Finance and Economic Breakdown: Modeling Minsky's "Financial Instability Hypothesis"
Minus the math, which can be skipped over, for his discussion, the paper lays out the basics of modern economics wrt to economic cycles and labor v capitalist v creditor (banks) income.
It’s the basic model to reason about our economy and its state.
Apple workers are striking at a store in Maryland by Millie Giles 5/13/24
"...In the aftermath of its outrage-inducing object-crushing advert, Apple has been dealt another PR blow, as it faces its first retail employee strike in history.
...While Apple is currently in the firing line for its employee practices, with labor unions like the Communications Workers of America accusing the tech giant of union-busting, collective strike action has been gaining traction across the US more widely..."
By Mary Wildfire, originally published by Resilience.org May 14, 2024
"...A sociopath is by definition selfish, concerned only about getting what he or she wants and unconcerned about anyone else’s needs. And what is it that they want? Usually wealth. Some—the narcissists—also want the spotlight, want fame and adulation. Some crave power for its own sake, aside from the need to use power to get more wealth. Some don’t care about either of those. But mostly, it seems, what the billionaires want is more money. They have more money than they could spend in twenty lifetimes but they still are willing to sacrifice our children’s future to get even more money. This is remarkably narrow thinking, a fascination with numbers—you might even call it machinelike..."
“ One look at this chart should be sufficient to understand why the Great Crash of 1929 was both great, and a major cause of the Great Depression which followed it, and why levered speculation, rather than rational calculation, dominates the behaviour of asset markets.”
“ Treating the rates of change of and HQ as negligible, this implies that the rate of change of house prices is related to—and largely driven by—the acceleration of mortgage debt:”
Interesting, the acceleration in debt itself. Consider the Fed’s policy on interest rates.
Here is a direct relation of interest rates causing inflation.
The #Australia government is not a household or a business, they are the monopoly issuer of our #currency.
Any #surplus they achieve is necessarily money they could have spent on things we need, but chose not to. That's bad.
Do we want a government that taxes more money than they spend?
I don't. I want a government that identifies what needs doing, and spends whatever money required to achieve that.
And taxes based on which parties or activities should not have as much money as they extracted from the economy. Not a fiction of taxation "to spend on" something else.
The federal government should not have a "balanced #budget", they don't have any need to "find the money" anywhere, they issue as much #AustralianDollar as they choose to at any time.
That's what a federal spending bill does: The money now exists. It didn't "come from" anywhere. Stop waiting for taxation!
With my sisters and brothers from the Science Fiction Economics Lab, we prototyped a method to develop economically consistent science fictional "imperfect utopias" that are within reach (maybe). The secret sauce is a group with good balance of economists, science fiction authors, and "doers" (activists, policy makers).
#GlennLoury's new memoir will be published tomorrow! I've been waiting years, listening to him recount anecdotes as he's worked on the book. Quite the life he's led, going from the South Side of Chicago to youngest member of the Harvard Economics Department, offered a position in the Reagan Administration and author of a book opposing mass incarceration...
Ready for news that will shock nobody? It turns out globalization mostly helps out the richest 10% and has little to no impact on the poorest.
"The influence of globalization on income inequalities worldwide was greater than we had expected. We were particularly surprised that these differences were mainly due to the gains of the richest and that the lower income groups benefited little or not at all."
We really need to rethink our capitalistic obsession of running things like a business. Cutting costs to increase profits obviously doesn't make sense in areas of education, healthcare, public utilities, and prisons, to name just a few.
Hell, Boeing is making a strong case that it doesn't even make sense for businesses to be run like a business, much less these public goods...
Parallels Between Archaic Entrepots and Modern Offshore Banking Centers
By Michael Hudson, originally published by Resilience.org May 10, 2024
"...To create such enclaves has been an objective of mercantile capital through the ages. It patronizes the world’s politically weakest areas as long as they do not do what real governments do: regulate their economies. The search for “neutral territory” expressed itself already in the chalcolithic epoch, many millennia before private enterprise developed as we know it. The result of this impetus is that neolithic towns...and the biblical cities of refuge share the following important common denominator with today’s offshore banking centers: Instead of being centers of local governing, legal, and military power, they were politically neutral sites established outside the jurisdictions of local governments..."
