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BusinessWeek Wants YOU To Become A Keynesian Debt Slave
There are those, increasingly more of them, including such shocking statist luminaries as Alan Greenspan (the person more responsible for today's global depression than anyone else) and the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, who are realizing that the old debt=growth, saving=bad, spending=prosperity and inflation=utopia economic paradigm, the one unleashed by John Maynard Keynes, is the primary reason for today's worldwide economic devastation, a condition where $100 trillion in global debt has brought global growth to a crawl, and which coupled with endless "wealth effect" printing by central banks who have deposited $10 trillion in electronic money at their favorite commercial banks with the explicit instruction to buy spoos, have bet everything on reflating the world out of its debt quagmire, instead having achieved a world that has never been more split between the haves and have nots.
And then there is BusinessWeek, which quite to the contrary, is urging its readers in its cover story, ignore common sense, and do more of the same that has led the world to dead economic end it finds itself in currently. In fact, as NYT's Binyamin Appelbaum summarizes it best, it calls "the world governments to become the slaves of a defunct economist. "
And spend, spend, spend, preferably on credit.
Because, supposedly, this time the resulting crash from yet another debt-funded binge will be... different?
Then again, an article that has this line...
With fiscal policy missing in action, the world’s biggest central banks tried heroically to plug the gap.
... surely has to be premised on sarcasm: hardly anyone can be so clueless not to realize that it is the "heroic" central banks "getting to work" for the past 6 years that has enabled fiscal policy to stay on the sidelines as politicians become nothing but Wall Street marionettes, that has led to the most dysfunctional Congress in history, to a Europe that in the past 5 years has implemented precisely zero reforms, and where nothing at all has changed... except debt has hit new record highs, the amount of reserves in circulation is unchartable, the number of billionaires is hitting new records every week even as the people living on foodstamps and out of the labor force is unprecedented, and, of course, the S&P 500 is at an all time high.
So we will operate on the assumption that indeed BusinessWeek's Peter Coy, in his cover story, is merely pulling a prank. Because the alternative is far scarier, if funnier to contemplate.
There is a doctor in the house, and his prescriptions are more relevant than ever. True, he’s been dead since 1946. But even in the past tense, the British economist, investor, and civil servant John Maynard Keynes has more to teach us about how to save the global economy than an army of modern Ph.D.s equipped with models of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium. The symptoms of the Great Depression that he correctly diagnosed are back, though fortunately on a smaller scale: chronic unemployment, deflation, currency wars, and beggar-thy-neighbor economic policies.
Some of the other pearls.
This isn’t a stable status quo. The mid-October shock in global stock markets betrayed grave concerns about a relapse. While the U.S. economy is growing adequately for now despite the drag from fiscal policy, China’s pace is slowing, Japan is suffering from the self-inflicted wound of its consumption tax hike, and the 18-nation euro zone had zero growth in the second quarter. That simply isn’t good enough, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said in an October visit to Bloomberg. “You need all four wheels to be moving,” he said, “or it isn’t going to be a good ride.”
Enter Lord Keynes. Cutting interest rates is fine for raising growth in ordinary times, he said, because lower rates induce consumers to spend rather than save while stimulating businesses to invest. But where rates sink to the “lower bound” of zero, he showed, central banks become nearly powerless, while fiscal policy (taxes and spending) becomes highly effective as a fix for inadequate demand. Governments can raise spending to stimulate demand without having to worry about crowding out private investment—because there’s plenty of unused capacity, and their spending won’t lift interest rates.
It’s the closest thing economists have found to a free lunch. Keynes, ever the provocateur, argued that in a deep recession anything the government did to induce economic activity was better than nothing—even burying bottles stuffed with bank notes in coal mines for people to dig up.
Of course, it’s far better if the money is spent well. Considering the crying need for better roads, bridges, tunnels, schools, and the like, it’s a no-brainer for governments to build them now, when there are willing hands and cheap loans. Harvard economist Lawrence Summers, a former Treasury secretary, and Brad DeLong of the University of California at Berkeley argued in 2012 that infrastructure investment might even pay for itself, in part by keeping people employed so their skills don’t atrophy.
...
