Tag Archives: Economy
Austerity myths
We already know that real households do not live within their means; if they did, the economy would grind to a halt. Modern prosperity is built upon debt, and the main aim of economic recovery is to get the banks lending again to both households and businesses.
It is a myth, and it is propping up austerity politics. Another myth is that there is a shortage of money. This implies that there is a fixed pool of money, or some other external factor limiting supply. …
The austerity myth that damaged the public sector most significantly was the claim that states could not create money, they could only borrow from the banking sector. …
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Scientists must do more to challenge the failed economic and political system
But at the top, there is paralysis: leading scientific organizations do little except chase money and reinforce the ruling nexus of politics and finance — even since the financial crisis of 2008, which discredited the free-market philosophy that underpins that nexus. I argued years ago (see Nature479, 447; 2011) that scientific leaders had failed to respond in any meaningful way to that collapse, and I’m still waiting.
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Public perceptions of economy, shocks and elections
Perceptive.
Bernie, William Jennings Bryan and Progressivism
Since Sanders uttered these words, last May, his message hasn’t changed. Day after day, he has spoken in terms that haven’t been heard from a serious major-party candidate since William Jennings Bryan, the great prairie populist, who famously accused his opponent, William McKinley, and the moneyed interests who supported McKinley, of trying to “crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” (Bryan was referring to the gold standard, which he opposed.) In much the same way that Trump has labelled Sanders a Communist, the Republicans of Bryan’s day called him a fanatic who would wreck the American economy. Even some Democrats depicted Bryan as a dangerous radical with impractical policy proposals.
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Financial Reform
So right.
While it is reasonable to subject a reform agenda to the 2008 test, this should be at most a side issue. After all, it is virtually certain that our next crisis will not look our last crisis. Financial reform first and foremost is not about preventing the last crisis, but rather about designing a financial system that more effectively serves the rest of the economy.
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Age of Dissent: more protests in 2015 than any time since the late 70s
The year 2011 is widely viewed as the peak of protest and dissent in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the austerity agenda that followed it. It was the year of the Arab Spring, Occupy, UK Uncut, indignados, urban riots and anti-austerity and tuition fee protests – and in which Time magazine famously named “The Protester” as its person of the year.
Yet in the UK, protests continue to occur at a rate rarely seen prior to the global economic crisis in 2008. Indeed, 2015 seems to have confirmed the suggestion, made at the beginning of the year, that 2011 was “really only just the beginning”. …
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Basic Income, an idea whose time has come
A wide array of different approaches to a Basic Income have been proposed over the years. But perhaps one of the most credible and immediately possible proposals has recently emerged in a new report by the RSA.
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Inverse relation between private debt and unemployment
Figure 7: Acceleration of private debt and change in unemployment (Correlation coefficient -0.82)
Cartel Corporation Cocaine Capitalism
A new book by Roberto Saviano:
The realisation that cocaine capitalism is central to our economic universe made Escobar the Copernicus of organised crime, argues Saviano, adding: “No business in the world is so dynamic, so restlessly innovative, so loyal to the pure free-market spirit as the global cocaine business.” It sounds simple, but it isn’t – it is revolutionary and, says Saviano, it explains the world. …
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A conversation between David Graeber and Thomas Piketty
On capital, debt and the future of capitalism.
5% and New Economy
IMF: ‘Trickle-Down’ economics does not work
If there’s one person most often associated with the origins of of trickle-down economics, it’s President Ronald Reagan. Few people know, however, that the phrase was actually coined by American humorist Will Rogers, whomocked President Herbert Hoover’s Depression-era recovery efforts, saying that “money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes it would trickle down to the needy.” …
Now, nearly 80 years later, Rogers’ quip is getting the punchline it deserves: A devastating new report from the International Monetary Fund has declared the idea of “trickle-down” economics to be as much a joke as he’d imagined.
Increasing the income share to the bottom 20 percent of citizens by a mere one percent results in a 0.38 percentage point jump in GDP growth.
