Analysis Topic: Politics & Social Trends
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Art Laffer On The Fed, What Would Milton Friedman Say? / Politics / US Federal Reserve Bank
By: Steve_H_Hanke
Art Laffer, the supply-side guru and recent recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom has caused yet another stir among the chattering classes. Last week, he told John Catsimatidis on AM 970 New York that “The Fed shouldn’t be independent of the administration. Never should be. None of those people were elected. They were appointed.” He repeated those sentiments on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” this morning.
What would my good friend Milton Friedman say? Well, unfortunately, we don’t know for certain because Milton is no longer with us. That said, Nobelist Friedman weighed in on the issue of central bank independence on several occasions. Indeed, an essay he penned in 1962 was titled “Should there be an Independent Monetary Authority?” His essay appeared in In Search of a Monetary Constitution, which was published by Harvard University Press and was edited by my collaborator, the late Leland B. Yeager. Friedman was unambiguous. He concluded that “The case against a fully independent central bank is strong indeed.”
Read full article... Read full article...
Friday, July 12, 2019
State of the US Economy as Laffer Gets Laughable / Politics / US Economy
By: Peter_Schiff
While the willingness to abandon long held beliefs for political gain has always been a common trait among public figures, the spectacle has recently taken on shocking levels of casual audacity. The contempt for even minimal levels of intellectual consistency has allowed Kamala Harris to condemn Joe Biden for his past opposition to Federally mandated busing while simultaneously taking the exact same position herself. These somersaults are particularly common with former economic conservatives seeking to curry favor with President Trump's decidedly non-conservative policies.
We have seen former free-trader Larry Kudlow awkwardly embrace high tariffs and big deficits, and economist Stephen Moore disavow decades of monetary hawkishness to position himself as a potentially reliable Trump loyalist. But the most dizzying reversal came this week when supposedly conservative Reagan administration economist Arthur Laffer (in what I believe to be an audition for a job in the Trump Administration) hit the airwaves to make the case that the Federal Reserve should be run directly by the President, not by the Fed's supposedly independent governors. Come again? Direct political control of a central bank has always been the bogeyman of any conservative economist. Was he serious?
Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, July 11, 2019
My SATS Results SHOCK! / Politics / Educating Children
By: Anika_Walayat
It's Sats results day when 600 thousand 10 and 11 year olds will be getting their Sats scores for English, Grammar and Maths tests that take place at the end of Key Stage 2 just prior to the move to secondary school. So find what the SATS results are all about and if my scores live up to expectations in my latest video.
Read full article... Read full article...
Friday, July 05, 2019
The Geopolitical Winds are Shifting / Politics / GeoPolitics
By: Raul_I_Meijer
How do you define terror? Perhaps, because of the way the term has evolved in the English language, one wouldn’t call the west ‘terrorists’ per se, but ‘we’ are certainly spreading terror and terrorizing very large groups of people. Yeah, bring on the tanks and parade them around town. Add a marching band that plays some war tunes.
The ‘official’ storyline : at the request of the US, Gibraltar police and UK marines have seized an oil tanker in Gibraltar. The super-tanker, 1000 feet (330 meters) long, carrying 2 million barrels, had stopped there after sailing all around the Cape of Good Hope instead of taking the Suez canal on its way, ostensibly, from Iran to Syria.
Read full article... Read full article...
Friday, June 28, 2019
Is Bitcoin A Diversion from the Natural Monetary Order? / Politics / Bitcoin
By: Antonius_Aquinas
As modern man continues to wantonly deviate, flaunt, and reject the natural law and the Divinely-created order from which it derives, it is not surprising that illusions like Bitcoin and other crypto currencies have captured the imagination of many and have provided a vehicle for scammers to rip off their fellow man.
Crypto currencies are a more complex, yet still devious derivative of the immoral, economic destructive, and social debilitating system of central banking. In response, Bitcoin pumpers have craftily tried to portray digital currencies as a “decentralized” alternative to the present fiat, paper-money standard.
Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, June 27, 2019
What Led to the Current Brexit Crisis? / Politics / BrExit
By: Travis_Bard
It’s more than a thousand days since the UK voted to leave the European Union, but the future relationship between the country and its continental neighbor is still unclear. The historic House of Commons, hailed as the Mother of Parliaments and based in the Palace of Westminster, has reached an impasse and can now only ask for an extension to the exit process in order to buy itself more time for a way out of the current predicament.
The public is as bitterly divided as the politicians – with more than six million people signing a petition to call for Brexit to be stopped and a mass march in London demanding another referendum to revisit the exit issue.
Read full article... Read full article...
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Iran and the Dying Days Of the US Empire / Politics / US Politics
By: Raul_I_Meijer
Something’s been nagging me for the past few days, and I’m not sure I’ve figured out why yet. It started when Donald Trump first called off the alleged planned strikes on targets in Iran because they would have cost 150 lives, and then the next day said the US would do sanctions instead. As they did on Monday, even directly targeting Trump’s equal, the “Supreme Leader Khameini”.
