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luckily we know of the 'tulip. Here's two recommendation lists both published today - must be something in the water - so enter at your own risk, there is no lifeguard on duty . . . .
from Jim Kunstler:
1. Outstanding for consistent excellence, acuity, clarity, and the milk of human kindness is the McAlvany Weekly Commentary. David McAlvany manages an investment company out of Durango, Colorado, with an emphasis on precious metals. His interview subjects are high-caliber figures often outside the posse of usual suspects making the rounds elsewhere on the web. He speaks beautifully in complete sentences, shows enough emotion to come off as sympathetically human, and has an equally intelligent sidekick in Kevin Orrick. Together they present the most coherent view of money and politics on the web. A Christian enthusiast, he admirably keeps religion mostly out of the script.
2. For years, The Automatic Earth has presented the most consistently intelligent, wide-ranging, and intellectually rigorous view of the overall ongoing financial fiasco in the written blog format. Until the past year, most of the commentary was written by the droll Raul Ilargi Meijer. Now he is joined by the brilliant energy and finance analyst Nicole Foss and young Ashvin Pandurangi. Their combined point of view is staunchly deflationist. They do immense amounts of homework, cut through all the bullshit to the dense core of our troubled reality, and publish several times a week. The title of the blog comes from a Paul Simon lyric out of Graceland.
3. Zero Hedge. The mysterious person(s) behind this massive continuous stream of reports and analysis from the loony bin of Wall Street and beyond has a manic edge but accurately reflects the madness of the current situation. Zero Hedge seems to post virtually around the clock, every day. They are relentless and hugely comical, with exactly the right sharply malicious overtones required in these evil times. The characters who infest their comment section are some of the worst vermin in trolldom.
4. Mish's Global Analysis. I don't know how Mike Shedlock ("Mish") does it. He puts out two or three commentaries a day as well as holding down a regular job. His great service to us is providing the best breaking analysis of breaking news, that is, making sense of events that are often mystifying -- since mystification is one of the prime tactics of financial playerdom in these dark, non-transparent times -- and getting it done in a very timely way. The upshot is that few of the dodges and ruses emanating from the money world get by this guard-dog, to the huge benefit of us civilians.
5. Charles Hugh Smith's blog, Of Two Minds, manages to publish keenly insightful analysis practically every day in the form of essays that tend to follow big picture themes: governance, energy, taxation, culture, electoral politics. Smith's penetrating, dogged analysis connects vast constellations of dots between the forces that are shattering late industrial economies. He apparently does it all by himself and has also produced several excellent books that form a rich matrix of understanding for anyone trying to make sense of the epochal changes coming down on us.
6. Naked Capitalism is Yves Smith's daily roundup of first rate essays on disasters of banking, including her own forceful callings-out of the ubiquitous misconduct that surrounds her on Wall Street where she works. Her writing is fluent and clear on subjects that would otherwise appear hopelessly abstruse, which is especially valuable where complexity is a cover for misbehavior.
7. In an earlier incarnation of this life, Chris Martenson was a PhD biochemist toiling for da man in the corporate swamps of Connecticut. He literally dropped out and reinvented himself as a blogger / podcaster when the peak oil and debt trap equation startled him into recognizing that the reigning system of political-economy's days were numbered. Since then, he has produced perhaps the best book on the failures of contemporary finance, The Crash Course, and has lately ginned up an excellent weekly interview podcast that should be indispensible.
8. The Archdruid Report. To the casual observer John Michael Greer would seem an odd figure, being a long-bearded, shambling, threadbare enthusiast of things druidical (whatever they are), but he's also about the most humane, articulate, and lucid observer of the crumbling economic and political scene from the realm of totally outside the box. He puts out a beautifully crafted essay every Thursday from the backwater of Cumberland, Maryland, and his view of where the human race is headed is sobering, reassuring, and full of authentic empathy for our multiple predicaments.