Love him or hate him, there’s no one like Keynes on the world stage today. He was a statesman, a philosopher, a bohemian lover of ballet, and a member along with Virginia Woolf in the artsy, intellectual Bloomsbury Group. He made and lost fortunes as an investor and died rich. In 1919, in a prescient book called The Economic Consequences of the Peace, he condemned harsh reparations imposed on Germany after World War I, which were so punitive that they helped create the conditions for Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. In 1936 he essentially invented the field of macroeconomics in his masterwork, The General Theory. From 1944 until close to his death at age 62 two years later, he led Britain’s delegation in negotiations that resulted in the founding of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
The world was lucky in the 1970s and early 1980s, when finally Keynes lunacy quickly unravelled, when as even Coy admits, "his theories couldn’t readily account for stagflation—the coexistence of high unemployment and high inflation."
Academic economists were drawn to the new theory of “rational expectations,” which said that government couldn’t possibly stimulate the economy through deficit spending because foresighted consumers would rationally expect that the stimulus would have to be paid for eventually and so would save for future tax hikes, offsetting the initiative. Supply-side economists said Keynes missed how low taxes could stimulate long-term growth by inducing work and investment. “Unsuccessful policies and confused debates have left Keynesian economics in disarray,” the Swedish economist Axel Leijonhufvud wrote in 1983 for a conference celebrating Keynes’s centennial. A successor theory that evolved in the 1980s and 1990s, New Keynesianism, attempted to inject rational expectations theory into Keynes’s worldview while preserving his observation that prices and wages are “sticky”—i.e., they don’t fall enough in a slump to equalize supply and demand. New Keynesians range from conservatives such as John Taylor of the Hoover Institution to liberals like Berkeley’s DeLong.
Of course, what ended up happening is that one bad theory was replaced by an even worse one, when in 1980s Alan Greenspan unleashed the "Great Moderation" genie and the Fed's bubble factory was put on Max. But that is a topic too complex for the BW author. Instead, he quotes Joe Lavorgna:
On Wall Street, Keynesianism never really died, because its theories did a good job of explaining the short-term fluctuations bank economists are paid to predict. “We approach forecasting more from a Keynesian perspective whether we like him or not,” says Joseph LaVorgna, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank Securities
Actually, Joe, speak for yourself. And then there is the inevitable outcome of the entire world following Keynesian policies. War.
If Keynes were alive today, he might be warning of a repeat of 1937, when policy mistakes turned a promising recovery into history’s worst double dip. This time, Europe is the danger zone; then it was the U.S. What’s called the Great Depression was really two steep downturns in the U.S. The first ended in 1933. It was followed by four years of output growth averaging more than 9 percent a year, one of the strongest recoveries ever. What aborted the comeback is still debated. Some economists blame President Franklin Roosevelt for signing tax hikes and cuts in New Deal jobs programs. Others blame the Federal Reserve. Dartmouth College economist Douglas Irwin argues that the Roosevelt administration triggered the relapse by buying up gold, removing it from the U.S. monetary base. The move to prevent inflation succeeded all too well, causing deflation. Whatever the cause, Britain and other trading partners were dragged down, and U.S. output plunged and didn’t fully recover until America’s entry into World War II. “We are really at a kind of 1937 moment now,” says MIT’s Temin. “It’s a cautionary history for us."
In short, let's accelerate the world's collapse into yet another global war and listen to Keynes once again. Judging by the number of all out conflicts around the globe, and how much the latest "war on terror" boosted US Q3 GDP we are already half way there.
Not enough humor? The rest can be found here.
Then again, maybe the joke's on us, and the only thing that one can hope is "stimulated" are magazine sales.
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what's new there, the problem is that sheeples are the majority
Business Week is still in operation? Who knew?
Rest assured, more people will read about this article on ZH than will from reading Business Week.
Because the government spending trillions on worthless projects has worked so well for Japan. [/sarc]
The rest of us are merely playing 'catch-up.'
It is simple logic that spending today means no spending tomorrow. The fact that borrowing from the future provides temporary prosperity today is no surprise, btu the piper must be paid.
Before all is said and done, Keynes will be responsible for more deaths than all other 20th century tyrants combined...
