The economic nutcase behind the coup attempt in Venezuala

The economic takeover of the country with the largest oil deposits is being planned by a Milton Friedman disciple from Venezuela. He is currently at Harvard—that rat's nest of neoliberalism. Some say ideas don't matter. Well strap yourself in—apparently this guy has the ear of Donald Trump. Just ghastly!

Ricardo Hausmann Is Taking Milton Friedman’s Lessons to Venezuela

Tanya Rawal-Jindia | February 9, 2019


For a few years now, there has been a tendency to compare Donald Trump to Richard Nixon, but the more urgent comparison in the face of the Venezuelan crisis is one between two well-pedigreed economists: Milton Friedman and Ricardo Hausmann.

Under Nixon’s reign, Milton Friedman was the “intellectual” who started to gain excessive power. Friedman was a trained economist, earning a doctorate at Columbia University, with teaching and research stints at the Universities of Chicago and Stanford.

And under Trump, we have another trained economist: Ricardo Hausmann. He received his doctorate from Cornell University and is the director for the Center of International Development at Harvard University.

For years now, Ricardo Hausmann has been suggesting that the solution for Venezuela’s socialist “crisis” is a U.S. invasion or “intervention.”

Financing the Green New Deal

Sister Ellen—Keep on preaching the truth as demonstrated by the successful social actions of North Dakota's Non-Partisan League, the KfW Bank of Germany, and FDR's RFC. The BIGGEST single impediment to a more enlightened approach to the oncoming catastrophe that is climate change is the fact that we allow our monetary system to be run by thieves.

The Financial Secret Behind Germany’s Green Energy Revolution

Ellen Brown | January 26, 2019

The “Green New Deal” endorsed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D.-N.Y., and more than 40 other House members has been criticized as imposing a too-heavy burden on the rich and upper-middle-class taxpayers who will have to pay for it. However, taxing the rich is not what the Green New Deal resolution proposes. It says funding would come primarily from certain public agencies, including the U.S. Federal Reserve and “a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks.”

Funding through the Federal Reserve may be controversial, but establishing a national public infrastructure and development bank should be a no-brainer. The real question is why we don’t already have one, as do China, Germany and other countries that are running circles around us in infrastructure development. Many European, Asian and Latin American countries have their own national development banks, as well as belong to bilateral or multinational development institutions that are jointly owned by multiple governments. Unlike the U.S. Federal Reserve, which considers itself “independent” of government, national development banks are wholly owned by their governments and carry out public development policies.

China not only has its own China Infrastructure Bank but has established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which counts many Asian and Middle Eastern countries in its membership, including Australia, New Zealand and Saudi Arabia. Both banks are helping to fund China’s trillion-dollar “One Belt One Road” infrastructure initiative. China is so far ahead of the United States in building infrastructure that Dan Slane, a former adviser on President Donald Trump’s transition team, has warned, “If we don’t get our act together very soon, we should all be brushing up on our Mandarin.”

Are the Saudis

In the fall of 1974, I took what was easily my most interesting course at the University of Minnesota. It was named Energy and Public Policy and was taught by the infinitely curious, snoose-using, balding Minnesota-Swede named Dean Abrahamson. He was a Physics Ph.D., medical doctor, and had also collected a degree in public policy from the soon-to-be Humphrey Institute. He had been pursuing the question "just how dangerous are nuclear power plants?" He thought at first it was a physics question, then a medical question, and finally came to the conclusion that it was a collective public policy question. Along the way, he realized that if nuclear power really was too dangerous to use, he would have to know about the competing energy alternatives. Acid rain dominated the environmental news those days and he judged coal burning as a close second to the dangers of fission. But since the Oil Shock of 1973 was fresh in everyone's memory, Dr. Dean spent a lot of time lecturing on middle east oil.

If that wasn't enough, we had a genuine Saudi student in the class. I paid special attention to his remarks. He rigorously defended the Saudi oil embargo and had a pretty legitimate list of grievances against the oil imperialists. He wasn't overly happy about the cultural imperialism that resulted in young Saudi men imitating the pickups, belt buckles, and boots of the Texas / Oklahoma oil guys. And he thought that oil prices were far too low.

Oops. NOW we are talking. Since the Industrial Revolution had produced a million clever things that needed petroleum to run, folks could get really desperate if they got cut off from their sources of energy. In some applications, such as the fuels needed to run the machinery of a harvest, diesel fuel is extremely time-critical. In real-world terms, that fuel is priceless. Before oil shock #1, such diesel fetched about $0.25 at the pump. Because while this fuel is priceless, the farmer wants to pay as little as possible. Our Saudi student may have had no inkling just how valuable oil is to folks who live in cultures where nearly everything has become powered. But he did know that Saudi Arabia deserved a bigger slice of the pie.