9. Jim Willie's Hat Trick Letter at The Golden Jackass Report is a deep, complex, often savage dissection of financial reality that always manages to illuminate new angles on the giant hairball of lies and swindles that the money world has become in our time. He writes in a singular telegraphic style that is delightful to read in a way similar to the pleasures of watching certain horror movies. He assumes that his readers already know a lot and can follow the often recondite pathways of financial discourse that he is such an excellent guide to
10. The Keiser Report with Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert. Stacy is the straight-person to Max's antic persona. But no one has flogged the evil-doers of banking as hard and unrelentingly as Max, who worked on the inside of the investment racket until driven by outrage to become one of its fiercest attackers. His perch in Paris gives him a front-row seat on the shenanigans now unraveling civilization in the Eurozone, but he shines his lamp under the rock of Wall Street regularly and loves to put the wicked Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan in the spotlight.
11. King World News. Eric King is the reigning gold bug of podcastdom. While he unabashedly "talks his book," one gathers he does it because he sincerely believes in the arguments for precious metals (as I do) and he brings out around five punchy interviews a week with a revolving cast of fellow gold bugs and other generally intelligent high level players in that world - though I could do without the snide Gerald Celente.
12. Financial Sense New Hour. Jim Puplava recently expanded his formerly weekends-only massive three hour podcast to include premium-priced weekday interviews with a lineup of insiders. Puplava covers the waterfront energetically, but he has some weaknesses: 1.) his malaprop rate is staggering; 2.) he doesn't challenge guests spouting obvious nonsense; 3.) other than being a staunch inflationist, his views on the markets shift with whatever wind is issuing from a guest's mouth; and 4.) he's a closet John Bircher who does an annual summer show (any week now) featuring an appalling roster of right-wing crazies. In a normal culture, that alone would tend to discredit all his other worthy endeavors. His sidekick John Loeffler sounds more consistently intelligent. Both of them are jesus freaks, of course.
I left a few characters off the main list, but shoutouts to CK Michaelson's Some Assembly Required blog, Bruce Krasting's blog, Bill Bonner's The Daily Reckoning, Whiskey and Gunpowder, the brave Martin Armstrong, Jesse's Café Americain, Barry Ritholtz's The Big Picture, Carl Denninger, Peter Schiff, the great, sobering Doug Noland of the Prudent Bear's Credit Bubble Bulletin, Pater Tenebrarum of Acting Man, Doug Henwood, the savvy and beautiful Lauren Lyster, Bill Moyers... and probably several others who I am (unfortunately) too rushed to mention.
from Paul Craig Roberts:
Readers ask me from time to time to recommend a book from which they can learn about economics.
The problem with reading a book to learn economics that is taught in the universities and practiced in Washington is that economics is now a highly formalized subject based on abstract models and assumptions and has been mathematized. It is not that the subject is totally useless and without any applicability to real world problems. Rather, the problem is that the discipline both lags an ever-changing world and got some things wrong at the beginning. Consequently, learning economics places one inside a box where some of the tools and understanding provided are outdated and incorrect.
For example, every textbook will draw a picture of agriculture as the perfect example of competitive markets in which “no producer’s output is large enough to affect price.” This made sense when one-third of the US work force was on family farms. Today, American agriculture is dominated by corporations and agribusiness. Additionally, part of the disastrous financial deregulation pushed by no-think economists and special interests was the removal of position limits on speculators. Formerly, speculators smoothed agricultural and commodity markets by buying and selling in order to stabilize price over periods when supply and demand were out of balance. Now speculators can dominate markets and rig prices to the benefit of their profits.
There are many such examples where economics no longer speaks to the real world.
Two other examples will suffice:
Most intelligent people are aware that natural resources are finite, including the environment’s ability to absorb the wastes or pollution from productive activities (see for example, Jared Diamond, Collapse, 2005). But few economists are aware, because economists assume that man-made capital is a perfect substitute for nature’s capital. This assumption implies that there are no finite environmental limits to infinite economic growth. Lost in such a make-believe world, economists neglect the full cost of production and cannot tell if the value of the increases in GDP are greater or less than the full cost of producing it.
Economists have almost universally confused jobs offshoring with free trade. Economists have even managed to produce “studies” purporting to show that a domestic economy is benefitted by being turned into the GDP of some other country. Economists have managed to make this statement even while its absurdity is obvious to what remains of the US manufacturing, industrial, and professional skilled (software engineers, for example) workforce and to the cities and states whose tax bases have been devastated by the movement offshore of US jobs.