Well, govt printing and borrowing money and spending it in attempts to stimulate the economy has never been tried before right? Oh, wait, you say it's been tried countless times throughout history, and it's never worked? Shit, someone better tell these guys, they must not have heard that...
QE = Steroids for markets
NOw, taking steroids has plenty of benefits. The question is, how does one stop taking steroids? You will suffer from depression, withdrawal, lack of energy... Basically everything that will make you suicidal until you get back on steroids.
With my plan and your money, we'll go far together.
Sincerely,
.gov
For the most part, foragers didn't have to save and invest for future production. They essentially lived in the eternal now.
The freely given gifts of nature were readily consumed, otherwise some other creature would eat them or they would spoil. High time preference meant survival.
Not anymore. It is at odds with the concept of positive sum economics.
Bloomberg that's that thing that's like the home shopping network, except its for stocks right?
double post, sorry
Funny, nope-1004.
It is more of cocaine than steroids.
steroids would result in more markets not hardly any what we have now.
They are like any addict, it takes more and more to get the same effect right up until it kills them. We are now in the process of finding that dose and there is nothing to stop it.
This 'doctor' was little more than a snake-oil salesman.....and his elixir is killing the patients.
Dante' neglected to mention a 10th ring reserved for bankers, politicians, and the rest of the money-changing enablers....
Vivant et publium.....bitchez!
It's covered in the 4th ring with the 8th and 9th ring as vacation destinations....
Well as long as we're at it, have them print a few million bucks for me so I can get one of those 200 mph supercars they have articles about in CNN/Money every day. The MSM business press is just one long Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous episode nowadays, with a few infotainment pie graphs thrown in for credibility's sake and articles glamming the latest round of Fed officials, I'm missing out on the fun! I want my penthouse condo in NYC!
I guess it depends how you define " worked". For them, yes, they get to pocket large sums of money at the expense of those who work and produce. For the rest of us, not so much as we watch our hard earned money inflate away and plunge us into poverty. So they do it again and again until we wise up and behead them. Seems like we have been waiting a bit long for the happy ending.
Miffed
Give Business Week and Zero Hedge each an economy. Which one prospers and which turns to dust? Nuff said.
Time to buy a bird.
What else to do with Businessweek except line a bird cage, preferably a bird with bowel troubles.
Back then it was govt work for a little money. Now it's lots of money for zero work.
Nation of leaches has been unleashed upon the land
Confirmation bias was my reason for checking out the article - for years Business Week has only been fit for bird cage liner as mentioned below.
NoDebt,
Quite. And they haven't read their history either.
John Maynard Keynes quote "I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago".
DavidC
And this is probably why all my friends in the NE here call the J-man "walkers"...
Business Week are the same dufious that populate Bloomberg and get paid peanuts to tell us Wall Street needs more money to pay bonuses for failure!
The face of mental illness??
The face of a cult leader
One of those "cult leaders" whose message gets a little messed up over time like Chinese Whispers.
I don't remember Keynes saying the people should personally go into debt. I do remember him saying the govt should spend more money when others can't. I guess - tax money for repayments, repayments, what's the dif? Cut out the govt middle man. Is that it?
I don't remember Keynes saying that real estate and share prices should go up while wages stay the same. Perhaps that was in the advanced course. My Economics training is minimal, so I could easily have missed that lesson. I don't remember Keynes saying that banks should be totally unaccountable to anyone and should lend whatever they like to whoever they like for any venture what-so-ever and then get bailed out when things go belly-up and all the incompetents should keep their jobs. Maybe he did say that. I just don't remember it. And like I said, I only had a little bit of Economics training - not even uni level. Maybe they taught that bit at uni. Anyone care to correct me?
Yes, please continue to dilute the money supply which is supposed to be saved as a store of labor. I'll be sure to keep working really hard to obtain more of those fiat pieces of paper for sure. WTF.
Basically, we ask the Chinese and Japanese: Which do you prefer – our intrinsically worthless dollars or our intrinsically worthless dollar-denominated Treasury bonds? Apparently, they prefer the smell of the green, printed paper over the relatively odorless, sepia, printed paper. Pick your paper!
