Economics

This stuff was posted on two sites:

• Ryan Grim & Jeremy Scahill’s new Drop Site
• Matt Taibbi’s Racket News

I haven’t gone through all the content yet, but over the last ~6 years I’ve come to take Jeffrey Sachs at his word, moreso than Naomi Klein. He’s been consistently what he appears at face value.

• Ryan Grim: Jeffrey Sachs: A Front Row Seat to the Cold War That Never Ended
• Matt Taibbi: What I Got Wrong About “Shock Therapy”
• Ryan Grim & Emily Jashinsky interview Matt Taibbi & Jeffery Sachs: A True Shock? Economist Jeffrey Sachs Reveals Secret at Heart of U.S.-Russian Relations (YouTube video)

It appears that Senator Elizabeth Warren was spot on in her assessment of the lack of a backbone for Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell when it comes to raising capital requirements on the powerful megabanks on Wall Street.

Powell doesn’t lack backbone. The private banking cartel largely runs the Fed, and he’s their elected capo. The Fed is a racket.

That is what happens when you slash taxation on the richest and allow inequality to explode. Your economies die, and your children don’t eat, and they wear thick jumpers, as I did, in the winter, and they shiver, with their families, in cold homes.

Meanwhile, someone like me will be sitting in a skyscraper, just a 15-minute walk away, betting on it, and that person will become a millionaire.

Then they’ll retire and they’ll buy a luxury apartment, overlooking a marina, and they’ll sit on a huge sofa and eat porridge, and they’ll watch the budget, and they’ll cry.

And in the houses down the road, the mom doesn’t eat, and she hopes the children don’t notice. But they do.

cross-posted from: https://jorts.horse/users/fathermcgruder/statuses/113008342518705813

Instead of price controls to prevent gouging, why doesn't the government build up reserves and stockpiles?

#economics #HarrisWalz #PriceControls #gouging

@crosspost

Paywall removed: https://archive.is/W4JHS

Paywall removed https://archive.is/cbtbh

Paywall removed: https://archive.is/2f1VY

Using data from the Census Bureau, TransUnion and the Federal Reserve, the study’s authors looked at inflation-adjusted household debt in the country’s largest 181 cities found Santa Clarita, California to have the highest average household credit card debt ($21,836), followed by Chula Vista, CA ($20,920), New York, NY ($19,207), Fontana, CA ($18,843) and Rancho Cucamonga, CA ($18,549).

https://archive.ph/B6BHy

https://archive.ph/O1kQZ

Alternative link: https://archive.ph/ce08r

"Specifically, let me make three points. First, while $34 trillion is a very large figure, it’s a lot less scary than many imagine if you put it in historical and international context. Second, to the extent debt is a concern, making debt sustainable wouldn’t be at all hard in terms of the straight economics; it’s almost entirely a political problem. Finally, people who claim to be deeply concerned about debt are, all too often, hypocrites — the level of their hypocrisy often reaches the surreal.

How scary is the debt? It’s a big number, even if you exclude debt that is basically money that one arm of the government owes to another — debt held by the public is still around $27 trillion. But our economy is huge, too. Today, debt as a percentage of G.D.P. isn’t unprecedented, even in America: It’s roughly the same as it was at the end of World War II. It’s considerably lower than the corresponding number for Japan right now and far below Britain’s debt ratio at the end of World War II. In none of these cases was there anything resembling a debt crisis. ..."