Politics and Economics
The Minotaur’s Handmaidens Part B: The Wal-Mart business model and Wall Street’s toxic money
, 18/02/2011
In The Minotaur’s Handmaidens Part A, my last post, I looked at two important contributors to the Global Minotaur: to America’s astonishing pre-2008 capacity to attract financing from the capital surpluses of the rest of the world sufficient for the purposes of funding its expanding twin deficits. These two contributors were, on the one hand, the […]
The Minotaur's Handmaidens Part A: Mergers and take overs, Hedging and Leverage
, 16/02/2011
The last post presented the Global Minotaur as a peculiar, yet powerful, Global Surplus Recycling Mechanism (GSRM). Now, I move on to a discussion of the various submechanisms by which the US twin deficits managed to attract financing from the capital surpluses of the rest of the world so that this strange GSRM could operate […]
The Global Minotaur as a most peculiar Global Surplus Recycling Mechanism
, 15/02/2011
Continuing with the story of the Global Minotaur, today’s post looks at it as a most peculiar Global Surplus Recycling Mechanism .(to get up to speed on what this mechanism might be all about, click here) Following the collapse of the Global Plan in 1971, by the end of the 1970s America’s twin deficits had started […]
A late night discussion with Richard Holbrooke remembered
, 14/12/2010
It was summer of 2003. The setting was the island of Kos, a stone’s throw from the Turkish coast. Richard Holbrooke was participating at that year’s Symi Symposium organised by George Papandreou, then Greece’s Foreign Minister, currently Prime Minister. Though not a participant in that symposium (which also featured notables like Bill Clinton, Segolen Royal […]
Wikileaks' Precursor and Unsung Foe of Neoliberal Economics
, 11/12/2010
A tribute to Daniel Ellsberg, whose analytical work exposed the Achilles’ Heal of toxic economics forty seven years before the Crash of 2008, and whose courageous leaking of the Pentagon Papers stunned the world by exposing thousands of documents revealing the US government’s lies about Vietnam.
Cutting our noses to spite our faces
, 30/11/2010
The trouble with austerian logic is that it is grossly illogical. It does not even make sense in terms of the logic of microeconomics, let alone that of macroeconomics. Consider the current conundrum facing Greece and Ireland, the eurozone’s set of failed states (so far): Both countries have been forced to slice 10% off government […]