Sheeple may not be smart but they are internally wired to know that something for nothing is unnatural and will result in consequences.
You are giving the sheeple way too much credit.
Free shit...that is my birthright.
Did someone ring?
They know, but do they care?
While they know this at an individual level, they accept the flawed premise of Keynes that it can work magic at a macroeconomic aggregate level.
Because all the experts said so!
machiavelli: private debt equals public good.
the problem so far is they haven't been able to make the private individual assume his or her share of the public debt. they don't necessarily want to bail-in your bank account, they want to add a loan to your account. (and in some places and times in history they have done just that)
if everyone would assume their share of the public debt, then proceed to work and pay it off, the economy would recover. i just hope when they assign us this debt, they give us ZIRP, otherwise its just outright loan sharking, which is why VISA is leading the DOW today.
What do they have, like, 300 subscribers?
Who still reads those rags?
Any updates on open slots for that one way mars mission?
Keynes rhymes with 'philistines'
I did see Tim Cook announced he is gay. No sooner than he started blasting retailers for not using Apple pay.
And Visa is going through the roof today.
WTF?
Announcement to Tim Cook: The world knew, no announcement was needed. Don't flatter yourself.
such a liberal rag
This is paving the way for the next QE. Obama is now encouraged to get a massive fiscal plan passed that will require close to a trillion in new debt and... enter the Fed to start buying it up. BTFD
Must get Billery elected, gasp, choke..... one more QE will do it.
Nice joke Businessweek. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice and it's pitchforks and nooses.
(That's how the saying went, right?)
Bullshits Week
Ponziness Week
"even burying bottles stuffed with bank notes in coal mines for people to dig up."
Who knew Keynes was a closet bitcoiner?
Although the Fed was created in 1913, it took the bankers another 70 years or so before they fully captured the Central Bank. Now they seem to have captured most financial journalists, as can be seen with tripe like this written in mainstream publications. Makes me sick.
They fall into the logical fallacy that doing something is always better than doing nothing. Which is very frequently untrue.
They also misrepresent keynes. Love him or hate him, he would never endorse what's going on now. He would never have conceive of this level of bullshit, lies, extremely low interest rates for decades, financial repression, etc.
They also misrepresent keynes. Love him or hate him, he would never endorse what's going on now.
True, i_call_you_my_base. If they can misrepresent Jesus (He would have demanded an end to Corporatism, private property, the state, white male christian heterosexuals, and all forms of morality except that which Obama preaches: The end justifies the means), they can sure misrepresent Keynes.
& silver is getting blowtorched ......
The woodshed is on fire! I am throwing some water on my stack as we speak. Lots of casualites. Oh, the humanity!!!!!!
who wanted to make FRNs from stacking anyway... this is not why you hold it... You hold it so the poor SOBs who eventually need it, trade their daughters for it...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvZgwtpPmLY
i spent some debt coupon dollars this morning on 100 oz'sof of real money.
doin my part.
thanks again you fucking MoneyChanger pieces of shit.
Ahhh, 100 oz'ers. I am going to build a little wall and paint it.
So much better than boat accident stories...
Keynes, it appears, had a foxhole conversion before his death. Does this mean he went to Heaven?
Martin Armstrong:
“…career politicians are the single greatest threat to our long-term economic survival. They will defend their wrong decisions to create the euro no matter what. Europe has to crash and burn BECAUSE they will not even consider the horrifying thought that their perceived power to manipulate society does not exist. Even John Maynard Keynes at least saw his ideas as delusion towards the end. Just before his death in 1946, Keynes told Henry Clay, a professor of Social Economics and Adviser to the Bank of England that he hoped that Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” would help Britain out of the economic hole it is in: 'I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago.’
“Keynes, who had worked in government, was infected with that same idea that government possesses the power to do anything. He came to his senses and realized the free markets always prevail. This is a lesson Hillary has to learn – but I fear she is too old to learn new tricks.”
Reprinted from Armstrong Economics.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/10/no_author/the-threat-of-the-political-elite/
Armstrong's a fucking fool if he thinks for an instant that Hitlery cares in the least about the negative effects of government power. Worse yet, I'd say that like any power-monger, she absolutely depends upon them.
