Month: April 2012
-
Conservative or Liberal? One Question to Rule them All
I’m devastated that Christian Rudder hasn’t posted to the OKTrends blog for more than a year.* He did statistical analysis of the monstrous database of OK Cupid — a dating site that asks participants hundreds of often odd and quirky questions about themselves — to draw out conclusions about various, sundry, and often fascinating topics.…
-
Beckworth Promotes Platinum Coins as Obama’s “FDR Moment”!
You know things are weird when pretty strongly right-of-center economists are proposing ideas first touted by MMT econocranks (yes, beowulf, I’m talking about you) to bring about the Obama breakout moment that progressives (despairingly) dream of at night. The world is a very strange place. And people argue with Steve Randy Waldman when he says…
-
Mitt Romney, American Parasite, Destroys America’s Mittelstand
Speaking of “extractive elites,” don’t miss Pete Kotz’s cover story in the Village Voice, Mitt Romney, American Parasite. (I read it in their subsidiary Seattle Weekly.) It details a whole string of Bain purchases under Romney — thriving companies that were saddled with debt so Romney could extract cash in the form of “profits,” leaving the companies to devolve…
-
The American Conservative: “Extractive Elites” and “Macro-Corruption”
It’s pretty amazing to read a cover story in, and by the publisher of, The American Conservative that could have run in The Nation, Mother Jones, or on Daily Kos — almost. Certainly America’s top engineers and entrepreneurs have created many of the world’s most important technologies, sometimes becoming enormously wealthy in the process. But these economic successes are…
-
Encouraging Deadly Financial Viruses
Randall Wray highlights two great insights that arose at the annual Minsky conference last week in NYC. First Joseph Stiglitz (Wray’s words, emphasis mine): Recall that part of the reason for the creation and explosion of derivatives was to spread risk. For example, mortgage-backed securities were supposed to make the global financial system safer by…