Yearly Archives: 2012

Fiat Justitia? Breuer fires blanks on elite financial frauds

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Devin Smith | 20 comments

Beurre blanc is the classic white butter sauce of France. Americans who hate the French claim that they became adept at saucing to cover up the rot in their meat in earlier times. A beurre blanc does not remove the rot. It masks the bad taste and the bad color of bad meat. Indeed, the sauce makes the dish even less healthy. If the rotten meat doesn’t get you, the sauce’s cholesterol will.

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged banksters, Control Fraud, criminogenic, DPA, elite corporate crime, NDA

Alan Grayson’s Right; But He Misses the Larger Point

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Devin Smith | 9 comments

By Joe Firestone

Alan Grayson’s e-mail on Moody’s warning that it might reduce the US’s AAA rating, suggested that Moody’s was either threatening a downgrade because it wants to get the Bush tax cuts for the rich extended, or, alternatively, that “Moody’s is living in what Aristophanes called “Cloud Cuckoo Land.”” He says this because Moody’s is upset about the possibility that the US may go over the so-called “fiscal cliff,” even though if it did, it would theoretically result in $560 Billion of deficit reduction annually, without further legislative changes, and it makes no sense on the surface for a ratings agency to think that the risk of US bond default is greater when the annual deficit is being reduced by $560 B per year, than by some lesser amount, which is likely to happen if Congress doesn’t take us over that “cliff.”

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Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged 14th Amendment, Alan Grayson, Bill Mitchell, bond vigilantes, debt issuance, deficit reduction, deficits, fiscal cliff, Mike Norman, MMT, modern money theory, Moody's, national debt, PPCS, Proof Platinum Coin Seigniorage, Ratings Agencies, Standard & Poor's, Trillion Dollar Coin

Modern Money and Public Purpose

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Devin Smith | Comments Off

Randall Wray and Michael Hudson both presented at the inaugural session of Modern Money and Public Purpose. This seminar series is held at Columbia University’s Law School and is organized by the Workers’ Rights Student Coalition. Over the coming months, several MMT proponents will be presenting as part of the series including Stephanie Kelton and Warren Mosler on September 25th. Continue reading →

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Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged MMT, Modern Money and Public Purpose

Shamanistic Economics

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Dan Kervick | 52 comments

By Dan Kervick

The Fed did something on Wednesday: it announced a new program of open-ended quantitative easing, and it announced that it likely won’t pull back on the new round of monthly asset purchases once the economy begins to recover more strongly, but will keep the purchases going for some indefinite period of time afterward. After what exactly was left unsaid. The Fed apparently has a target it intends to overshoot, but hasn’t said exactly what the target is. But whatever it is, we have been given forward guidance that the reaching of that unspecified target won’t stop the asset purchases – at least not right away.

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Posted in Dan Kervick

Tagged Federal Reserve

How to End the Crisis

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Stephanie Kelton | 13 comments

By Marriner S. Eccles
(via e-mail from Thorvald Grung, Central Bank of Norway)

Marriner Eccles was Chairman of the Federal Reserve under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This note consists of excerpts from an address he gave to the US Senate’s Committee on Finance in 1933 before he was called to Washington for public service by FDR. The original address contained in the Congressional Records has been reduced from over thirty pages (including questions and answers) to only three pages here that contain his essential message. The address has been edited by Thorvald Grung Moe, Visiting Scholar at Levy Economics Institute. Some parts have been slightly modified to fit the current time and crisis. Additions or alteration to the text has been marked by square brackets. All original figures used by Eccles in the address have been inflated by a factor of 16.4 according to the official US CPI index.

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Posted in Guest Blogger

Has ‘Super Mario’ Really Saved the Euro?

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Devin Smith | 2 comments

By Marshall Auerback

Germany’s Constitutional Court gave a green light on Wednesday for the country to ratify Europe’s new bailout fund, boosting hopes that the single currency bloc is finally putting in place the tools to resolve its three-year old debt crisis.

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2 Comments

Posted in Marshall Auerback

Tagged Draghi, ESM, euro, euro crisis, european bailout

Beyond the Morality of Spending and Saving (Money) – Part 2

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Devin Smith | 6 comments

By Michael Hoexter

Ethics, Moral Advocacy and Economics (con’t)

If we look at the structure of the discourse produced by academic economists after Smith whether in print or in media appearances, moral frameworks provide a structuring role that often outweighs the technical aspect of the content which is presented. Well-known among MMT-oriented and post-Keynesian economists are the arguments of austerity advocates, who ignore the analytically obvious monetary and economic consequences of austerity in pursuit of the seeming virtue of every economic actor becoming a “saver” of money. Continue reading →

6 Comments

Posted in Michael Hoexter

Tagged austerity, neoliberalism, spending, TINA

Effectiveness of Mortgage Fraud Task Force

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Devin Smith | 1 comment

RT America discusses with William Black just how aggressive the investigation by the President’s Mortgage Fraud Task Force has actually been.

1 Comment

Posted in William K. Black

Tagged banksters, Financial crisis, jail the banksters, liar loans, mortgage fraud

No Plan B?

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Devin Smith | 11 comments

By Joe Firestone

Bob Woodward’s releasing a new book, so we are now seeing articles based on it. A few days back, The Washington Post published the “Inside story of Obama’s struggle to keep Congress from controlling outcome of debt ceiling crisis.” This account is a pretty downbeat one of how our political leaders and President Obama handled the debt ceiling crisis of the summer of 2011. I want to comment on what for me was the most salient point: that during the crisis, the President had no “Plan B” to get around the debt ceiling beyond negotiating a deal with Congress.

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Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged 14th Amendment, Bob Woodward, CNN, debt ceiling crisis, deficit reduction, deficits, entitlements, grand bargain, Jack Balkin, MMT, modern money theory, national debt, paul jay, PPCS, President Obama, Proof Platinum Coin Seigniorage, Social Security, Trillion Dollar Coin, Yves Smith

Beyond the Morality of Spending and Saving (Money) – Part 1

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Devin Smith | 9 comments

By Michael Hoexter

Readers of this blog will know that the austerity drive is based on faulty macroeconomics and austerity itself is a self-defeating economic strategy. Austerity relies and capitalizes on critical misunderstandings within economics, misunderstandings that were not conclusively and clearly enough debunked by John Maynard Keynes and others 75 years ago and in subsequent years. Continue reading →