The following story tells the tale that the Saudis are still trying to come to grips with their big but dwindling oil deposits. Those who wanted to take Aramco public still thought it was a good idea to trade oil for paper or reprogrammed computer chips. Those who block this move obviously have different thoughts about the value of oil. Personally, I think it would have been insane for the Saudis to take Aramco public.

Hudson on the current economy

Watching the business news these days is truly to look into advanced irrationality. Apple worth a $1 Trillion? I have been a reasonably loyal Apple customer since 1985 and think some of their offerings a have redefined genius but even I believe this is absurd. Elon Musk should be having songs written about him for the accomplishment of making electric cars cool and desirable but a car company that is still not profitable should probably not be valued in the same territory as GM.

On the other hand, the tattered remnants of the once robust USA middle class is hanging on by their fingernails. They cannot afford houses, they are still paying off student loans in their 40s, energy prices are up, they are a small medical step away from bankruptcy, agriculture hasn't seen a profit in four years, etc. And the businesses that would otherwise rely on their spending are wondering where their customers went.

Meanwhile, the financial sector has abandoned any pretense of honesty or responsibility. You can hardly blame them—with the real economy staggering along, there is hardly any reason to even try honest banking. So they don't. And so economic conditions seem even more hazardous than they were in 2007. Why would anything else be true? After all, none of the problems of 2007 were meaningfully addressed.

So here we have Michael Hudson, who seems to have the stomach to look at the bankster community, explaining where we stand.

The “Next” Financial Crisis

THE HUDSON REPORT, AUGUST 3, 2018

In this episode of The Hudson Report, we speak with Michael Hudson about the implications of the flattening yield curve, the possibility of another global financial crisis, and public banking as an alternative to the current system.

‘The Hudson Report’ is a Left Out weekly series with the legendary economist Michael Hudson. Every week, we look at an economic issue that is either being ignored—or hotly debated—in the press that week.

Paul Sliker: Michael Hudson welcome back to another episode of The Hudson Report.

Michael Hudson:It’s good to be here again.

Paul Sliker: So, Michael, over the past few months the IMF has been sending warning signals about the state of the global economy. There are a bunch of different macroeconomic developments that signal we could be entering into another crisis or recession in the near future. One of those elements is the yield curve, which shows the difference between short-term and long-term borrowing rates. Investors and financial pundits of all sorts are concerned about this, because since 1950 every time the yield curve has flattened, the economy has tanked shortly thereafter.

Monetary Theory and the Left

Tony (probably correctly) believes that I should write more about monetary theory.

Good point. Without monetary reform, there is simply no way the the world can pay the huge bills that will be incurred running an effective program to combat climate change. So in no particular order, here are my excuses for not writing about the subject every damn day—like it probably deserves.

1) I have written extensively on money and the economics of development. I still consider the chapter on Money to be the most well-thought-out chapter in Elegant Technology. But over the years, I have sort of run out of things to say.

2) The "left" is notoriously uninterested in monetary debates—lord knows I have tried. I have heard money debated in barber shops, gas stations, feed mills, church basements—sometimes (rarely) even in political forums. I grew up in the corn belt. My grandfather was an active member of the Farmer-Labor Party. But I haven't heard anyone from the "left" discuss the money subject since I started at U Minn in 1967. And the few people I have tried to engage either get lost in the math or the fact that fractional banking is not as established / legitimate as the big myths of banking and finance. The fact that the evidence is beyond rational debate does not sway minds—especially those who believe that "the personal is the political" and so shun the notion that something as impersonal as money may be the most important political subject of them all.

3) That leaves the "right." There are people like Ron Paul who are very good critics of the Federal Reserve. But his "solution" is the Gold Standard. Now the Fed has fallen into the hands of some serious fools, but on their very worst days, they are still a superior alternative to the Gold Standard.

4) Ellen Brown. Enter her name in the search box of this blog and you will find dozens of posts related to some well-written argument she is making. She loves the Bank of North Dakota—easily the best idea Progressives ever had. Strange how no one has duplicated that institution in other states, but she has done a nice job of lighting the fire that may lead to a California version.

5) There are a lot of crackpots out there. Because the nature of money is a subject that is virtually absent in the mainstream financial press, most people who develop any theories at all are usually self-taught. Now because there are a wealth of good books written about money and folks like Franklin, Edison, and Ford took an active interest in the subject, it IS possible to get your arms around this sprawling subject by reading alone, but it is difficult. It's the folks who aren't willing to do the necessary homework that end up as cranks.

Anyway, I promise to try to address legitimate monetary questions directed my way.

