The Fatal Disease of the Status Quo

Diminishing returns may lead to collapse

By charles smith

The costs of maintaining a sclerotic, cartel-state Status Quo infected with incurable diminishing returns eventually exceed the carrying capacity of the real economy and the Status Quo collapses in a heap.

On the surface, the Status Quo appears stable, if not quite healthy. This stability is illusory, however, for the Status Quo has a fatal disease: diminishing return.

The basic idea of diminishing return is closely related to marginal utility and marginal return: the more capital, energy and labor committed to a project, the lower the return/yield/output.

Diminishing return works in two ways:

1. Output (yield) remains stable, but it requires an ever-increasing input of capital, energy and labor to maintain that output.

2. Input remains stable but output (yield) constantly declines. 

To survive, the Status Quo must maintain the same output: the stock market must be held aloft at current levels, entitlements must be paid, the National Security State must either expand or maintain its current global reach, and so on.

France Tells Brussels to Shove It

Simmering Feud Between France and Germany Erupts Into Verbal Warfare 

By Mike "Mish" Shedlock

The simmering feud between France and Germany erupted into a heated political exchange following Pressure on Hollande to take bold action to revive the French economy, calling for new pension and labour market reforms. 

"The commission’s list of recommendations for Paris, which it expects to be delivered in return for allowing France two extra years to meet its budget deficit targets, covered all the hard issues the socialist government faces: cutting public spending; restoring badly diminished competitiveness, opening up restricted markets, reforming the tax regime and loosening tight labour market regulations."

France Tells Brussels to Shove It

The exchange got quite interesting when Merkel Allies Bashed Hollande Over Needed Reforms 

 Leading members of Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian Democratic Union in Germany have fiercely criticised François Hollande, accusing the French president of “shaking the foundations of the European Union”, only hours before the two leaders met in Paris in a bid to repair their troubled relations.

Deep German concern about the French government’s resistance to economic reform and hostility to EU pressure emerged after Mr Hollande said it was not for the European Commission “to dictate” reforms to Paris.

“There is no need for European recommendations; what’s needed is obvious. It’s not for the commission to dictate what we have to do,” Mr Hollande said in response to the commission, whose call was part of its annual assessment of budget plans for all 27 EU members.

Immigration Tests Prospects for a Borderless Europe

Welfare and Immigration don't match together

By RAPHAEL MINDER

Carolina Porta Nova, 19, had dreams of becoming a schoolteacher in her native Portugal. But grinding recession, government cuts to education and an unemployment rate of about 40 percent among young people put an end to those plans.

So last October Ms. Porta Nova moved to Switzerland, where she quickly found work as a house cleaner in a country whose relatively healthy economy has made it a magnet for job-seekers from the European Union, particularly its distressed southern tier. “I can see no happy future for teachers in Portugal,” she said.

Ms. Porta Nova was one of 79,000 migrants to Switzerland last year, helping raise the number of foreign residents by 14 percent over the past five years, a pace that has begun to alarm some here. After mounting pressure, this month the government reintroduced quotas for work permits for citizens from the European Union. The right-wing Swiss People’s Party is now pushing for a referendum on immigration, which could re-establish checks at Swiss borders with E.U. countries for the first time in five years.

The Swiss are not alone in their reservations about immigration. Declining economies, the rise of nationalist parties and the prospect of citizens from two of the Union’s newest and poorest members, Romania and Bulgaria, gaining unrestricted access to E.U. labor markets has tested the ambitions for a borderless Europe more than at any time since the accord that eliminated most internal boundaries — the Schengen Agreement — went into effect in 1995.

The British government has proposed making it easier to deport some foreigners and requiring migrants to pay for some health care. Denmark reimposed border controls two years ago, under pressure from the right-wing Danish People’s Party. Spain recently required work contracts for Romanians after a fourfold increase in their arrivals, reversing a previous commitment to allow them free access as fellow E.U. members.

Such steps have highlighted a new tendency by economically stressed E.U. members to retreat to their own corners after decades of pooling their fortunes. The Swiss decision, in particular, drew a stinging rebuke from Catherine Ashton, the Union’s foreign policy chief, who said that the restrictions “disregard the great benefits that the free movement of persons brings to the citizens of both Switzerland and the E.U.”

Quote of the Day

That’s not the way capitalism is supposed to work

You are not supposed to take money away from the competent people and give it to the incompetent so that the incompetent can compete with the competent people with their own money. That’s not the way capitalism is supposed to work.

- Jim Rogers tells Zero Hedge what he thinks of bank bailouts. 

No Warning Can Save People Determined To Grow Suddenly Rich

Everything that government touches, whatever its initial value or worth, ultimately turns to ashes

by Tim Price

“No bubbles. Because it’s normal for large liquid asset classes to nearly double in value over less than a year and then drop 10% in a day.”         

    - Tweet from financial journalist Alen Mattich, 23 May 2013.

 “An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and a satisfactory return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.”        

    -   Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, ‘Security Analysis’.

 “No warning can save people determined to grow suddenly rich.”     