I'm thinking Armstrong is also too old to learn new tricks.
True.
Very interesting post, JR. What's most intriguing is that Keynes said, "I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago" in 1946, just when England was about to embark upon the great socialist experiment.
Ah, too, too, too late for that game.
World learned the trick now.
World won't provide as easily as before commodities, energy and finished goods, unless of course, Pentagon gets involved again and it will.
World needs Pentagon's service defending world trade routes.
If that services is NOT provided, then world is NOT interested in shipping goods to USA for digital dollars.
It is that simple
This is all part of the Robert Rubin-Larry Summers power scheme, they who control this country. The men who created O. The men who own the Clintons.
Darth Vader is the pope next to those 2 schmucks.
Add one dose of Greenspam and Pompously name it "The Committee to save the world".
What could go wrong?
One could also argue that the pope is Darth Vader.
fedgov has been doing its best to spend like a drunken sailor
pre-recession USG spending $2.7trillion (FY2007)
got as high as $3.6trillion (FY2011)
come down a tad to $3.5trillion (FY2014)
the only reason deficit not as bad is because of 2012 tax increases ... not fedgov cutting spending
Keynesianism: advocating that people either only own one pair of underwear or that they wear all of their underwear all the time to prevent "slack" and "unused resources" in the economy. Because savings causes unemployment.
If people continue to save underwear, there will be a deflationary cycle whereby people don't wash their underwear at night. If people continue to not wear all their underwear, the government should put it on their heads and run around telling people how incredible they are. This will use up the underwear slack.
I would venture to guess a large percentage of the people coming out of these institutions called colleges and universities don't have a clue there is an area in the field of economics called the Austrian School.
Take away the free money system. How much of todays BS goes away?
Keynesianism works quite well materially for the coddled and cushioned and tenured J. Bradford DeLongs as viewed from their Ivory Towers where Berkeley’s professorial protégé pinned his criticisms of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson as soon as he discovered it was available online. Why?
Wrote DeLong, who feeds at the tuition trough, on April 10, 2005:
“It is a limited book because at least half its pages hint that the works of John Maynard Keynes are an abomination without ever grappling with the Keynesian argument.”
That, of course, is a paid for lie. For it is those pages that destroyed Keynes—with the facts.
Ludwig von Mises said of Henry Hazlitt’s The Failure of the New Economics, 1959, reprinted 1973, “Hazlitt has entirely demolished the Keynesian misconceptions. The nation’s best-known and best-respected financial writer and commentator during his life time, Hazlitt shows again and again that Keynes pronounced his theories ex cathedra, without substantial statistics to back them up
The artificial driving down of interest rates to “free up credit” not only does not work, according to Hazlitt, but it has the OPPOSITE effect of that intended – unemployment.
To decrease unemployment during the Great Depression, Hazlitt said Keynesians recommended two main remedies: Deficit spending and artificially low interest rates. Neither worked.
Said Hazlitt:“One is deficit spending. How good is this remedy? It was tried in the United States for a full decade during the Great Depression. What were the results? Official figures cited by Hazlitt in his books show that: “The central and decisive fact is that heavy deficits were accompanied by mass unemployment…”
The other is low interest rates. Hazlitt continues: “The other main Keynesian remedy for unemployment is low interest rates… artificially produced by printing more money, i.e. by deliberate inflation… The question immediately before us is: Did low interest rates prevent mass unemployment?” …
No! Official statistics show that: “In sum, over this period of a dozen years low interest rates did NOT eliminate unemployment. On the contrary, unemployment actually INCREASED as interest rates went down. In the seven-year period from 1934 to 1940, when the cheap money policy was pushed to an average infra-low rate below 1 percent (.77 of 1 per cent) an average of more than 17 in every 100 persons in the labor force were unemployed.”
Another good post, JR. You write well.
Under Bloomberg's ownership, Businessweek has become a a ultra liberal, Keynsian Krugman rag. I get a free subscription (what it's worth) and throw it right into the recycling bin. They argue for taxes on soda, bans on guns, more debt and money printing, more government, more regulation. It's pathetic and awful.