Hudson on debt cancellation

Michael Hudson has a new book coming out. It addresses the most fundamental economic question of the age—what to do about the unpayable debt. The reason I am so interested in this subject is that IF the austerity geeks get their way, there will not be the money needed to build the solar future.

Coming from the rural Midwest, I have heard these debates for a long time—even one that Hudson highlights below—his contention the Christianity was about progressive economics. The King James translators had it right when they wrote the Lord's Prayer as "forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." Most Protestants have wimped out and changed this radical notion to "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." Last I heard, the Presbyterians still use the older, more accurate version. Considering the implications, I am not sure that reopening that wound is wise since it is as old as Christianity itself. The religion of slaves become the religion of the Roman Emperor in only 300 years so it is not especially surprising that the interests of the creditor classes would come to dominate—even so far as to rewrite the freaking Lord's Prayer. (Where are the fundamentalists when you need them ;-)

And of course, this is Hudson so he gets it right. I wish he would take up the subject of "odious" debt (and maybe he does in his new book). The way I see it, because we can no longer operate our societies with technologies that produce CO2, all investments in these technologies should be written off as "odious." Actually I don't give a damn what reasoning is used so long as there is a serious global debt restructuring.

Infrastructure funding

Whenever I discuss possible solutions to climate change, it isn't long before someone demands, "How much will this cost??!! And how do you propose we pay for it?" These are in fact excellent questions because the MAIN reason why this civilization-threatening problem doesn't get seriously addressed is the sticker shock that occurs whenever someone gives a realistic estimate for a fix.

Then there's Ellen Brown who reminds us that the problem of not enough money should be the easiest problem to solve of all.  Then she gives us historical examples of why democratic money creation suggest the perfect solutions to the funding problems. Unfortunately, folks who saw the world like Ellen does mostly disappeared by the early 1950s so she has become an almost lone voice for a sane monetary and banking organization.

Which is all the more reason why she should be read.

The power of conventional wisdom

One of the smartest men I know once assured me that the "Zeitgeist cannot be changed—that's what makes it the Zeitgeist." OK. Except I know better. I grew up in the world created by the Keynesians of the Ken Galbraith variety. I watched it just disappear in the wake of the 1973 Arab oil embargo to be replaced by people who believed in ideas that supposedly had been forever discredited by the Great Depression. I still gasp at the sheer audacity of it all. It helped immeasurably that we had become a land of historical illiterates (The United States of Amnesia--Gore Vidal) so forgetting economic history was a trivial problem. And so the Zeitgeist changed from the Keynesians to the Monetarists in an historical eye-blink. Maoists become central bankers. And no, I most certainly do NOT believe all this happened by accident.

Even so, this was much easier than anyone could have imagined (or at least me.) The family business was running a church where I learned just how difficult it is to get folks to change their minds. Turns out well-funded think tanks can change quite a few minds. Jason Hirthler lays out a believable explanation for how and why this happened. Interesting reading.

The decline and fall of neoliberalism in the Democratic Party

If you are snow-bound in USA today, and want something to read, I highly recommend Ryan Cooper's excellent short summary of USA political and economic history since the New Deal, posted last week, The decline and fall of neoliberalism in the Democratic Party

Nations took various roads out of the Great Depression. Every one involved ditching liberal orthodoxy — deficit spending and the abandonment of the gold standard being the key two policies in most instances, which had to overcome resistance from business. In Germany, fascism removed "capitalist objections to full employment," wrote economist Michal Kalecki, by routing all deficit spending into rearmament and by keeping labor quiescent with political repression and permanent dictatorship. 

In the United States, the replacement ideology was the New Deal. After some initial failed experimentation with planning, New Dealers settled on a framework of stimulus, regulation, unionization, progressive taxation, and anti-trust, heavily influenced by Louis Brandeis (to be covered in the next article in this series). To get people back to work and prime the economic pump, vast new public works were built, and millions were directly employed by the state. Business — especially finance — was regulated, above all to prevent concentration. Unions were protected under a new legal regime created by the National Labor Relations Act. Taxes on the rich were sharply increased, both to raise revenue and to deliberately prevent the accumulation of vast fortunes. Finally, world trade was managed under the Bretton-Woods system.

These two paragraphs are an excellent summary of what the New Deal was -- and what was dismantled in a joint project of conservatives, libertarians, and neoliberals. This dismantling is why neoliberals are as much to blame for the rise of neofascism around the world. While conservatives, libertarians and the Republican Party, the past half century, constantly stoked bigotry by "feeding meat to their base," neoliberals joined them in destroying the "welfare state" policies that were enacted after World War Two to ensure that never again would fascism be incubated in a cauldron of economic misery and inequality. 