When Trump announced the sanctions, I thought: wait a minute, by presenting this the way you did, you effectively turned economic sanctions into a military tool: we chose not to do bombs but sanctions. Sounds the same as not doing a naval invasion but going for air attacks instead. The kind of decisions that were made in Vietnam a thousand times.
Read full article... Read full article...
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Racial Reparations Another Version of Slavery / Politics / Social Issues
By: BATR
Racial neutrality was becoming an entrenched aspect in the populist general culture. Yet, the faction of continuing tribal dissention, once again, raised its Identity discontent to keep and widen the gap among varied sub groups. Slavery has never been limited to people of African descent. But to suffer through the repetitive diatribe that Blacks deserve sole recompense for their distress because of the color of their skin is offensive to any advocate of sincere social justice. By any objective standard the last half century since the racial riots that burned urban centers of rebellion; the advancement of Afro-Americans improved in most aspects. Those who assimilated into the mainstream culture usually shared the benefits of unification. However, the lingering resentment that eats away at achieving civil co-existence is brought up whenever it is politically opportune for the power hungry race baiters.
Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, June 24, 2019
Will Google AI Kill Us? Man vs Machine Intelligence / Politics / AI
By: N_Walayat
Every search we do feeds the Google AI with more and more data about who we really are and thus how to predict our actions under a wide variety of circumstances. Throw into the mix Google's continuing expansion into every aspect of our lives coupled with the exponential growth in processing power then we are perhaps no more than a year or so away when Google's AI will surpass that which even the smartest of humans are able to understand what it's getting up to with potentially dire consequences for mankind unless we try to keep pace with the machine intelligence by upgrading ourselves both mentally and physically which is the focus of this video.
Read full article... Read full article...
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Trump Clueless On Trade Tariffs / Politics / Protectionism
By: Steve_H_Hanke
President Trump doesn’t like U.S. trade deficits. He also doesn’t like migrants flowing into the U.S. from south of the border. His tariffs and tariff threats are slowing trade and world economic growth. And this will, in turn, increase the migrant flows into the United States. After all, as foreign economic activity slows, and more foreigners are either thrown out of work or find their incomes drying up, they will be motivated to migrate. Trump remains clueless as to why tariffs fuel migration.
But, that’s not Trump’s only international trade blind spot. He and his cabinet think that U.S. trade deficits are a problem, and that they are caused by foreign countries that manipulate their currencies and engage in unfair trade practices. These ideas are wrongheaded.
These misguided ideas have plagued other administrations—even those lead by free-market presidents, like Ronald Reagan. Indeed, I spent many days, while at Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, trying to defend the President’s free-trade ideas. But, at the end of the day, the free-trader faction, which was led by the likes of Reagan himself, lost the war. The protectionists who harbored exactly the same wrongheaded ideas as Trump rolled us.
Read full article... Read full article...
Saturday, June 22, 2019
Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran / Politics / US Military
By: Raul_I_Meijer
As a nation, you’re certifiedly (is that a word?!) in deep trouble if and when Donald Trump is your most peaceloving man. But nevertheless, that is America today. It all harks back to the days when Trump was first -grudgingly and painstakingly- recognized as an actual presidential candidate.
He campaigned as a man who would end the costly and neverending decades-old and counting US wars far away from American shores and territory. He hasn’t lived up to those campaign goals at all, far from it, and he hired doofuses like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to show everyone that he didn’t, but in the early hours of June 21 2019 he apparently decided at the last minute that it just didn’t add up.
Read full article... Read full article...
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
We’re All Socialists Now / Politics / US Politics
By: Antonius_Aquinas
Despite being probably robbed of the Democratic Party’s nomination by the Clinton political machine, the success of the Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign with his advocacy of “democratic socialism” was an ominous sign of things to come and, in some sense, more telling of the political climate than Donald Trump’s improbable victory in November, 2016. The millions of votes garnered by Sanders in the Democratic primaries has emboldened other socialists to seek political office while socialist ideas are openly spoken of with little fear of political recriminations.
Sanders has doubled down on his advocacy of democratic socialism in a recent speech at George Washington University, calling for the completion of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s:
Today I am proposing we complete the unfinished work of Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party by putting forth a 21st century economic bill of rights.*
Read full article... Read full article...
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
Will Inflation “Save” Social Security? / Politics / Government Spending
By: MoneyMetals
Uncle Sam is going broke. That’s not exactly news – at least not to anyone who has been paying attention to the sorry state of federal finances.
Yet to most Americans, the ballooning national debt ($22.3 trillion and counting) isn’t a problem that impacts their daily lives. They won’t directly perceive the cost of another trillion dollars in borrowing in the government’s next fiscal year.
Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, June 17, 2019
Is Boris set to be the next Conservation leader? / Politics / UK Politics
By: Submissions
The battle is on for the next Conservation leader following the inevitable departure of Theresa May. This is certainly going to be a difficult job for whoever takes over the helm, in which there currently remains six looking for the role. The Roulettegeeks odds prediction has Boris Johnson as the short favourite and his price continues to shorten, in which he is now a best priced 1/6.
Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, June 17, 2019
Johnson Vs Gove Tory Leadership Contest Grudge Match Betfair Betting / Politics / UK Politics
By: Nadeem_Walayat
The latest odds for who who is likely to be the next tory leader have continued to narrow in Boris Johnson's favour with the latest price of just 1.23 which is set against 1.84 a week ago, 2.98 a week before that, 4+ a month before and 5+ a few months ago. So the train for betting on Boris Johnson has left the station as the risk vs reward is just not there. I don't take bets where the return on a £100 risk is just £23, even if I am pretty sure the bet will come good because risk vs reward is one of the primary rules for successful trading as iterated in my January 2019 article on the real secrets for successful trading. The Real Secret for Successful Trading
Sunday, June 16, 2019
US China War - Thucydides Trap and gold / Politics / China US Conflict
By: Richard_Mills
When an emerging power attempts to supplant a hegemonic power in international politics, major conflict often ensues. This is the definition of “The Thucydides Trap” as explained in a recent op-ed piece in The Japan Times.
The Thucydides Trap (pronounced “thu”, like you have a heavy lisp + sid + idees) is a term invented by Graham Allison, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Alison has been saying since 2015 that war between a rising power, China, and an established power, the United States, is inevitable, based on historical examples. The argument is fleshed out in his book, 'Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’sTrap?'
Allison’s Thucydides Trap has become a popular topic of conversation among the chattering classes in these troubling times in America, especially with a loose cannon like Trump as the tweeter-in-chief who has the keys to the nuclear button. As positions in the trade dispute get more entrenched, and issues like Huawei crop up, many are talking about a march to war with a new adversary: China.
Read full article... Read full article...
Friday, June 14, 2019
Boris Johnson Vs Michael Gove Tory Leadership Grudge Match - Video / Politics / UK Politics
By: Nadeem_Walayat
The tory leadership contest is converging towards the ultimate grudge match of Boris Johnson who should have won the 2016 leadership campaign vs Michael Gove who should have backed Boris Johnson in 2016 but instead chose to stab him in the back by standing himself for leader just a few hours before Boris was set to announce his candidature for next tory leader.
We'll now 3 years on Boris has learned his lessons and thus had deployed a slick campaign to convince MP's and Tory party members to finally back him for their next leader and thus the next British Prime Minister as the results of MP's voting in the first round illustrates:
Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, June 13, 2019
IRAN - The Next American War / Politics / US Military
By: Submissions
The hand on the trigger: How an American president wantonly prepares the next war
The great world powers slipped into World War I without really wanting it. But they had been arming themselves for years, so all that was needed was but a spark – such as the assassination of the Austrian heir to the throne – to detonate a powder keg filled to the rim.
A lot of explosives had accumulated
not only in the arsenals of the military, but in the hearts of the people. In the first moment of the declaration of war, many people throughout Europe were seen to be overwhelmed by enthusiasm. “… the war of 1914… was still serving a delusion, the dream of a better world, a world that would be just and peaceful… That was why the victims went to the slaughter drunk and rejoicing, crowned with flowers and wearing oak leaves on their helmets, while the streets echoed with cheering and blazed with light, as if it were a festival”(Stefan Zweig).
Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, June 13, 2019
Tory Leadership Contest Betting Markets Forecast - Betfair / Politics / UK Politics
By: Nadeem_Walayat
The worst Prime Minister in British History who has literally clung onto power by her finger tips for the past 6 months is set to resign as Tory party leader tomorrow, Friday 7th of June in the wake of the disaster that were the EU elections, which will mark the start for a 6 week long tory leadership contest with the objective of whittling down a wide field of 11 candidates to just 2 from whom the 100,000 or so tory party members will vote to choose to become the next Tory Leader and thus British Prime Minister set to take office late July as Britain counts down to the 31st October 2019 deadline. A deadline that most candidates have already declared they will seek to extend as a remainer parliament continues to do its utmost to subvert Brexit by taking a NO DEAL Brexit off the table and thus wasted the last 3 years instead of just declaring Independence as I concluded several years ago is what Britain should do to win the Brexit War.
Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, June 10, 2019
Betting on Next British Prime Minister Tory Leadership Betfair Markets Forecast / Politics / Gambling
By: Nadeem_Walayat
The worst Prime Minister in British History who has literally clung onto power by her finger tips for the past 6 months is set to resign as Tory party leader tomorrow, Friday 7th of June in the wake of the disaster that were the EU elections, which will mark the start for a 6 week long tory leadership contest with the objective of whittling down a wide field of 11 candidates to just 2 from whom the 100,000 or so tory party members will vote to choose to become the next Tory Leader and thus British Prime Minister set to take office late July as Britain counts down to the 31st October 2019 deadline. A deadline that most candidates have already declared they will seek to extend as a remainer parliament continues to do its utmost to subvert Brexit by taking a NO DEAL Brexit off the table and thus wasted the last 3 years instead of just declaring Independence as I concluded several years ago is what Britain should do to win the Brexit War.