Scratches to Sketches
Friday, 10 January 2014
Thursday, 9 January 2014
IMF paper warns of 'savings tax' and mass write-offs as West's debt hits 200-year high - Telegraph
Ian,
Thank you for pointing out this piece which escaped my reading net. I know Carmen and have been at the receiving end of many of her lectures. Krugman has had a field day arguing with her and with the deflation potential aspects of debt being repaid in the so-called advanced economies.
What matters is the maturity of the debt and who owns the assets that will need to deflate in value.
Maturity mismatch is obvious and has been exaggerated by low interest short term funding for long term exaggerated value assets. At some point the long term bank assets are bad debt because the saleable real value of the assets is much less than the real value of amortisation. Consumers / property developers default on bank loans because the value of their properties is less in nominal terms than apparent nominal debt, rental income and amortisation to be serviced. They have both variable interest rates and property prices to contend with. Who could live in a world where the collective fall in property values and real interest rates work against completing debt amortisation to maturity.
So another crisis is indeed imminent. We have in fact a need to continue to inflate the economy so as to continue to keep property values up, but we are in a cost / value trap. When one looks at a property one needs to have a clear idea of total costs compared with total saleable value plus accumulated rent and interest on that rent and interest, etc.
Plug all these variables into a system of equations where real incomes are stationary or falling?
Yes, gold has value, but perhaps not so much as a store of value because deflation hits everyone and commodities in particular. Bit coin as a hedge?
It's possible to achieve what economists call a soft landing, but part of the process would be to totally delink banks from housing finance, insurance, and stock markets where they are pretty hopeless. Right now there is insurance on change, on the change in the change and on the change in the change in the change? It's a Las Vegas economy coming from American banks that have acquired huge amounts of second and first generation bubble money to play games with.
Interestingly, were the rich to be taxed to pay for all the debt, the world would see productivity and employment rise rather rapidly, because rather than being the gateway to employment the incomes and assets of the rich are a black hole for employment. Traditional capitalism does not and did not produce the goods promised politically.
Arthur
Tuesday, 7 January 2014
Monday, 6 January 2014
Sunday, 5 January 2014
Thursday, 2 January 2014
Scientists observe dogs relieving themselves, discover something amazing - CSMonitor.com
"A team of Czech and German researchers have found that, all else being equal, when a dog wants to go powder its rhinarium, it will tend to do so while standing in alignment with the Earth's magnetic field."
Wednesday, 1 January 2014
Monday, 30 December 2013
Paul Krugman on Bitcoin, It's Not A Stable Store Of Value - Forbes - Tim Worstall
"Even Milton Friedman, the high priest of monetarism (or perhaps Scott Sumner today on market monetarism) insisted that you want the money supply to be expanding so as to cater to the greater demand for money as the economy grows. Sure, too much monetary expansion will lead to inflation, too much money chasing too few goods. But deflation means the opposite, where the economy, if the deflation is strong enough, will shrink in terms of the goods and services available to us. That is indeed the same thing as saying we'll all get poorer."
Manufacturing lessons from Germany - Tradegood
"Germany is the largest economy in Europe and the second largest exporter in the world after China. The country's 2.7 trillion euro GDP accounts for nearly 30% of Eurozone output. Over the past decade it has posted the fastest GDP per capita growth, making it the second largest production powerhouse among the G7 economies. With the second-lowest unemployment rate in Europe and an economic growth at 0.7% in the second quarter of 2013, the country successfully weathered the 18-month economic downturn in the Eurozone. As seen from the recent Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index 2013, Germany ranked second in global manufacturing competitiveness after China, but topped the list among the developed countries. It has also gained political clout thanks to its role as the biggest financial contributor to Europe's bailouts."
I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on | Heather Linebaugh | Comment is free | theguardian.com
Few of these politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue of what actually goes on. I, on the other hand, have seen these awful sights first hand.
Edward Snowden declares 'mission accomplished' in Moscow interview | World news | theguardian.com
He continued: "I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself."
NSA mass collection of phone data is legal, federal judge rules | World news | The Guardian
Judge Pauley said privacy protections enshrined in the fourth amendment of the US constitution needed to be balanced against a government need to maintain a database of records to prevent future terrorist attacks. "The right to be free from searches is fundamental but not absolute," he said. "Whether the fourth amendment protects bulk telephony metadata is ultimately a question of reasonableness."
NSA 'hacking unit' infiltrates computers around the world – report | World news | The Guardian
NSA officials responded to the Spiegel report with a statement, which said: "Tailored Access Operations is a unique national asset that is on the front lines of enabling NSA to defend the nation and its allies. [TAO's] work is centred on computer network exploitation in support of foreign intelligence collection."
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Sketches from scratches is a provocative blogspot that has grown out of the Wuh Lax experience. It is eclectic, which means that it might consider just about anything from the simple to the extremely difficult. A scratch can be something that is troubling me or a short line on paper. From a scratch comes a verbal sketch or image sketch of the issue or subject. Other sites have other stuff that should really be of interest to the broad reader. I try to develop themes, but variety often comes before depth.
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