Cooper includes all the most important points of this history, with the exception of the race to the bottom initiated by NAFTA and free trade. Also, Cooper does not fully grasp that the prosperity of the tech boom under Clinton was mostly the result of the phase shift in the national economy resulting from the 1950s through 1980s build-out of the new technology of computers, which -- like all phase shifts in the economy -- began with government support and promotion of new technologies (in this case, computers are developed in military research programs during World War for ballistics calculations, fire control, aircraft simulation, radar, code breaking, and physics calculation for the Manhattan Project, as covered in my chronology HAWB 1940s-1950s Timeline of computer development shows crucial role of government.)

Cooper's article is the first of a four-part series examining the four major factions in the Democratic Party and American left today. This first part considers the neoliberals, which of course is the faction which currently dominates the Democratic Party leadership, though it is in a dwindling minority. It dominates because it has money, but not votes. 

The second part is The Return of the Trust Busters, the faction around Elizabeth Warren, which Cooper brilliantly traces back to Louis Brandeis. 

The third article is Bernie Sanders and the Rise of American Social Democracy.

The fourth and final installment is The Dawn of American Socialism, which focused on the faction led by the Democratic Socialists of America.

There is no consideration of the historically crucial role of the American School of political economy, which helps explain why Cooper does not include the disastrous "race to the bottom" initiated by NAFTA and free trade.

I also highly recommend Cooper's How to Crush Trump from December 27, 2017, especially this paragraph:

Then in 2020, Trump must be crushed at the ballot box. His corrupt administration must be thoroughly investigated, and any criminal acts punished. More importantly, the economic base of Republican plutocracy — Wall Street, monopolist corporations, and idle rich heirs and heiresses — must also be crushed. Monopolies must be broken up, taxes on the rich and corporations dramatically increased, and the size, profitability, and power of Wall Street sharply reduced with cricket bat regulations.

None of Obama's "don't look back, only forward," pursuit of bipartisan unicorns. Criminal activity must be ruthlessly targeted and vigorously prosecuted, ESPECIALLY by our political enemies.

Protect the Petrodollar

The second most important story after the catastrophe of climate change is the quite related story of: What is the end game for the Age of Fire and Fossil Fuels?

This is no small question. The incredible energy density of fossil fuels has made possible a huge population that will be fighting over the table scraps as these fuels become more rare and expensive. Just remember, any fuel that is not renewable is by definition running out. The role of fuels like gasoline in the food supply is beyond important. And while activities like freezing food for preservation can powered by solar or wind with a few changes, the idea of a battery-powered tractor or combine is still mostly a fantasy.

Here in USA, the end of the Age of Petroleum promises to especially difficult. We have been a net energy importer since about 1970 and while we sold off the country's industrial crown jewels and some prime real estate to help pay the bills, such actions were but a drop in the bucket compared to the massive oceans of oil we import every day. In 2012, the trade deficit in oil was over $300 billion and while fracking has recently lowered that amount to less than $15 billion in 2016, fracking is a secondary recovery technique designed to extract the last remnants of a depleted oil field. Of course, selling off the industrial crown jewels means that we make less of our needs every year—we now make less than 2% of our shoes for goodness sakes.

But the pain has mostly been rendered invisible because of the agreements USA managed to get agreed to in the 1970s when Richard Nixon closed the gold window. The most important plus the USA got by being the superpower was the agreement that the medium of exchange for the petroleum trade would be the dollar.

But we should remember a few fundamentals about money so we can understand why the petrodollar is so important.

The form money takes seems important to some, but in fact this is the most irrelevant issue (sorry goldbugs). The important question is: What makes money valuable?

1. Money is valuable if it can be exchanged for something else you want or need. Monetary cranks insist that paper or electronic money should be able to converted into something more intrinsically valuable like gold. Problem is, gold has very little intrinsic value compared to something like oil so the petrodollar is a FAR more stable store of value than gold could ever hope to be.
2. Money is valuable if you need it to pay off persons who can make your life miserable. As Peter Cooper, the Greenback Party Presidential candidate, would say, "If you can pay your taxes with it, the money is good." Of course, the same can be said for money used to pay off mortgages, etc. Creditors use police powers to enforce their currency rules.
3. The third way money is made valuable is when it is a monetization of human genius. When Japan's PM Abe tried to drive down the value of the Yen in 2012, he discovered that the factors usually blamed for driving down the value of a currency by the monetary pundits didn't work for the Yen. Turns out that if you can trade Yen for a Lexus (or thousand of other perfectly good examples), by gum it is worth something.