The few economists who have the intelligence to recognize that jobs offshoring is the antithesis of free trade are dismissed as “protectionists.” Economists are so dogmatic about free trade that they have even constructed a folk myth that the rise of the US economy was based on free trade. As Michael Hudson, an economist able to think outside the box has proven, there is not a scrap of evidence in behalf of this folk myth (see America’s Protectionist Takeoff 1815-1914).
My advice to readers who wish to develop economic comprehension is to begin with the outside-the-box economists who are addressing real issues. For example, Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb’s For the Common Good is accessible to ordinary readers willing to take the effort to google the definitions of unfamiliar terms. However, the most important development in trade theory is not. Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests by Ralplh E. Gomory and William J. Baumol (MIT Press, 2000) is apparently even over the heads of professional economists, who prefer to babble on ignorantly about the “benefits of free trade” than to learn what they don’t know. Nevertheless, readers should understand that the case for free trade will never been the same after
its dissection by Gomory and Baumol.
With this preface to the column, I now turn to its subject: economist Michael Hudson. Hudson is totally outside the matrix in which economists imprison themselves. Hudson doesn’t live in the artificial reality of economists or shill for corporations and Wall Street.
A person can learn a lot from Hudson. His book, Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (2009) explains how foreign trade and economic development have been used to concentrate economic power in the hands of dominant nations. What is really going on is covered up with do-good verbiage and formal models. In reality, trade and development are ways to colonize countries that think they are independent. (Another good book on this subject is Michel Chossudovsky’s The Globalization of Poverty.)
Perhaps the best place to begin with Hudson is his latest book, The Bubble and Beyond, which should be available within a few days of the appearance of this column. In this book Hudson addresses the crisis in the economy and the crisis in the discipline of economics. From this book you can understand not only the crisis but also why economists have misdiagnosed the crisis and are applying incorrect remedies.
Hudson shows that a central problem is that economic theory ignores the role of debt in the economy. Economic theory also pretends that economic policy, such as the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy, serves the public’s interest rather than the interests of powerful private interests.
As Lenin and others predicted, industrial capitalism has turned into finance capitalism. Finance capitalism does not finance or create new real investments such as manufacturing facilities. Instead, finance capitalism functions as a rentier. It leverages debt and extracts interest payments (and today taxpayer bailouts for its over-leveraged gambles). Finance capitalism flourishes by converting more and more of society’s resources into payments to itself.
One result is that markets cease to expand and economies cease to grow as austerity is imposed to service the build-up in debt. Austerity pushes economies down as consumption and investment are cut back in order to service debt. Hudson concludes that the result is that bankers now receive the rents (a form of unearned income) that once flowed to the landed aristocracy. Unlike the aristocracy, who were dispossessed of their rents, the bankers have not been.
Hudson knows the history of economic thought and economic history. Reading The Bubble and Beyond lets readers see how economic ideas developed in ways that leave economists unable to perceive the real character of the problems that are challenging them. Trapped in the matrix that they have constructed for themselves, economists are unable to devise solutions.
Hudson writes that western economies are at a turning point. GDP growth consists increasingly of the build-up of financial overhead. The wealth gains are paper gains, not gains from real plant and equipment, and are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the one percent. Financial earnings are extracted from the earnings of tangible capital and labor. Matt Taibbi captured the point with his imagery of Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
My suggestion is that you read Hudson along with Taibbi’s Griftopia, Nomi Prins’ It Takes A Pillage, Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner’s Reckless Endangerment, and Daly and Cobb’s For the Common Good. Then if you ever do study economics, you will be armored against being ensnared in the matrix that produces economists as shills for finance capitalism, environmental destruction, and the offshoring of the economy.
Everyone always wants a solution. Hudson offers suggestions how to reconstruct the economy in order that it serves the needs of the 99% instead only of the needs of the 1%.
