Favorite Blog List Modified

As my loyal readers have probably figured out, I have a limited amount of time to devote to the site, and simply relinking great articles from other sites does not add value.  This site is non-commercial anyway.

I am revising my list of regularly read blogs to reflect my updated preferences.  I’ve removed Calculated Risk (too old fashioned) and a few others, and added New$ To Use, which still has a sell-side emphasis but better international coverage. 

Mish and Zero Hedge are still in there for their number-crunching and ascerbic analysis, both exemplars of the Austro-libertarian point of view.  John Hussman’s scrupulously intellectually honest weekly postings, usually available Monday morning, have been added.  Hussman’s point of view most closely mirrors my own, being academically trained and a total apostate from the corrupt academic economics and finance establishment (I am currently trying to earn an honest living providing credit to small businesses).  Yves Smith and cohorts at Naked Capitalism go more than far enough in expressing their, and my, disgust at the impotence of progressives in our increasingly atavistic American political culture.  Jesse maintains a nice link list, though like Yves’s, I often skip his sermons.  There are a couple of sites I visit when I have time to waste, Jim Quinn’s The Burning Platform, another puerile libertarian blog but with an occasional nice article on the fourth turning (although his support for Romney as the next Boomer generation Prophet really cut his credibility with me), and The Economic Collapse, which offers a usually well-researched fundy end times perspective on latter day America.  Here’s a recent post on the state of children in America today.  The Browser is a general interest linking site, with good links.

The news flow from these sources (I mostly follow links) is a torrent.  My contribution will be to identify using my animal spirits model when the next collapse of confidence will likely occur.  A rising unemployment rate will precede it, but the event itself will be highly nonlinear.  I am still forecasting an “official” recession to begin in mid-2013.  Mish, ECRI and Hussman all say we’re “in recession” now.

BTW, I run AdBlock on Chrome on my PC, and having recently gotten an iPad (and become a convert to the tablet *and* touch screen modalities—my next PC will be a 15 inch Mac with a touch screen, I think) and Chrome for the iPad not having an ad blocker, I have been appalled at what Zero Hedge and other sites look like unfiltered.  I read most of my blogs in Google reader, and don’t see ads when I go to the site itself.  But these folks deserve to make money. 

Happy winter solstice!

House of Cards

After Yves trashed the first two segments of Frontline’s expose, I am posting a CNBC video referenced in comments at NC that may have a bit more bite:

House of Cards

We’ll see if the concluding episodes of the Frontline series get any better.  Naturally, Frontline is probably afraid for its life if the Republicans win in November.

Links 5/16/2011

• The Destruction of Economic Facts – Hernando do Soto.  Just like in other banana republics.  The Wall Street shell game:  first you see your money, then you don’t.
• Krugman’s column on the financial crisis in Sunday’s Izvestia is shocking and appalling - Lambert Strether (h/t/ Yves).  I have commented before on Krugman’s “living too close to New York” bias.  Here Lambert Strether shows just how far up their fundaments the New York establishment has their heads, some of them anyway.  Just for good measure, I’m going to link to a Paul Farrell column as counterweight.
• 10 Doomsday trends America can’t survive – Paul Farrell, MarketWatch
• Economics in Crisis [Denial] – J. Bradford Delong.  What’s really wonderful about Delong’s comments is that he pretends the economists knew all along what was going to happen, only they didn’t think it would be so bad.  This is really rich as the economists missed all the signature characteristics of imminent depression like increasing income and wealth inequality, asset bubbles, and massive increases of aggregate debt-to-income ratios.  A more complacent and self-satisfied economist is hard to conceive of—the nail in the coffin being his defense of Larry Summers’ defense of economists.  They just got distracted… by being whoring agents of the thieving Wall Street elite.  Be a man and call a spade a spade, will ya, Brad?