The IMF report, authored by five economists, presents a scathing rejection of the trickle-down approach, arguing that the monetary philosophy has been used as a justification for growing income inequality over the past several decades. “Income distribution matters for growth,” they write. “Specifically, if the income share of the top 20 percent increases, then GDP growth actually declined over the medium term, suggesting that the benefits do not trickle down.”
The IMF Confirms That ‘Trickle-Down’ Economics Is, Indeed, a Joke
http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
January Reading List
- Sir Peter to take on new role in the defence sector
- Breaking Taboos, BDS Gains Ground Among Academics
- No, Chancellor, 0.5% inflation is not “welcome news”
- It is ‘impossible’ for today’s big oil companies to adapt to climate change
- Leave fossil fuels buried to prevent climate change, study urges
- The wealth that failed to trickle down: The rich do get richer while poor stay poor, report suggests
- Rate of environmental degradation puts life on Earth at risk, say scientists
- Why we must reject the dangerous delusions of Davos
- Is USAID Helping Haiti to Recover, or US Contractors to Make Millions?
- New Oxfam report says half of global wealth held by the 1%
- Revealed: how the wealth gap holds back economic growth
- Old ice in Arctic vanishingly rare
- Pentagon says air force’s ‘expanding drone fleet’ is unjustified and wasteful
- Tory and Labour seats face fracking and groundwater concerns
- Fossil fuel firms accused of renewable lobby takeover to push gas
- As inequality soars, the nervous super rich are already planning their escapes
- They Pretend to Think, We Pretend to Listen
- George Osborne urges ministers to fast-track fracking measures in leaked letter
- Social conscience is key to cutting household energy
- In depth: Infrastructure bill amendments on fracking, fossil fuels, and zero carbon homes
- MPs have given the thumbs up to fracking – but this one’s far from over
- Winning an Election Does Not Mean Winning Power
- How the CIA made Google
- Why is terror Islamist?
- The Myth of the Terrorist Safe Haven
- Their mantra was ‘Hope begins today’: the inside story of Syriza’s rise to power
- A State Licence to Rob the Public
- Can Cool Pope Francis Change the Catholic Church?
- Any Government Must Fund The NHS Properly
- Claims that climate models overestimate warming are “unfounded”, study shows
- 33 Latin American and Caribbean states endorse Austrian Pledge and call for negotiations on a ban treaty
- Islamic State: the unknown war
- Why Is an Israeli Defense Contractor Building a ‘Virtual Wall’ in the Arizona Desert?
- Five Years After: Long Live Howard Zinn
- Pentagon Seeks 13% Weapons Increase as Obama Urges End to Cuts
- How America Could Collapse
- Fracking set to be banned from 40% of England’s shale areas
- Put the Pentagon On a Real Budget
- Don’t Blame Islam
- Cameron’s five-year legacy: has he finished what Thatcher started?
November Reading List
- Fracking could carry unforeseen risks as thalidomide and asbestos did, says report
- This headline will subtly mislead you and science says that probably matters
- 5 Key Takeaways From the Latest Climate Change Report
- Why Ebola hit West Africa hard
- Nuclear Arms Control in China Today
- Texas oil town makes history as residents say no to fracking
- The secular stagnation hoax
- The Pentagon’s Arguments for Runaway Arms Trading Are Indefensible
- World’s first solar cycle lane opening in the Netherlands
- Raytheon acquires cyber firm for $420 million
- America’s New Mercenaries
- What’s the environmental impact of modern war?
- Petraeus joins pro-fracking choir at Harvard’s Belfer Center
- Stakes are high as US plays the oil card against Iran and Russia
- Foundation of US nuclear system showing cracks
- Midterms 2014: The Red Wedding for Democrats
- Can (green) energy policy create jobs?
- Death Wears Bunny Slippers
- It is the 0.01% who are really getting ahead in America
- The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and UK healthcare
- Is neoliberalism at last unravelling in Britain?