Get busy. Reading these books will do you much greater good than playing video games, watching TV or hanging out in bars. Our country needs a larger informed younger generation to replace the smaller informed older generation.
from Jim Kunstler:
1. Outstanding for consistent excellence, acuity, clarity, and the milk of human kindness is the McAlvany Weekly Commentary. David McAlvany manages an investment company out of Durango, Colorado, with an emphasis on precious metals. His interview subjects are high-caliber figures often outside the posse of usual suspects making the rounds elsewhere on the web. He speaks beautifully in complete sentences, shows enough emotion to come off as sympathetically human, and has an equally intelligent sidekick in Kevin Orrick. Together they present the most coherent view of money and politics on the web. A Christian enthusiast, he admirably keeps religion mostly out of the script.
2. For years, The Automatic Earth has presented the most consistently intelligent, wide-ranging, and intellectually rigorous view of the overall ongoing financial fiasco in the written blog format. Until the past year, most of the commentary was written by the droll Raul Ilargi Meijer. Now he is joined by the brilliant energy and finance analyst Nicole Foss and young Ashvin Pandurangi. Their combined point of view is staunchly deflationist. They do immense amounts of homework, cut through all the bullshit to the dense core of our troubled reality, and publish several times a week. The title of the blog comes from a Paul Simon lyric out of Graceland.
3. Zero Hedge. The mysterious person(s) behind this massive continuous stream of reports and analysis from the loony bin of Wall Street and beyond has a manic edge but accurately reflects the madness of the current situation. Zero Hedge seems to post virtually around the clock, every day. They are relentless and hugely comical, with exactly the right sharply malicious overtones required in these evil times. The characters who infest their comment section are some of the worst vermin in trolldom.
4. Mish's Global Analysis. I don't know how Mike Shedlock ("Mish") does it. He puts out two or three commentaries a day as well as holding down a regular job. His great service to us is providing the best breaking analysis of breaking news, that is, making sense of events that are often mystifying -- since mystification is one of the prime tactics of financial playerdom in these dark, non-transparent times -- and getting it done in a very timely way. The upshot is that few of the dodges and ruses emanating from the money world get by this guard-dog, to the huge benefit of us civilians.
5. Charles Hugh Smith's blog, Of Two Minds, manages to publish keenly insightful analysis practically every day in the form of essays that tend to follow big picture themes: governance, energy, taxation, culture, electoral politics. Smith's penetrating, dogged analysis connects vast constellations of dots between the forces that are shattering late industrial economies. He apparently does it all by himself and has also produced several excellent books that form a rich matrix of understanding for anyone trying to make sense of the epochal changes coming down on us.
6. Naked Capitalism is Yves Smith's daily roundup of first rate essays on disasters of banking, including her own forceful callings-out of the ubiquitous misconduct that surrounds her on Wall Street where she works. Her writing is fluent and clear on subjects that would otherwise appear hopelessly abstruse, which is especially valuable where complexity is a cover for misbehavior.
7. In an earlier incarnation of this life, Chris Martenson was a PhD biochemist toiling for da man in the corporate swamps of Connecticut. He literally dropped out and reinvented himself as a blogger / podcaster when the peak oil and debt trap equation startled him into recognizing that the reigning system of political-economy's days were numbered. Since then, he has produced perhaps the best book on the failures of contemporary finance, The Crash Course, and has lately ginned up an excellent weekly interview podcast that should be indispensible.
8. The Archdruid Report. To the casual observer John Michael Greer would seem an odd figure, being a long-bearded, shambling, threadbare enthusiast of things druidical (whatever they are), but he's also about the most humane, articulate, and lucid observer of the crumbling economic and political scene from the realm of totally outside the box. He puts out a beautifully crafted essay every Thursday from the backwater of Cumberland, Maryland, and his view of where the human race is headed is sobering, reassuring, and full of authentic empathy for our multiple predicaments.