Links 3/23/2011

Some particularly good links on where we’re at h/t www.patrick.net :

James Grant Testifies On The Federal Reserve (dailybail.com)
The Origin of Central Banking and Possible Alternatives (Mish)
Federal Reserve and the opaque banking syndicate (mybudget360.com)
New Civil War erupts, led by super rich, GOP (marketwatch.com)
Rising Wealth Inequality: Should We Care? (nytimes.com)
Educating College Graduates So They Can be Unemployed Mike Konczal, New Deal 2.0

Links 1/17/2011

A defense of a working program – angrybear.com.    Social Security.  Read the Brookings link.  Fighting the plutocracy’s propaganda (“We are happy to send you on the road to serfdom!”).  I really should put these guys on my recommended sites list.  They get very pedantic and go off on highly academic economics polluted tangents, but do good work in general.  It’s my distaste for academic economics that has prevented me from adding them.  I’m going to work on that.

Central Bank steps up its cash support to Irish banks financed by institution printing own money Independent (Ireland). Yves’ commentary:  “You have to love this, no one else seems to be reporting that the Irish Central Bank is “printing” euros. Yes, they did inform (note merely inform) the mother ship, the ECB, which is pretending this is all OK. Now if the Irish can take the position that they don’t need approval, what is to prevent any other eurozone central bank from doing the same?”  Hyperinflation, here we come?  This is mind boggling.

Forget Brain Age: Researchers Develop Software That Makes You Smarter – Wired.  The only scientifically validated “brain training” method, now implemented in freeware at http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/   Brain Workshop was created by Paul Hoskinson, and is maintained by Paul Hoskinson and Jonathan Toomim.  Thank you!  I downloaded it have played a couple of dozen times…. Challenging!  I made the suggested $5 donantion as well.  “Brain training” is now a multi-hundreds of millions of dollars a year “industry” (scam?).

Links 1/14/2011

"The United States of Inequality" – Slate

Nader hails 'exciting' progressive-libertarian alliance

This time may truly be different – balance sheet adjustment under population ageing Kiyohiko G Nishimura, a January 7 speech posted at the Bank of International Settlements (hat tip Yves)

Can Europe Be Saved? Paul Krugman, New York Times. This account will be old hat to reader of the financial press, but a good summary for laypeople who’ve decided to get up to speed (h/t/ Yves)

Links 8/31/2010

The Paradox of the Zero Bound – Hussman  The first intelligent discussion of why the yield curve might not work predicting recession in a Zero Interest Rate Policy environment, using Japanese data and data from America in the 1930s, when the relationship broke down.  I will revisit this issue in the next “animal spirits” update.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pObxCXhf9-E&feature=channel  What GM is doing in China with SAIC.  Are you aware of the $60 billion China expo, themed “Better City, Better Life”?  Check it out.

Beware those who think the worst is past Carmen Reinhart and Vincent Reinhar (h/t yves).  These are the folks who have looked at what over-indebtedness does to economic growth across virtually all available data:  growth slows down.

However, “recessions” or business slumps in the classic sense are characterized by a failure of confidence and negative skewness of the growth rate.  The next failure of confidence does not appear to be imminent—not to say we can’t have a negative quarter of GDP growth here and there, as the forecast is for negligibly positive real growth into the next slump, which is going to be a doozy.

Links 8/24

Worth reading:

Debt's Deadly Grip  -nytimes.com

Income Inequality and Financial Crises – nytimes.com

Inflation, not deflation, Mr. Bernanke - MarketWatch

Links 8/16/2010

• The Plutocracy Prevention Act (thenation.com)
  
• Former Bank Regulator William Black: U.S. Using "Really Stupid Strategy" to Hide Bank Losses - Will Produce Japanese Style Lost Decade (Mish)
  
• U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don't Even Know It: Laurence Kotlikoff – Bloomberg
  
• The money-inflation connection: It's baaaack! – Atlanta Fed.  Watch M2 growth for inklings of [hyper?] inflation….
  
• How to Thwart the Assassins of the American Dream – Janet Tavakoli.  Basically puffola for Arianna Huffington’s new book, but she is at least framing the correct problem, and that’s what we need.

Tourists in Skagway, Alaska.

Links 7/10

I am back from visiting a friend who is a top 1-percenter in the Boston-Washington corridor, so I am chockerblot with dismay at the Pollyanna Obama-boosterism of those riding on the Stimulus Gravy Train.  It really took me aback to be asked to contribute to groceries by someone with two homes, including a vacation home on a beautiful island in Maine and annual compensation close to half a million dollars.  The greed and unawareness of how everyone else lives of the top 1 percent is simply astounding.

