krebscycle

  • The mysterious capture of US “left” economics by the John Birch Society

    (from 2011) The lesson of the finance crisis is that the finance sector doesn’t work well, but to hear the “liberal/left” on the blogs and on TV, you’d think the problem was Tim Geithner and the Federal Reserve. Which is strange for a number of reasons. During the financial crisis,…

  • Paul Volcker – Left Wing Icon: Christine Romer edition

    Hitting that target required pushing interest rates to unprecedented levels. Unemployment rose past 10 percent, and Mr. Volcker was pilloried. At one point, farmers on tractors blockaded Fed headquarters to protest the high rates. But the policy worked. Inflation fell from 11 percent in 1979 to 3 percent in 1983,…

  • Delong’s error – financial corporation edition

    My belief that large, leveraged financial institutions had sufficient caution and sufficient control over their derivatives books that their derivative positions did not pose major systemic risk. [ Brad Delong’s admitted errors] For both methodological convenience and ideological conformance, modern economics at the macro level treats a firm as if…

  • The Nation: condescension watch

    The Nation: condescension watch

    Mike Konzcal’s contribution to the world of Obama condescension  appears (where else?) in The Nation and takes the standard form of a finger wagging lecture as if from an exasperated teaching assistant to a particularly dim undergraduate. There’s an implicit presumption in these lectures that Barack Obama stumbled into the…

  • The living room

    Watching these adverts is a long lesson in what could have been. At each point, post WWII, where the GOP has won the Presidency or come close enough to steal it, the consequences for the world have been catastrophic. Television Adverts for US Presidential Elections.

  • Karl Marx versus the immature American System

    Karl Marx versus the immature American System

    Marx considered himself to be carrying on the work of economists like Says and Ricardo – the founders of what has developed into the dominant “neoclassical” economics. It’s customary to think of Ricardo and his “bourgeois” successors as being the antagonists of Marx and his followers but there was a…

  • Track changes and the left

    (7/22/11 TPV) Forty years after the Powell memo outlined a plan for right wing power in America, the permanent Republican majority is in sight. The packed Supreme Court seems ready to invalidate the voting rights act to protect successful gerrymandering that has boosted the GOP to control of the House…

  • The self-crippling of #ows

    OWS started as the President was in the midst of trying to sell his jobs bill. The bill hired teachers and construction workers to do useful work by eliminated special tax favors for corporate executives (the executive jet tax break), oil companies, and hedge fund managers. You’d imagine this bill…

  • The 18th Brumaire of Mel Brooks

    Slavoj Žižek invokes Marx’s “18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon"  to half-heartedly support an argument against the doctrine of human rights and Professor Corey Robin (a far more pedestrian thinker) cites Marx’s work as  "master text” in yet another tired episode of “Obama is teh suxxor”.  What makes The 18th Brumaire valuable 160…

  • Marx, Opium, Zetas.

    In 1840 the Chinese government tried to block English drug kingpins who were selling opium in Chinese coastal cities. In response, British Naval warships bombarded Canton and went up the Yangtze river into the heart of China, burning, looting on a grand scale and shelling defenseless towns while killing many…