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Brent crude's taking another run at $90bbl. đź‘Ť
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The economy's in recession already. By attempting to fix the peso Chainsaw's probably done enough to ensure it will be long and ugly. My expectation is that he'll be thrown out of office well before it ends. His deregulatory and privatisating agenda is essentially the one we've been using since 1980 - the Thames Water model - minus the cost free credit facility of a central bank. Just awful.
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It's only been three months! Chainsaw's already crashed the economy into the ground. Standard & Poor downgraded Argentina's sovereign debt to Selective Default mid week. Meanwhile, his program of deregulatory reforms has been voted down in parliament. Cracking start, if he lasts the year I'll be amazed.
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Dupe.
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Dupe.
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Angus Deaton regrets pretending to be a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2024/03/Symposium-Rethinking-Economics-Angus-Deaton Like many others, I have recently found myself changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practicing economist for more than half a century. I will come to some of the substantive topics, but I start with some general failings. I do not include the corruption allegations that have become common in some debates. Even so, economists, who have prospered mightily over the past half century, might fairly be accused of having a vested interest in capitalism as it currently operates. I should also say that I am writing about a (perhaps nebulous) mainstream, and that there are many nonmainstream economists. Power: Our emphasis on the virtues of free, competitive markets and exogenous technical change can distract us from the importance of power in setting prices and wages, in choosing the direction of technical change, and in influencing politics to change the rules of the game. Without an analysis of power, it is hard to understand inequality or much else in modern capitalism. Philosophy and ethics: In contrast to economists from Adam Smith and Karl Marx through John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, and even Milton Friedman, we have largely stopped thinking about ethics and about what constitutes human well-being. We are technocrats who focus on efficiency. We get little training about the ends of economics, on the meaning of well-being—welfare economics has long since vanished from the curriculum—or on what philosophers say about equality. When pressed, we usually fall back on an income-based utilitarianism. We often equate well-being with money or consumption, missing much of what matters to people. In current economic thinking, individuals matter much more than relationships between people in families or in communities. Efficiency is important, but we valorize it over other ends. Many subscribe to Lionel Robbins’ definition of economics as the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends or to the stronger version that says that economists should focus on efficiency and leave equity to others, to politicians or administrators. But the others regularly fail to materialize, so that when efficiency comes with upward redistribution—frequently though not inevitably—our recommendations become little more than a license for plunder. Keynes wrote that the problem of economics is to reconcile economic efficiency, social justice, and individual liberty. We are good at the first, and the libertarian streak in economics constantly pushes the last, but social justice can be an afterthought. After economists on the left bought into the Chicago School’s deference to markets—“we are all Friedmanites now”—social justice became subservient to markets, and a concern with distribution was overruled by attention to the average, often nonsensically described as the “national interest. Second thoughts Like most of my age cohort, I long regarded unions as a nuisance that interfered with economic (and often personal) efficiency and welcomed their slow demise. But today large corporations have too much power over working conditions, wages, and decisions in Washington, where unions currently have little say compared with corporate lobbyists. Unions once raised wages for members and nonmembers, they were an important part of social capital in many places, and they brought political power to working people in the workplace and in local, state, and federal governments. Their decline is contributing to the falling wage share, to the widening gap between executives and workers, to community destruction, and to rising populism. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson have recently argued that the direction of technical change has always depended on who has the power to decide; unions need to be at the table for decisions about artificial intelligence. Economists’ enthusiasm for technical change as the instrument of universal enrichment is no longer tenable (if it ever was). I am much more skeptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even skeptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalization was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years. I also no longer defend the idea that the harm done to working Americans by globalization was a reasonable price to pay for global poverty reduction because workers in America are so much better off than the global poor. I believe that the reduction in poverty in India had little to do with world trade. And poverty reduction in China could have happened with less damage to workers in rich countries if Chinese policies caused it to save less of its national income, allowing more of its manufacturing growth to be absorbed at home. I had also seriously underthought my ethical judgments about trade-offs between domestic and foreign workers. We certainly have a duty to aid those in distress, but we have additional obligations to our fellow citizens that we do not have to others. I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the US was a good thing, with great benefits to the migrants and little or no cost to domestic low-skilled workers. I no longer think so. Economists’ beliefs are not unanimous on this but are shaped by econometric designs that may be credible but often rest on short-term outcomes. Longer-term analysis over the past century and a half tells a different story. Inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed, and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age. It has also been plausibly argued that the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the factories in the North would not have happened if factory owners had been able to hire the European migrants they preferred. Economists could benefit by greater engagement with the ideas of philosophers, historians, and sociologists, just as Adam Smith once did. The philosophers, historians, and sociologists would likely benefit too.