Bitcoins meet none of these criteria. Therefore its value is quite ephemeral. On the other hand, the petrodollar IS backed by force. The big problem is that it isn't easily-bullied pipsqueaks like Iraq or Libya challenging petrodollar supremacy. This time it's Russia and China. And while the Petrodollar is so powerful that it can withstand a bunch of shocks, it also has a bunch of enemies. Bringing down the petrodollar would make much of the world's population very happy. So while it is still powerful and backed by murderous people with insanely destructive weapons, the petrodollar is no longer invulnerable. We should all keep an eye on this story. There isn't a LOT of good writing on this subject but I found three articles worth reading.

The infuriating irony of libertarians' wet dream, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency

I suspect that most people do not understand bitcoin and cryptocurrencies because they also do not understand how money is "created." The reality that money can be created out of nothing is so ludicrously simple that most people simply cannot believe it. John Kenneth Galbraith observed that "The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled."

I am going to go out on a limb and assert that if you do not understand the creation of money, you cannot be truly progressive on economic issues. You can support progressive positions on economic issues, but until you understand how money is created, you will always be vulnerable to being herded into a veal pen for slaughter by financial oligarchs.

If you want an explanation of money creation, in January 2015 I posted Creating money out of thin air on DailyKos. If you want examples of so-called progressives freaking out because they refuse to believe money is created out of nothing, read the comments. The hostility and arrogance of certain imbeciles is part of what pushed me away from DailyKos.

Cryptocurrencies, of which Bitcoin is now the best known example, with the highest market capitalization -- $217.8 billion the minute I write this -- are nothing more than computer programs creating their own units of money. Libertarians love it, because it is money that is NOT being created by governments. No small number of libertarians also hate the big banks almost as much as they hate government. So, I think cryptocurrencies are going to be more than a passing speculative fad simply because they are a libertarians wet dream. Nothing will happen to knock cryptocurrencies that libertarians won't shake off as they cling to their anti-government, anti-"crony capitalism" ideology. 

The infuriating irony is that one of the things libertarians hate most about governments and central banks (which are often quasi-government entities controlled by the very financial oligarchs who control the big banks of Wall Street and the City of London) is that governments and central banks issue fiat currency that is backed by nothing. Libertarians insist on a return to the gold standard, so that government-issued money has "value." What about cryptocurrencies, though? I have yet to hear any libertarian denounce Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency because it is not backed by gold, or backed by anything else of "value."

So, while the speculative frenzy of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is bad, the one good thing is that it is teaching people that money can be created out of nothing. I suspect that's why Dimon of JP Morgan hates Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies so much. Either that, or Dimon is just talking them down to manipulate the price.

(A note on why the speculative frenzy is bad. Because it is a misuse and misapplication of society's talents and resources at a time when the only frenzy should be building the Tesla and electric car recharging stations, wind turbines, solar energy arrays, geothermal generating plants, urban mass transit systems, and upgrading and replacing every man-made structure on the planet to, to transition as quickly as possible away from burning fossil fuels and worsening climate change.)

The sun STILL never sets on the British Empire

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I have been openly questioning, in sundry forums around the pixelsphere, why Rupert Murdoch and Fox News have never been treated the same way RT is being treated now--forced to register as a Russian agent of influence because of a flood of suspicions regarding to what extent RT is controlled by Russian intelligence, or even Putin personally. Why have Rupert Murdoch and Fox News never been even considered as British agents of influence? I should have seen it coming, but I did not, yet come it did, on--where else?--DailyKos. Someone informed me that I was wrong: Murdoch is not British, but Australian.

Well, OK, I should try to be more understanding that Americans have not really had first hand experience with the strict social and political hierarchy of Britain and the countries of the British commonwealth, and probably do not understand that Australia, when push comes to shove, is still under the thumb of the British monarch. The same is true for Canada and a bunch of other countries. The British monarch is head of state of 16 countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon Islands, The Bahamas, Tuvalu and the United Kingdom. Note how many of these are hot money centers.

The head of government, usually the Prime Minister of the country, can be dismissed by the British monarch, usually acting through the monarch’s representative, the Governor-General. This happened in Australia in November 1975, after Prime Minister Gough Whitlam of the Australian Labor Party (ALP); began to prepare to break from the financial stranglehold of the City of London by reaching out to the Saudis and other oil states for financing. Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed Whitlam as Australian PM, and made the Leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Fraser of the Liberal Party, the new Prime Minister. This is still a really big deal in Australia. It created a constitutional crisis that is called "The Dismissal". A series of movies have been made about it, and a number of books published. In the national memory of Australians, it is comparable to Watergate for Americans.