9. Jim Willie's Hat Trick Letter at The Golden Jackass Report is a deep, complex, often savage dissection of financial reality that always manages to illuminate new angles on the giant hairball of lies and swindles that the money world has become in our time. He writes in a singular telegraphic style that is delightful to read in a way similar to the pleasures of watching certain horror movies. He assumes that his readers already know a lot and can follow the often recondite pathways of financial discourse that he is such an excellent guide to
10. The Keiser Report with Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert. Stacy is the straight-person to Max's antic persona. But no one has flogged the evil-doers of banking as hard and unrelentingly as Max, who worked on the inside of the investment racket until driven by outrage to become one of its fiercest attackers. His perch in Paris gives him a front-row seat on the shenanigans now unraveling civilization in the Eurozone, but he shines his lamp under the rock of Wall Street regularly and loves to put the wicked Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan in the spotlight.
11. King World News. Eric King is the reigning gold bug of podcastdom. While he unabashedly "talks his book," one gathers he does it because he sincerely believes in the arguments for precious metals (as I do) and he brings out around five punchy interviews a week with a revolving cast of fellow gold bugs and other generally intelligent high level players in that world - though I could do without the snide Gerald Celente.
12. Financial Sense New Hour. Jim Puplava recently expanded his formerly weekends-only massive three hour podcast to include premium-priced weekday interviews with a lineup of insiders. Puplava covers the waterfront energetically, but he has some weaknesses: 1.) his malaprop rate is staggering; 2.) he doesn't challenge guests spouting obvious nonsense; 3.) other than being a staunch inflationist, his views on the markets shift with whatever wind is issuing from a guest's mouth; and 4.) he's a closet John Bircher who does an annual summer show (any week now) featuring an appalling roster of right-wing crazies. In a normal culture, that alone would tend to discredit all his other worthy endeavors. His sidekick John Loeffler sounds more consistently intelligent. Both of them are jesus freaks, of course.
I left a few characters off the main list, but shoutouts to CK Michaelson's Some Assembly Required blog, Bruce Krasting's blog, Bill Bonner's The Daily Reckoning, Whiskey and Gunpowder, the brave Martin Armstrong, Jesse's Café Americain, Barry Ritholtz's The Big Picture, Carl Denninger, Peter Schiff, the great, sobering Doug Noland of the Prudent Bear's Credit Bubble Bulletin, Pater Tenebrarum of Acting Man, Doug Henwood, the savvy and beautiful Lauren Lyster, Bill Moyers... and probably several others who I am (unfortunately) too rushed to mention.
from Paul Craig Roberts:
Readers ask me from time to time to recommend a book from which they can learn about economics.
The problem with reading a book to learn economics that is taught in the universities and practiced in Washington is that economics is now a highly formalized subject based on abstract models and assumptions and has been mathematized. It is not that the subject is totally useless and without any applicability to real world problems. Rather, the problem is that the discipline both lags an ever-changing world and got some things wrong at the beginning. Consequently, learning economics places one inside a box where some of the tools and understanding provided are outdated and incorrect.
For example, every textbook will draw a picture of agriculture as the perfect example of competitive markets in which “no producer’s output is large enough to affect price.” This made sense when one-third of the US work force was on family farms. Today, American agriculture is dominated by corporations and agribusiness. Additionally, part of the disastrous financial deregulation pushed by no-think economists and special interests was the removal of position limits on speculators. Formerly, speculators smoothed agricultural and commodity markets by buying and selling in order to stabilize price over periods when supply and demand were out of balance. Now speculators can dominate markets and rig prices to the benefit of their profits.
There are many such examples where economics no longer speaks to the real world.
Two other examples will suffice:
Most intelligent people are aware that natural resources are finite, including the environment’s ability to absorb the wastes or pollution from productive activities (see for example, Jared Diamond, Collapse, 2005). But few economists are aware, because economists assume that man-made capital is a perfect substitute for nature’s capital. This assumption implies that there are no finite environmental limits to infinite economic growth. Lost in such a make-believe world, economists neglect the full cost of production and cannot tell if the value of the increases in GDP are greater or less than the full cost of producing it.
Economists have almost universally confused jobs offshoring with free trade. Economists have even managed to produce “studies” purporting to show that a domestic economy is benefitted by being turned into the GDP of some other country. Economists have managed to make this statement even while its absurdity is obvious to what remains of the US manufacturing, industrial, and professional skilled (software engineers, for example) workforce and to the cities and states whose tax bases have been devastated by the movement offshore of US jobs.