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A detailed timetable of peace negotiations is given below. It explicitly refutes your suggestion that Russia is trying to wipe the Ukraine off the map. Though subject to a host of Ukrainian terrorist atrocities, including this week's expeditionary tomfool, the Russians haven't even declared war on their neighbour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_negotiations_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
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Categorically untrue. There have been several rounds of talks aimed at achieving a negotiated peace. A comprehensive draft agreement was drawn up in March 2022 that could have provided the basis of a lasting settlement of grievances between the two countries. That was effectively scuppered by Boris Johnson's surprise visit to Kiev on April 9th.
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The Bubbly Bitcoin Thread -- Merged Threads
zugzwang replied to NatterJackToad's topic in House prices and the economy
Saylor also claims that owning BTC is like living in New York. -
Janet Yellen regrets pretending to be a scientist. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen walks back transitory inflation claims: 'I regret saying it' Story by Kristen Altus As Americans have continued to sound off over sticker shock on retail and grocery shelves, the U.S. Treasury secretary admitted Wednesday that her public predictions were wrong. "I regret saying it was transitory [inflation]. It has come down, but I think transitory means a few weeks or months to most people. And it's lasted longer than that," Janet Yellen told FOX Business’ Edward Lawrence in an exclusive interview. In early June 2021, Yellen had tamped down inflationary concerns, claiming rising costs and the contributing factors were "transitory," a term used to describe temporary market conditions. "We have in recent months seen some inflation, and we – at least on a year-over-year basis – will continue, I believe through the rest of the year, to see higher inflation rates, maybe around 3 percent," Yellen said that June. "But I personally believe that this represents transitory factors." Just one year after her comments, inflation surged to 9.1%, which had not been seen in four decades. Fast-forward to this week, when Labor Department data indicated inflation unexpectedly ticked higher in February thanks to a jump in the cost of gasoline and rent, climbing to 3.2% year-over-year. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/us-treasury-secretary-janet-yellen-walks-back-transitory-inflation-claims-i-regret-saying-it/ar-BB1jT60n
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Pumping more dirty shale. Making huge undeclared losses. Poisoning the local groundwater forever. But still the price of crude keeps climbing... https://www.fxstreet.com/news/oil-rallies-on-us-crude-stockpile-drawdowns-202403141130 WTI Oil trades up around 3% in just two trading days. Oil traders are seeing bullish positioning paying off after US stockpiles unexpectedly declined. The US Dollar Index trades at 103.00 after hot PPI data. Oil prices are rallying for a second consecutive day after the weekly US Crude data pointed to a drawdown in stockpiles. The recent drop was unexpected, although traders were already positioned for a draw in recent days with markets asking questions on how long the US could keep up this pace of pumping up Oil. It looks like OPEC and the US are playing a game of chicken to see who will be the first one to lose: the US by seeing its stockpile decline substantially, or will it be OPEC forced to apply more, longer, and deeper production cuts? The US Dollar, meanwhile is trading substantially higher after US Producer Price data came out higher on all fronts. The beat on estimates and the upside surprise leaves traders now puzzled on what to do next. US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the Fed would cut once data came down significantly and confirmed containment of price pressure, though an uprise in inflation has not been communicated by the Fed. This could threaten the projection of a June initial rate cut being pushed further away.
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Are you serious? No-one in British public life has endured more racially inspired hatred than Diane Abbott. Decades of it. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/13/frank-hesters-ugly-words-about-me-are-a-reminder-all-parties-including-labour-must-stand-against-racism There have been days of discussion about the Conservative party’s biggest donor, Hester, saying in 2019: “It’s like trying not to be racist but you see Diane Abbott on the TV and you’re just like, I hate, you just want to hate all black women because she’s there, and I don’t hate all black women at all, but I think she should be shot.” Reading his remarks, I was upset but not surprised. This is partly because I am hardened to racist abuse. I receive hundreds of abusive emails, phone calls and letters monthly, and the numbers shoot up whenever I am in the media. Most of this correspondence targets my appearance, questions my intelligence and features classic racist lines such as: “Go back to where you come from.” Recently, the abuse has taken an even darker turn, with accusations of child abuse. For instance: “If you and your child want to ****** children, go back to one of your sick third-world shitholes and bury yourself, sicko.”