Why not start the day with a little political economy
For those of you new to the idea that money is primarily the result of private credit creation in the banking sector, here's a nice (concise) summary of the position, linking the history of money, the role of the state & the importance of banks credit creation activity.
The key point, is there is no 'natural' economy, only one made from rule/laws of exchange & state interventions.
If you take the population and divide by the rate of housing starts per year, you get a quantity in dimensions of time and units of years. This quantity roughly speaking is related to the "longevity of a dwelling" you need to have in order for the housing per person that's available not to decline. So if real longevity of houses is more or less a constant, then when this graph is high housing availability is declining, and when it's low it's growing... There's a reason millennials feel cheated
Dagnab it, I am constantly wishing I had more text in my messages and forgetting to tag stuff in my first post. This message is just to tag @economics@a.gup.pe and some hash tags #economics#housing#data#statistics
This discussion is about housing longevity and the adequate production rate of housing starts to keep housing from becoming scarce. There's a graph in the first post that shows very interesting dynamics.
Gelman's blog asked the question "is it really just the economy stupid?"... A long discussion occurred. One economist I respect (Dale Lehman) argued from official statistics that the "real income" of the bottom 10% of nominal income has gone up in recent years. I argued based on a fixed uniform weighted CPI that it had gone down. Further discussion ensued. 1/ #economics@economics@a.gup.pe
Our #aurora generating magnetosphere, a geophysical #UBI, an environmental, ecological, economic UBI we don’t even think of that billionaires and their pet economists say they are competent to substitute for.
Consider the enormity of their egotistical folly.
Even Star Fleet would choose a 7C warmer Earth or an irradiated nuked Earth over a Mars. Technology has nothing to do with it. Wisdom does.
Imagine if Republicans actually got on board with this awesome idea instead of painting it as the destruction of America like they undoubtedly will. Conservatives have lost their way and their minds, truly. https://www.threads.net/@potus/post/C607StBrwUy
What Can We Learn From the Ruins of Gary, Indiana?
Exploring deindustrialization by Matthew Christopher May 3, 2024
"...To understand the root of Gary’s problems, we have to understand why it was built in the first place. Gary was founded in 1906 by United States Steel on approximately 10,000 acres of swampland it had covertly purchased. Unlike other American cities that had a more organic evolution, Gary’s sole purpose was to manufacture steel at Gary Works. ...Gary was a metropolis born of the ruthless pragmatism of railway lines and shipping routes—not quality of life...
...In 1973, a recession in the global steel market led to drastic decreases in steel prices and mill closures across the country. The effects were severe and long-lasting, and steel towns were among the hardest hit...
...It’s a warning, a monument to loss....It’s really a shame to see everything that you grew up with gone.”
A Shareable explainer: What is the Solidarity Economy?
By Emily Kawano, originally published by Shareable May 9, 2024
"...Here are some key differences between the sharing economy and the solidarity economy:
Profit orientation: ...the solidarity economy actively seeks to downplay or redistribute profits to stakeholders and community members...
Community engagement: The solidarity economy is deeply rooted in community engagement and empowerment, aiming to improve local resilience and economic democracy...
Governance: Solidarity economy initiatives typically involve democratic or participatory governance, with stakeholders involved in decision-making...
Sustainability and equity goals: The solidarity economy explicitly aims for social and environmental sustainability and equity. While sharing economy platforms might contribute to resource efficiency, these outcomes are not always the primary goal..."
So if a free market works to optimize stuff by maximizing efficiency, and people are perfectly clairvoyant utility maximizing beings people would have gone vegan in order to maximize agricultural output, defined as max caloric return for humans.
But instead the lion’s share of output goes to maximizing calories for cows, pigs and chickens. Despite the fact they can convert non edible (for people) organic matter into human calories.
Remember folks, mainstream economists assert that 3C warming is OKEY-DOKEY. They also put universities on a commerce footing and lobbied for debt based higher education.
They also say they are a scientific discipline, because they believe that humans operate on a rational basis. Of course, they demonstrate highest evidence regarding that assertion & their rationale attainment. ;)