When I started searching the internet to verify a few details (for example, I had forgotten the names of Whitlam and Kerr), I found controversy over The Dismissal has been rekindled in Australia by a court fight to force Queen Elizabeth to release to the public her private files regarding The Dismissal. The court case apparently was initiated by a scholar after she found a handful of extracts from Kerr's letters to the Queen's private secretary in Kerr's journals. According to an Australian Broadcasting Company posting:

A handful of extracts from Kerr's letters to the Palace quoted in his own journal show that from as early as September 1975, the Governor-General had raised the prospect of him sacking of the Government, and of his own dismissal by Whitlam. "The moment he set that out to the Queen she was already involved because the Queen from that point had options that she could take," Professor Hocking said. "One of the options was to alert the prime minister Gough Whitlam to the fact that the Governor-General was speaking about these very extreme possibilities ... Now, from all accounts she chose not to do that."

This past November, ABC posted an article on the anniversary of The Dismissal: The facts of the Whitlam dismissal are more important than ever.

Five Hundred Million Dollar Negative Yield Bond Issued

I have permission from Mr. Welsh to repost anything he writes after waiting at least a day or two from his original posting. TW.
by Ian Welsh, Nov. 17, 2017

No, central banks aren’t screwing the economy up with their purchases:

Veolia (Paris:VIE) has issued a 500 million 3-year EUR bond (maturity November 2020) with a negative yield of -0.026 %, which is a first for a BBB issuer.

To be clear, central banks didn’t buy those bonds, investors did. But central bank purchases of government debt are a large part of what is causing this issue.

The ECB (European Central Bank) has been buying SEVEN times the issuance of government bonds. Seven times. Seven times.

They are straight up financing governments (which, done right, could be a good thing, but isn’t in this context).

The problem in the world today is the same as it was 15 years ago, before the financial collapse: There is too much money chasing not enough returns. Because there isn’t enough real growth, that money moves into bubbles and fraud, and destroys companies through leveraged buyouts and so on, but it also means that, if there isn’t enough fraud or predation going on, it sits and stagnates and does nothing worthwhile.

What the developed world actually needs is stuff to invest in, high marginal tax rates (higher on capital gains than on earned income), distributive policies to the bulk of the population to create wide-spread demand, and moderate inflation of about five percent a year to get people to actually invest in new businesses, not in financial speculation.

The problem with this solution set is that if it doesn’t also include effective regulation, it can have to environmentally devastating effects; for instance, because solar is not fully online, the above solution set could lead to oil price spikes.

Those problems, however, are not why this isn’t being done. This isn’t being done because current leadership does not believe in high taxes, wide distribution, or regulation. They are neoliberals, and 40 years of neoliberal disasters cannot convince them to engage anything other than neoliberalism, because neoliberalism has made them and their friends very very rich.

But the game is coming to an end. They want to tax the middle class and poor people, sparing the rich but they are now starting to tax the rich through the back door of negative interest rates. Meanwhile, the poor and middle class, especially the young ones, are losing patience and are willing to go either straight-up socialist or straight-up fascist (the Polish 50K rally).

This is going to get a lot uglier before it gets better.

There will be three choices for countries: Fascism, left-wing populism, or dystopic surveillance/police states.

Choose.

Trump's New Fed Chairman--Meet the New Boss; Same as the Old Boss

Trumpster's choice as next chairman of the Federal Reserve is Jerome Powell, who is not an economist, but a lawyer. Powell, a Republican, has been on the Fed Board of Governors since 2012 when he was appointed by that paragon of unrequited bipartisanship, Barack Obama.

Actually, I myself missed the news: Powell's appointment was on November 2, 2017. I just learned of it via one of today's postings at Naked Capitalism: Powell’s Federal Reserve, a melange of reactions from various economists, including Kenneth "dangerous debt cliff" Rogoff, and Joseph Stiglitz, one of the precious few high-profile but decent economists in the world, who "wonders whether Trump has captured the Fed." The best line in the piece linked to by NC is "Tho Bishop at Mises Wire argues that with the nomination of Powell the “swamp wins again”." This is one time the libertarians get it right: a quick perusal of Powell's profile on Wikipedia shows that Powell is a swamp creature, a Wall Street financial predator, and nothing else.

Powell started his career clerking for a federal judge, followed by joining the big Wall Street law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell in 1981. This firm was a central legal player in the leveraged buy outs (LBOs) of the 1980s, which laundered hundreds of billions of dollars of dirty money by taking over and asset-stripping thousands of U.S. industrial and other companies.

In 1984, Powell moved to Dillon, Read & Co., one of the most established of the Wall Street establishment investment banks. A few years ago, a former managing director of Dillon Read, Catherine Austin Fitts, made her public mea culpa by posting details of the firm's involvement in dirty money laundering that will make your eyeballs pop. Dillon Read was involved in what was by far the largest LBO of the time, the $25 billion buyout of RJR Nabisco by Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts in 1988. (KKR has been a top funder of the Republican Party and conservative political infrastructure for decades now). Fitts writes that the RJR Nabisco LBO made no business sense at all, since it was impossible for RJR Nabisco to service the buyout debt piled on it within the limits of its stated cash flow. The LBO only made sense after she read a European Union lawsuit against RJR Nabisco, which alleged that RJR Nabisco was engaged in multiple long-lived criminal conspiracies, including business with Latin American drug cartels, Italian and Russian mafia, and Saddam Hussein’s family. There were literally billions of dollars in additional cash flow, but it was all dirty money.