- For Whom the Wall Fell? A balance-sheet of transition to capitalism
- Ministers’ shale gas ‘hype’ attacked
- Some Very Initial Thoughts on the US-China Deal
- The social, political and ecological pathologies of the Ebola Crisis cannot be ignored
- F’d: How the U.S. and Its Allies Got Stuck with the World’s Worst New Warplane
- Spied on by BP
- How did the first world war actually end?
- Don’t Throw Billions at an Obsolete Nuclear Arsenal
- Hard Evidence: are we facing another financial crisis?
- Growth: the destructive god that can never be appeased
- Cameron is right to warn of another recession, but wrong to blame the world
- The Top 5 Foreign Policy Lessons of the Past 20 Years
- The .01 Percent Blow Their Fortunes on Yachts, Personal Jets and America’s Politicians
- How much is owed to Gaza? Does anyone know? This is not a rhetorical question. I’m really asking!
- International arms firm Lockheed Martin in the frame for £1bn NHS contract
- We Love the Pentagon’s ‘Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure’
- Massive Rail Deal Gives China’s Push Into Africa a Major Win
- Exaggeration Nation
- Barclays boycotted over Israel arms trade shares
- Firms invested £17bn in companies making cluster bombs, report says
- There is Nothing Natural about Gentrification
- 41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed: US drone strikes – the facts on the ground
- The ‘crass insensitivity’ of Tower’s luxury dinner for arms dealers, days after poppy display
- Fracking firm’s plans to look for gas in North Yorkshire criticised by environmental groups
- House Republicans just passed a bill forbidding scientists from advising the EPA on their own research
- Justifying War: “Just” Wars
October Reading List
- A Trillion Ways To Build a New Military Industrial Complex
- The Military Takes on Climate Change Deniers
- Amazon Must Be Stopped
- Japan’s Decision on Collective Self-Defense in Context
- Far-Right Birther’s Secret Funders
- Pinkwashing: Fracking Company Teams Up With Susan G. Komen to ‘End Breast Cancer Forever’
- Cut benefits? Yes, let’s start with our £85bn corporate welfare handout
- US firms could make billions from UK via secret tribunals
- Germany Can’t Manage Its Weapons
- Warmongering Hebrew University tries to muzzle Palestinian students
- Richest 1% of people own nearly half of global wealth, says report
- UK to allow fracking companies to use ‘any substance’ under homes
- This One $486 Million Blunder In Afghanistan Sums Up The Disaster Of Military Spending
- The US and a Crumbling Levant
- Only 12% of drone victims in Pakistan identified as militants: report
- Does Rising Inequality Make a Democracy More Warlike?
- European banks and the global banking glut
- With US-led air strikes on Isis intensifying, it’s a good time to be an arms giant like Lockheed Martin
- Organised Hypocrisy on a Monumental Scale
- NASA Confirms A 2,500-Square-Mile Cloud Of Methane Floating Over US Southwest
- Netanyahu’s Not Chickenshit, the White House Is
What is neoliberalism
As explained by William Davies in his “Neoliberalism: A Bibliographic Review“:
Definitions of neoliberalism across these literatures are various. But they tend to share four things:
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Money creation in the modern economy
Defense spending in the U.S. in charts
Dylan Matthews, “Defense spending in the U.S., in four charts,” The Washington Post, 28 August 2012
Source: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments
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Will the Chinese economic miracle continue?
John Cassidy, “What’s Happening in 2014? Twelve Questions Answered,” The New Yorker, 3 January 2014
9. Will the Chinese economic miracle continue? Yes. After thirty years of rapid growth, the Chinese economy is now threatening to overtake the U.S. economy as the world’s largest, according to some measures. But there’s still plenty of scope for so-called “catch-up growth.” In terms of G.D.P. per person, the United States is still about five times as rich as China. Even middle-income countries such as Latvia and Chile are twice as rich. But with the formerly Communist nation still spending close to fifty per cent of its G.D.P. on infrastructure projects, education, and other forms of investment, the gap is likely to keep closing for some time. That’s what happened in other fast-growing Asian economies that industrialized earlier, such as Japan and Korea, and there’s no reason to expect China will be different.
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Tipping Point North South 