’s nickel and a fourth of its cobalt, and 2% of the world’s oil reserves. Meanwhile murderous gangsters like Boris Berezovsky were gifted controlling stakes in companies like Aeroflot (from which he siphoned to a Swiss shell company roughly a third of its annual $400 million in revenues) and Russia’s seventh-largest oil concern, Sidanko.