The end of Wolfgang Schäuble's evil madness?

Wolfgang Schäuble does not have a fan club around here because he is such a perfect neoliberal. (The list of my criticisms can be found here) But he has been accepted / praised in Germany because he has been the enthusiastic face of the German financial establishment. And what an ugly face that has been. Even by German standards, he is especially homely. If someone was casting a play and needed a devil to scare little children, he would be perfect. And I am pretty certain the Greeks whose lives he was destroying had no problem thinking of him as evil personified.

But the neoliberalism he was pitching was certain to be harming the German economy as well because it is an economic philosophy that causes a great deal of collateral damage. So it is with some pleasure I note that one of the more enlightened of the German economists, Heiner Flassbeck, has produced a stunningly accurate critique of Schäuble's crackpot mismanagement. Unfortunately for the Germans, the neoliberal bench is very deep. There are probably thousands of economists spread over all the political parties ready to make Schäuble look like a kindly old man. But the fact that he has been eased out as the FM may mean that there are corners of the German economic establishment who at least have questions about the "wisdom" of neoliberalism. It is 25 years too late but a turnaround must start somewhere.

Wiping Out Puerto Rico’s Debt Without Hurting Bondholders

Even before Hurricane Maria leveled the island of Puerto Rico, their economy was already in a world of hurt. They were attempting to refinance $74 billion in debt when Maria inflicted another $55 billion in property damage and caused $40 billion in lost economic output.

But hey, Puerto Rico is part of USA and we just spent the last nine years wiping out the massive banking losses incurred when the financial system crashed in the 2007-8 recession. The method used was a little gimmick called "quantitative easing." If we can bail out a bunch of crooked banksters, we should surly be able to rebuild an island responsible for a significant fraction of global Viagra production.

Below Ellen Brown explains just how this could be done. Of course, this does not mean it will be done. It's one thing to bail out crooked banksters—it's quite another to help poor people struggling to survive.

Globalisation: the rise and fall of a truly terrible idea

There is a certain beauty and nobility about the idea that we are the world and wonderful things happen when we think of the rest of humanity as our brothers and sisters. Unfortunately, some very cynical people can take this beautiful idea and turn it into empire building. The sun never sets on the greatest civilization, you know.

Of course, the Roman or British Empires were harmless play-actors compared to the ruthless plunder available to those who can control the hydraulics of electronic money. And to keep the looting of the electronic money boys on track, the world needed some philosopher-pundits to convince the suckers that usury was harmless and the "structural adjustments" that threw whole classes of people into abject poverty were necessary for growth and prosperity. And to give the practitioners of empire building with electronic money a patina of beauty and respectability, they named their wickedness "Globalization" and "Free Trade" and "Reform."

In spite of the fact that none of these schemes benefitted very many people, the Globalists kept at it because the very few it did benefit became rich beyond the dreams of avarice. But pretty predictions advanced by the expensive think tanks couldn't cover the fact that these global schemes never work.

• Big mass markets simply cannot work without a giant middle class with money to spend. Unfortunately, the primary goal of the money plunderers is to reduce the size and income of the middle classes.
• The money boys tend to lack all respect for manufacturing and other forms of useful work. Ship those factories to China or Bangladesh where desperate brown folks will work for $10 a day. The de-industrialization of the formerly industrial countries has triggered some of the greatest calamities in human history. These moves were deliberately undertaken by hopelessly thoughtless people.
• While we may all be brothers and sisters sharing a big blue marble in space, the realities of life are dramatically different from one region to another. One of the things builders quickly realize is that construction practices often don't travel very far. A house built for the blazing heat of the USA Southwest will be damn near worthless during a North Dakota blizzard. In macroeconomics, the same economic scheme that works well in Sweden may not work nearly as well in India or Egypt. Yet the money boys used their institutions to enforce economic orthodoxy from Ecuador to Korea and dozens of stops in between.

So now we are seeing some of the philosopher-pundits of Globalization coming ever so slowly to the realization that they have been selling some aromatic bullshit. Not all of them, mind you. The economics profession is mostly made up of very conventional people so they have no tendency to abandon their conventional wisdom. But some, apparently with the capacity to feel shame, have recognized that the vast majority of Globalization's major theses are just plain wrong and have formulated critiques. What follows is a damn fine article written by someone who has at least seen a brief flash of light.