Really, arguments like this aren't really Keynesian because they don't argue to save during good times and spend during bad, it is just spend all the time and don't worry about it. When it blows, blame the free market to gain more control.
Suppose you had access to an unlimited money supply and each day you could start out with a suitcase full of money to buy whatever you wanted, such as "Business Week." That's Bloomberg.
Many of these billionaires, most the former millionaires of the 20th century, are the creatures of the bubble, as John Hoelle calls Michael Bloomberg, “a part of the parasitic apparatus which has destroyed the U.S. economy."
The only consensus, Bloomberg represents, says Hoelle in "How Bloomberg Got His Millions," is the consensus of the money lenders.
Bloomberg’s fortune has risen from mainly the $10 million dollar package he was given by the private Salomon Brothers when he was asked to leave the firm in 1981. At the time of the 2004 Forbes List he had parlayed that into $5 billion in the 2004 Forbes List. Today, his net worth is estimated by Forbes at $35 billion as of 9/11/14.
Perhaps there is no better explanation of what this money created out of nothing and owned by the Federal Reserve is buying through its operatives such as Bloomberg than is provided by G. Edward Griffin, author of the famous Federal Reserve revelation, The Creature from Jekyll Island.
On the Fed money:
“You are led to the question of where is this river flowing? Where's it going? … They're not accumulating it at all. What are they spending it for? The answer may surprise you. They're not buying more yachts and mansions with this money; they've already got all of those they possibly want. … That's not it. When a person has all the wealth that you could possibly want for the material pleasures of life, what is left? Power. They are using this river of wealth to acquire power over you and me and our children.
They are spending it to acquire control over the power centers of society. The power centers are those groups and institutions through which individuals live and act and rely on for their information. They are literally buying up the world but not the real estate and the hardware, they're buying control over the organizations, the groups and institutions that control people. In other words, to be specific, they are buying control over politicians, political parties, television networks, cable networks, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, wire services, motion picture studios, universities, labor unions, church organizations, trade associations, tax-exempt foundations, multi-national corporations, boy scouts, girl scouts, you name it…this is where those people have been for many decades spending this river of wealth to acquire operational control particularly over those institutions and individuals, those organizations that represent opposition to themselves….”
http://www.bigeye.com/griffin.htm
All I can see is that we will have Minsky moment 2.0 - Piketty moment.
finance media is shit
stick with Tyler
Professor Emeritus Maynard Keynes is not defunct in terms of theory
while the economy of Alan Greenspan is, in fact, defunct for all intents and purposes. Millions unemployed so the 1% can get progressively more wealthy every day as new bankrupt debt serfs are losing everything they used to own. Invest in the 1% and watch the 99% go into bankruptcy
court en masse. At least Keynes realized the 99% were actually part of the economy whereas in today's climate of exclusion we see the theorists advocating to save the 1% and fuck the 99% through tax breaks for the corporatists in the 1%. Keynes was by no means off-the-mark on our contemporary economic goals of balanced investments for society. Greenspan destroyed those balances for profit margin to feather his nest and that of fellow crony capitalists.
No, master of the (Progressive fantasy utopia) universe. You misconstrue everything. Actually, that's a compliment. It's tough to be 100% wrong, so Kudos.
Such a substantive reply, lfdf. Frankly, you can project all you want, but the 'utopia' you are referencing is 'neo-liberalism' and Greenspan has already disproved that Chicago School claptrap espoused by what's-his-face and Anne Rosenbaum et al. Neo-Liberal economic orthodoxy only exists in your mind and on Internet.
Writing lucidly will not give you Ebola, you know.
Contemporary Keynesianism works for the 0.1%, not so much for everybody else.
Addendum to original post
Keynes was a Progressive. Progressivism is Authoritarianism.
From the article Introduction: The “Revolutionary” Who Wasn’t: This argument reflects the strong technocratic streak in Keynes’ thought. Keynes thought that the world should be governed by an educated elite that, in his view, would stand above conflicting class interests and govern in the public interest. He did not believe that political, intellectual, or economic elites always acted in the best interests of society as a whole, but he did believe that the right elites could. Moreover, he certainly did not believe that ordinary people could run society well, or should run it at all.
