Krugman

As noted by Richard Heinberg on June 22nd, 2011, the media has lacked the ability to connect the economic situations in the Middle East and their uprisings to what is happening in Europe. I would avoid the word “Revolution” in the case of the Middle Eastern uprisings, seeing as no dramatic systemic changes have taken place, only the ousting of dictators. Same as I would avoid the words of social upheaval in the case of European protests, which have been quite calm and only demanding to maintain the social safety nets produced through years of labor struggle. Rather, the odd occurrence is the ostensibly quiet population of the United States who are in many cases having the same economic problems and austerity based government solutions. This is a place where the media does want to ask the public the question, “Why aren’t you protesting?”

• Debt talks begin critical phase (Reuters)
• Obama and Boehner Advance Toward Deal to Cut Deficit  (WSJ)
• Democrats Balk at Potential U.S. Debt-Limit Deal (Bloomberg)
• Debt Ceiling Uncertainty Puts States at Risk (NYT)
• Chinese manufacturing set to contract (FT)
• Questions on Holdings at the Fed (WSJ)
• China Banking Regulator Steps Up Risk Controls on Local Government Loans (Bloomberg)
• IEA calls halt to emergency oil release (FT)
• EU leaders agree €109bn Greek bail-out (FT)
• EU May Accept Greek Default as Crisis Fight Intensifies (Bloomberg)
• The Lesser Depression (Krugman)
• Barnier seeks to soothe UK over banks (FT)

"They’re going to cut back the bone and they’re going to keep the fat, basically. They’re going to try to panic the population into acquiescing in a Democratic Party sellout by cutting back payments to the people...while making sure that they pay the Pentagon, they pay the foreign aid, they pay Wall Street." Michael Hudson

The emergency room doctors are missing the bigger problem ...

Last chance ...

More lunacy.

What do Hu Jintao, David Cameron, Warren Buffett, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Alan Greenspan, Robert Shiller, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich and Mark Thoma - and both conservatives and liberals - all agree on?

How would you trade the bind that Bernanke has created for himself?

Following up on saving the world and some 4th of July thoughts on Greek and American nationalism...

(In)famous artist Geoffrey Raymond has found a brilliant and 100% margin-generating scheme for boosting the prices of his trademarked annotated paintings: he opens them up for indirect commentary to the Zero Hedge community, which are then subsequently superimposed on to the painting itself. It worked for Jim Cramer, it worked for Ayn Rand, and now, it will work for Krugman (or rather the proud owner thereof). Black and White Krugman. Of course, in the process Raymond has made our prediction from two years ago that his work will be among the best IRRing cash allocation opportunities around, with recent clearing prices generating a triple digit investment CAGR for those who followed our January 2009 advice. So without further ado, here is Raymond's still unfinished Krugman, where the most eloquent ZH comments will take their rightful place. And P.S. no stimulus, fiscal or monetary, was wasted, or monetized, in the creation of this portrait.

As Zero Hedge readers predicted by a margin of more than nearly three to one, Tim Geithner's next employer of choice, per bnet's Constantine von Hoffman, is none other than the universal viceroy-cum-vampire squid presiding at 200 West according to a just "leaked" letter. And while we all know the key resume highlights (issuing $1.5 trillion in debt a year for the duration of his tenure, mopped up on both sides by Quantitative Easing, bringing America to the verge of insolvency and living on an "auction to auction" basis), here is the summary of Geithner's key qualifications that make him a shoo in for the job.

We have not recovered from the Great Recession and thus our current economic stagnation is less a new event than a continuation of the original collapse. The basis for the so-called “recovery” was a rise in GDP, that measure of what we have spent in the economy. It’s a fairly useless bit of data.

The Federal Reserve is playing a game of Pretend: Let's pretend that if interest rates are near-zero, we'll always be able to borrow more. Hey, what's a trillion dollars at zero interest? You and I could make the interest-only payments each month, because they're zero. But shoving "free money" into banks and Wall Street doesn't filter down to John Q. Citizen: it simply incentivizes massive speculation in stocks, commodities, seaside resorts, empty cities in China, you name it. This is the basis of the current stock, bond and commodities booms in the global economy: push trillions of dollars in "free money" to financial players, and guess what, that hot money flows out seeking a fat return. The Keynesians and other economists have no ideas for confronting the reality of a post-consumerist debt economy and society. Like frenzied rats in a cage, they only have one lever to push to release the cocaine-laced pellets, and so they've been pushing it for 40 years. Now they're hitting the bar with frantic energy, hoping the crazed and addled rats around them can dredge up some "demand" for more pellets to "consume." But the consumer-rats are bloated and lethargic; they've consumed so much debt-drug that they're near death. Like a star which has expanded and now cannot maintain its grand state, the debt-based consumerist economy is now poised to experience a supernova implosion.

A few weeks ago we pointed out what may be the most troubling (and Marxist) observation in America's labor arena, namely that the labor's share of national income has dropped to the lowest in history as a record number of Americans now focus on wealth creation through assets (i.e. owners of capital) instead of labor. In his just released latest letter (below) Bill Gross piggybacks on this observation in what is one of the most scathing notes blasting the traditional of higher education, and in essence claiming that college, as means of perpetuating a broken employment status quo whcih redirect labor to a now-expiring Wall Street labor model, is now worthless: "The past
several decades have witnessed an erosion of our manufacturing base in
exchange for a reliance on wealth creation via financial assets. Now,
as that road approaches a dead-end cul-de-sac via interest rates that
can go no lower, we are left untrained, underinvested and overindebted
relative to our global competitors. The precipitating
cause of our structural employment break is both internal neglect and
external competition. Blame us. Blame them. There’s plenty of blame to
go around." And why college graduates have only a 6 digit loan to look forward to: "American citizens and its universities have experienced an ivy-laden ivory tower for the past half century. Students, however, can no longer assume that a four year degree will be the golden ticket to a good job in a global economy that cares little for their social networking skills and more about what their labor is worth on the global marketplace." And some very bad news for the communists in the White House and the chimpanzees in the San Francisco Fed who continue to believe that unemployment is anything but structural: "The “golden” days are over, and it’s time our school and jobs “daze” comes to an end to be replaced by programs that do more than mimic failed establishment policies favoring Wall as opposed to Main Street."

Just under a year ago, we got the tax fraud, and the only remaining member of Obama's economic Titanic, praising the US recovery. His timing top ticked the economy, preceded the Hindenburg Omen by 10 days, and ushered in QE2. Now, we get his sidekick, long since departed after totally failing (we use the more polite F-form of the word) up at his job, writing the follow up, from the cushy confines of academia, warning America that unless there is a major fiscal stimulus (because presumably the monetary stimulus which everyone praised in the form of QE2 has now been proven to only be a boost to the stock market and a bailout of European banks), this once great country which once exhibited the world's reserve currency is on its way to another "lost decade." We wish Summers well: perhaps 3 of those who read the following drivel will take him seriously. Two of them are Krugman and Koo. We are taking bets as to who the third one will be...