Sovereign Debt Jubilee?

Whenever someone suggest that we fund a Green "New Deal" (to use the phrase of Green Party candidate Jill Stein) a howl goes up of "you must be crazy-don't you understand the national debt is already in the $20 trillion range?" And unfortunately, that pretty much ends the discussion. And so we keep doing nothing because paying the interest on the national debt is SO much more important than doing something meaningful to save the ecosystems that make human life possible. Massive death by compound interest, anyone?

The power of creditors to force people to do very unpleasant things is really quite amazing from cultural intimidation, to evictions, to debtors prisons, to various methods of physical torture employed by loan sharks—and all to enforce a "reality" that exists mostly as a line of bookkeeping. Think about it—we have been prevented from doing things that are utterly necessary to the survival of the species because of "information" that exists as an electronic charge in the memory of some computer. This reality is so fundamentally insane that its no wonder the creditor classes must resort to their bag of cultural and physical violence to enforce their claims on your life.

The intimidation must be total because the nature of debt can be changed with almost tiny revisions in law and practice. Here Ellen Brown outlines how Japan is in the process of wiping out half of its national debts with almost invisible changes to the way their central bank operates and asks, "Why cannot we do the same thing?"

Glass-Steagall, now more than ever

For those of us who have watched in absolute horror as the neoliberals have retested their crackpot theories on a country too ignorant to know better, our response is usually some variation on the theme "we know how to do it better because we have already demonstrated that our ideas are pragmatically superior." Paul Roberts is another throwback to the time when industrial "capitalism" created generalized prosperity and rewarded hard work and innovation rather than the scam of the month.

In some ways, it is almost impossible to imagine that something as honest, basic, and necessary as Glass-Steagall needs to be defended. Yet it was repealed, the banking systems blew up, and the taxpayers were put on the hook to save the perpetrators of deregulatory madness. Of course, the original act was put in place to prevent exactly the problems that showed up in the real estate bubble. In a sane world, Glass-Steagall would have been reinstated in 2008. But NOOOOO! The Predators want their bucket shops because it beats the hell out of honest work. And so the USA staggers from one economic crises to another.

The European Left sells out the Greeks

Watching the American Left slide into irrelevancy at best and utter insanity at worst is certainly distressing but it is hardly surprising. The signs of extreme forms of neoliberalism were already abundantly apparent in the Democratic Party in the 1970s when Jimmy Carter, a mostly unknown peanut farmer / nuclear engineer became President of the United States with the help of David Rockefeller and the Council on Foreign Relations / Trilateral Commission. Carter's Vice President, Walter Mondale, was such a drooling stooge of the establishment that in his presidential run in 1984, he managed to lose debates to Reagan—a guy who was already visibly suffering from dementia / Alzheimers. Mondale couldn't really debate Reagan because on the big issues of economics and foreign policy, they agreed. Of course Mondale didn't go quite as far as 1988 corpo-dem candidate Michael Dukakis who declared, "This race isn't about ideology, it's about competence."

Of course, the left actually did have a granola version of what they believed on hand for such an occasion. They may have thrown in the towel on economics, by gum, but they still had the culture wars to win and food to complain about. And in these arenas, it is hard to argue against their success. For me, this was personal. My political roots were in the Farmer-Labor Party. Their goal was to get a better economic arrangement for factory workers and small farmers. In my mind, if you gave up the economic arguments, you pretty much lost the reason for having a political party.

Oddly enough, I pretty much expected the USA Left to sell out their economic principles. Watching the European Left sell out is much harder to understand. When I first encountered Europe's Left it was in 1970. I was pretty much welcomed because of my anti-Vietnam War activism but when the subject changed to economics and social policy, I felt pretty much lost. Everyone I met who called themselves a Lefty was FAR more theoretical than I was or will ever be. The way I saw it, people who had invested so much time and energy developing their complex theoretical positions seemed highly unlikely to abandon them. I returned from that summer of passionate debates in youth hostels determined to get my theoretical ducks in a row.

So I read some Trotsky, a bunch of Gramsci, etc. Basically what I discovered was that even though these authors could inspire something that resembled revolutionary ardor, none seemed to address the issues that so dominated my early political consciousness—interest rates and usury laws, the creation of money, the regulation of "natural" monopolies, etc. So as we can see from today's brilliant take-down of the modern "Left" by one really furious Greek, we have reasons aplenty to be furious over what has happened to that poor little country. Even IF the Left could awaken some old revolutionary ardor, they are theoretically ill-equipped to comment on such issues as IMF structural adjustments in the age of electronic money—and the rest of the horrors visited on the world's poor.