You must defend the current economic status quo, because it's Keynesianism incarnate. From the article The Unholy Alliance of John Maynard Keynes: Perhaps the greatest modern champion of central economic planning was the 20th century English economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes, who was a political socialist and for a time a central banker, advocated the idea that the government should play a large, active role in the economy. Among the consequences of Keynes’ economic theories, whether intended or unintended, is the fact that Western economies today are characterized by large, central governments, central banks and massive debts.
Your statement that Keynes 'cared' about the 99% is contradicted by current reality: The 0.1% flourish, but the 99.9% either stagnate or lose ground. Keyesianism incarnate fucks the little guy.
Such a complicated theory. The government taxes people to death, then it gives them a few dollars to increase spending.
What about a simple one? Tax very little for essential services, not for wealth redistribution. People enjoy working and spending money.
The poor don't come to the country as they don't get welfare benefits.
The rich can't become extremely rich due to government preferences, limits, rules, licenses, etc.
How many short positions would have made fundamentalist rich were it not for QE? Where would the SnP 500 be right now? For that matter all the markets would be very different today.
QE is simply a means to pick winners and losers after the bets are placed and the race has started.
This is the economic utopia of the krugsters dreams.
Keynes worked for the banking oligarchy !
Keynes worked for the banking oligarchy !
Did Keynes say to spend, spend, spend and never run surpluses. From what i understood that part of his ideas was to pay back on the debt once good times arrived again. These idiots today want to continually increase the debt.
A challenge to anyone who feels up to it: Debunk this article from the rationally conservative Powerline blog (who won Time magazine's first award of the "Blog of the year" for 2004): In defense of QE, http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/10/in-defense-of-qe.php
Even though I was a small businessman for 15 years, I have no background in Finance or Economics, so I have difficulty understanding the intricate dynamics of QE. Viscerally, QE seems like a fucking disaster to me, but I can't say the same cerebrally.
WTF? Fiscal policy hasn't done its job? We've been running trillion dollar deficits for a decade. Europe is awash in red ink! Who are these fat clowns who think we're not running sufficiently "stimulative" budget deficits????
He looks like he has been stimulated with a broom handle!
Can anyone clarify the difference between what the liberals want and what venezuela does?
It''s not Venezuela. It's Joseph Stalin.
People in Russia, Moscow are angry at city managment so they gathered and prepared documents with collected signatures and wanted to see mayor or at least past these documents. But in stead Putin regime arrested those who where organizing this and dragged away while people where screaming that this not how they want to live, that this not normal!
http://y2u.be/Yc7TCxZh9eU
Gee ... I wonder why Business Week fails to mention that Keynes was a Socialist?
Why don't all the big thinkers work on this one...How can we get spending money into the consumers hand? No ideological arguments...don't ask how we can raise wages (maybe raising wages isn't the best way-maybe wages should stay the same, but prices should fall) Just ask how it can be done, and see what comes up...
They've danced around the issue, always trying something and promising it would result in a healthier consumer as a side-effect. Why not just cut the shit and address the question directly?
Because the answers would bring focus on what the REAL problems are. Policy makers are hoping they can solve it without ever having to discuss it.
If they are forced to acknowledge the reality of falling wages (and their immunity to 'fixes'), they are forced to acknowledge deflation as the end result.
The wrath of unintended consequences .
"Sheeple wear Wolfskin !"
Big anything is dead , but does not know it .
Especially Big Media .
See
https://www.academia.edu/9031355/The_Were-Sheeples_Almanac
http://andreswhy.blogspot.com/2014/10/were-sheeples-almanac.html
Interesting how far these people would go if left unattended… from Andreswhy:
“John Maynard Keynes approvingly cited the idea of a carrying tax on money,[23] (1936, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money) but dismissed it due to administrative difficulties.[24] More recently, a carry tax on currency was proposed by a Federal Reserve employee (Marvin Goodfriend) in 1999, to be implemented via magnetic strips on bills, deducting the carry tax upon deposit, the tax being based on how long the bill had been held.[24]"
Good stuff. Thanks.