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I love the way the GOP thinks it is perfectly acceptable to inconvenience people who want to vote by demanding all types of paperwork accessible only in remove government offices when there is little to no voter fraud but doesn’t want to inconvenience a person who wants to buy 6000 rounds of ammunition and a… Continue reading Untitled

The World Is Experiencing The Opposite Of A Sovereign Debt Crisis

The World Is Experiencing The Opposite Of A Sovereign Debt Crisis

You might be tempted to say, well, okay but the Fed is manipulating rates, or that the US is just the “cleanest dirty shirt” but both of these explanations fail when you look at the wide sweep of borrowing costs around the world.

This is the exact opposite of what should be happening if the Peter Schiff’s and Ron Paul’s of the world were right about a currency crisis causing spikes in inflation and interest rates as they have been predicting for almost a decade now.

Krugman, Say’s Law and the silliness of Going Galt

Krugman, Say’s Law and the silliness of Going Galt

Now suppose that President Obama has reduced Mr. Wheelerdealer to despair; not only does the president waste money by doing things like feeding children, he says mean things about some rich people, which is just like the Nazis invading Poland, or something. So Wheelerdealer decides to go Galt. Well, actually just one-third Galt, reducing his working time to just 2000 hours a year so he can spend more time with his wife and mistress.
According to marginal productivity theory, this does in fact shrink the economy: Wheelerdealer adds $10,000 worth of production for every hour he works, so his semi-withdrawal reduces GDP by $10 million. Bad!
But what is the impact on the incomes of Americans other than Wheelerdealer? GDP is down by $10 million — but payments to Wheelerdealer are also down by $10 million. So the impact on the incomes of non-Wheelerdealer America is … zero. Enjoy your leisure, John!

At some point we will be forced to admit that the folks who live on the equity side of the ledger are over paid and under taxed and this is a problem for people on the asset side of the ledger. If they all went Galt, no one would miss them and many people, mostly wage workers, would be better off.

What is the Libor scandal?

What is the Libor scandal?

growing evidence that Libor numbers have been deliberately manipulated by banks for years means that millions of people have been paying the wrong interest rate on all manner of financial products. Vast sums of money have been wrongly snatched from innocent people and created equally vast undeserved windfalls for others. The basic structure of the world’s financial system has once again been exposed as fundamentally broken.

And once again, the right says nothing about it, or claims it isn’t a problem because there is no way to fix the problem via tax cuts and deregulation. And if there is no way to fix it via tax cuts and deregulation, it can’t possibly be a real problem.

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OK, something did happen to fiscal responsibility; but it happened circa 1981, not circa 1961. Who was the president then? (via Sixties Madness – NYTimes.com)

How LIBOR Impacts Financial Models and Why the Scandal Matters

How LIBOR Impacts Financial Models and Why the Scandal Matters

Matt Taibbi asks why nobody is freaking out about the LIBOR scandal, Robert Reich calls it the scandal of all scandals, and Dylan Matthews has a great explainer of the whole thing here. Abigail Field has more at Reality Check.
This can be confusing stuff, so I want to go through a very simple example of how this impacts the markets.

The right isn’t talking about it because they haven’t figured out an angle to blame this on too much regulation or taxes being to high. Once they figure out a way to claim the scandal was caused by something they oppose, they will start talking about it. Until then, enjoy this really good explanation by Mike Konczal at Rortybomb.

“The people who are the engine of the economy.”

“The people who are the engine of the economy.”

I’m not much of a car guy, but the way I understand this metaphor to work is that if you want to give rich people credit for being “the engine of the economy” then if the economy is performing subpar it follows that something’s wrong with your engine. And yet I suspect Zambrelli wouldn’t take kindly to that diagnosis.

If something good happens, praise me. If something bad happens, blame yourself. And if you disagree you’re a Marxist from Kenya.

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Moving to Canada to protest universal health care coverage is like moving to Saudi Arabia to protest the Ground Zero Mosque.