• Hollow Men of Economics – www.gregor.us 
• Richard Koo’s pro-stimulus slides – still talking about “aggregate demand” instead distribution, the mainstream (i.e., hired pro-status quo cheerleaders) Establishment-approved Spin.  Meanwhile, the Republicans and Tea Partiers prove yet again that there’s a sucker born every minute among the bottom 80 percent.
• Presenting The Wall Of Worry: The 50 Ugliest Facts About The US eCONomy – www.zerohedge.com

Links 6/29/2010

• On the road to an epic fail – Hoe Bros. – especially refreshing in commentary on the US as the world’s biggest bully
• Repent at leisure – Economist – special report on world indebtedness
• RBS tells clients to prepare for 'monster' money-printing by the Federal Reserve – Evans-Pritchard - IMHO the Fed will not be able to forestall deflation by “printing more money.”  All the Fed has the power to do is to create more debt, and too much debt is the problem, not the solution.

Americans will have to answer the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” as the depression unfolds. 

If we can take back our government, we can stop the sequence that the ruling elite seems to have in mind:  inevitable deflationary depression –-> war to “get” oil (why can’t we just buy it like everyone else?) –-> corollary benefit of war:  get an inflation or hyperinflation going to inflate out the debt and give the Wall Street banks another opportunity to make a hugely leveraged killing.

Must read links 8/25

• Good morning, worker drones: this week in mayhem – Zero Hedge continues to break big stories, this one that the Fed seems by its own statistical admission to be trading derivatives – heavily; and a hot war threatens in Central Asia
• Bernanke's Self-Promotional Reappointment Campaign A Stunning Success – Mish, drawing upon John Hussman.  Doubling-down has become a way of life in D.C.
• The Electronic Police State, 2008 National Rankings, Cryptohippie – h/t orlingrabbe.com  Assume that any computer connected to the Web is a public place; that all your non-cash financial transactions are known to the government; that you have broken some law somewhere that the government could use to destroy you financially by forcing you to defend yourself in a court of law
• Clarion Call from Cantarell – Mexico’s biggest oil field running dry; more chaos to the south likely
• Nils Gilman on the ascent of deviant economies in the coming post-Western, post-modern age – h/t/ orlingrabbe.com

Links 6/15

• The Bush doctrine, economic warfare and your investment portfolio (FSU, hat tip Zero Hedge)  The only thing this gets wrong is inflation—not happening anytime soon.
• Contours of Crisis III: Systemic fear and forward-looking finance (Bichler & Nitzan, hat tip ZH)
• Optimism is not enough for a global recovery – Wolfgang Munchau, FT (h/t Yves)
• Depression Dynamic Ensues as Markets Revisit 1930s – Eichengreen (March), Bloomberg (h/t Yves)

Today’s reflection:

Those who oppose fiscal stimulus and welfare/workfare/health coverage for the unemployed may or may not realize they are supporting the existing system’s inequities.  The people at the bottom are the ones getting hurt.  Some of these writers are libertarians who just oppose government in almost any form.  Some are financial professionals who are representing, consciously or unconsciously, the interests of their moneyed clientele, who hate paying taxes.  Some have observed that the government simply doesn’t work anymore, that the military-industrial-financial complex has too many fingers in the pie for tax dollars to be spent on anything other than more of the same.  If the next big nonlinear event in America is a renegotiation of the social contract that is likely to occur over the next decade, it may begin with a tax revolt like that in California.  But without a change of the social contract as embodied in government policies and income distribution, a tax revolt merely cements the power of the ruling elite and punishes those at the bottom for being there.  This is a recipe for social unrest.  It cannot be the end of the story.

Comments?

Links 6/5/2009

A Tale of Two Depressions – VoxEu h/t/ yves  If we track the Great Depression we’re only about 40 percent of the way through

Benefit Spending Hits $2 Trillion, Highest Percent Since 1929; One Dollar Out of Every Six From Vouchers – Mish in an especially dour piece on welfare nationally and in California; disturbing