The few economists who have the intelligence to recognize that jobs offshoring is the antithesis of free trade are dismissed as “protectionists.” Economists are so dogmatic about free trade that they have even constructed a folk myth that the rise of the US economy was based on free trade. As Michael Hudson, an economist able to think outside the box has proven, there is not a scrap of evidence in behalf of this folk myth (see America’s Protectionist Takeoff 1815-1914).
My advice to readers who wish to develop economic comprehension is to begin with the outside-the-box economists who are addressing real issues. For example, Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb’s For the Common Good is accessible to ordinary readers willing to take the effort to google the definitions of unfamiliar terms. However, the most important development in trade theory is not. Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests by Ralplh E. Gomory and William J. Baumol (MIT Press, 2000) is apparently even over the heads of professional economists, who prefer to babble on ignorantly about the “benefits of free trade” than to learn what they don’t know. Nevertheless, readers should understand that the case for free trade will never been the same after
its dissection by Gomory and Baumol.
With this preface to the column, I now turn to its subject: economist Michael Hudson. Hudson is totally outside the matrix in which economists imprison themselves. Hudson doesn’t live in the artificial reality of economists or shill for corporations and Wall Street.
A person can learn a lot from Hudson. His book, Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (2009) explains how foreign trade and economic development have been used to concentrate economic power in the hands of dominant nations. What is really going on is covered up with do-good verbiage and formal models. In reality, trade and development are ways to colonize countries that think they are independent. (Another good book on this subject is Michel Chossudovsky’s The Globalization of Poverty.)
Perhaps the best place to begin with Hudson is his latest book, The Bubble and Beyond, which should be available within a few days of the appearance of this column. In this book Hudson addresses the crisis in the economy and the crisis in the discipline of economics. From this book you can understand not only the crisis but also why economists have misdiagnosed the crisis and are applying incorrect remedies.
Hudson shows that a central problem is that economic theory ignores the role of debt in the economy. Economic theory also pretends that economic policy, such as the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy, serves the public’s interest rather than the interests of powerful private interests.
As Lenin and others predicted, industrial capitalism has turned into finance capitalism. Finance capitalism does not finance or create new real investments such as manufacturing facilities. Instead, finance capitalism functions as a rentier. It leverages debt and extracts interest payments (and today taxpayer bailouts for its over-leveraged gambles). Finance capitalism flourishes by converting more and more of society’s resources into payments to itself.
One result is that markets cease to expand and economies cease to grow as austerity is imposed to service the build-up in debt. Austerity pushes economies down as consumption and investment are cut back in order to service debt. Hudson concludes that the result is that bankers now receive the rents (a form of unearned income) that once flowed to the landed aristocracy. Unlike the aristocracy, who were dispossessed of their rents, the bankers have not been.
Hudson knows the history of economic thought and economic history. Reading The Bubble and Beyond lets readers see how economic ideas developed in ways that leave economists unable to perceive the real character of the problems that are challenging them. Trapped in the matrix that they have constructed for themselves, economists are unable to devise solutions.
Hudson writes that western economies are at a turning point. GDP growth consists increasingly of the build-up of financial overhead. The wealth gains are paper gains, not gains from real plant and equipment, and are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the one percent. Financial earnings are extracted from the earnings of tangible capital and labor. Matt Taibbi captured the point with his imagery of Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
My suggestion is that you read Hudson along with Taibbi’s Griftopia, Nomi Prins’ It Takes A Pillage, Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner’s Reckless Endangerment, and Daly and Cobb’s For the Common Good. Then if you ever do study economics, you will be armored against being ensnared in the matrix that produces economists as shills for finance capitalism, environmental destruction, and the offshoring of the economy.
Everyone always wants a solution. Hudson offers suggestions how to reconstruct the economy in order that it serves the needs of the 99% instead only of the needs of the 1%.
Get busy. Reading these books will do you much greater good than playing video games, watching TV or hanging out in bars. Our country needs a larger informed younger generation to replace the smaller informed older generation.
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