                         - Lord Overstone.

At the height of the financial crisis (i.e. 2008) it was easy to despise just the bankers for their serial and colossal ineptitude and rank hypocrisy. Now, five years into one of history’s most alarming bubbles, it’s easy to despise just about everyone in a position of financial or political authority, and for the same reasons. 
Take the FT front page from last Wednesday: 

“America’s corporate titans fight back”. 

With just a cursory look at the layout of the page, one could be forgiven for thinking that “America’s corporate titans” were somehow fighting against a common foe. But on closer reading it transpired that JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon had merely succeeded in defending his own interests – as chairman and CEO of America’s most iconic bank – versus those of the people who notionally own his company, i.e. JP Morgan’s shareholders. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, on the other hand, was defending his company against the predations of some of America’s biggest crooks, a.k.a. the US government. “We pay all the taxes we owe,” said Mr Cook; “every single dollar. We not only comply with the laws but we comply with the spirit of the laws.” In sympathy with Mr Cook, the Republican senator Rand Paul added, 

“I’m offended by the spectacle of dragging in executives from an American company for doing nothing illegal. If anyone should be on trial here it should be Congress.”

There was a similar atmosphere of populist corporate tax avoidance witch-hunt mania here in the UK, as Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt suggested that it was not for companies to decide what tax policies should be, but rather for duly elected governments. This prompted the FT’s political columnist Janan Ganesh to tweet, somewhat archly: 

“Eric Schmidt is sparing the time to teach C-list MPs who have never created or run anything the difference between law and morality. Impressed.” 

How Hayek Helped Me Understand China's Tragedy

"If winter comes, can spring be far behind?"

By Yang Jisheng

In the space of four years, from 1958 to 1962, China experienced a disaster of historic proportions - the death by starvation of more than 30 million people. This occurred in a time of peace, without epidemic or abnormal climatic conditions. A confluence of historical factors caused China's leadership clique to follow the path of the Soviet Union, which was supposed to make China strong and prosperous. Instead, it brought inconceivable misery, bearing witness to what Friedrich Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom: "Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavor consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?"

Why did Mao Zedong's great ideals create such great tragedy? The answer can be found in Hayek's writings. China's revolutionaries built a system based on what Hayek called "the Great Utopia," which required "central direction and organization of all our activities according to some consciously constructed ‘blueprint'" and for a "unitary end" while "refusing to recognize autonomous spheres in which the ends of the individuals are supreme." In China's case, this "unitary end" was the "Great Utopia" of communism.

In order to bring about this Great Utopia, China's leaders constructed an all-encompassing and omnipotent state, eliminating private ownership, the market and competition. The state controlled the vast majority of social resources and monopolized production and distribution, making every individual completely dependent on it. The government decided the type and density of crops planted in each location, and yields were taken and distributed by the state. The result was massive food shortages, as the state's inability to ration food successfully doomed tens of millions of rural Chinese to a lingering death.

The designers of this system expected an economy organized under unified planning to result in efficiency. Instead, it brought shortage. Government monopoly blunted the basic impetus for economic function - personal enthusiasm, creativity and initiative - and eliminated the opportunity and space for free personal choice. Economic development ground to a halt. The extreme poverty of Mao's China was the inevitable result.

More Deserts to Bloom, This Time in Israel

Extracting the Mediterranean Sea’s water could provide Israel with an unquenchable supply of clean water

Water from the Mediterranean Sea rushes through pipes en route to being filtered for use across Israel in a process called desalination, which could soon account for 80 percent of the country's potable water

By Ben Sales

As construction workers pass through sandy corridors between huge rectangular buildings at this desalination plant on Israel’s southern coastline, the sound of rushing water resonates from behind a concrete wall.

Drawn from deep in the Mediterranean Sea, the water has flowed through pipelines reaching almost 4,000 feet off of Israel’s coast and, once in Israeli soil, buried almost 50 feet underground. Now, it rushes down a tube sending it through a series of filters and purifiers. After 90 minutes, it will be ready to run through the faucets of Tel Aviv.

Set to begin operating as soon as next month, Israel Desalination Enterprises’ Sorek Desalination Plant will provide up to 26,000 cubic meters – or nearly 7 million gallons – of potable water to Israelis every hour. When it’s at full capacity, it will be the largest desalination plant of its kind in the world.

“If we didn’t do this, we would be sitting at home complaining that we didn’t have water,” said Raphael Semiat, a member of the Israel Desalination Society and professor at Israel’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. “We won’t be dependent on what the rain brings us. This will give a chance for the aquifers to fill up.”

The new plant and several others along Israel’s coast are part of the country’s latest tactic in its decades-long quest to provide for the nation’s water needs. Advocates say desalination — the removal of salt from seawater – could be a game-changing solution to the challenges of Israel’s famously fickle rainfall. Instead of the sky, Israel’s thirst may be quenched by the Mediterranean’s nearly infinite, albeit salty, water supply.

Who Owns This Land?

In Greece, Who Knows?

By SUZANNE DALEY

Not long ago Leonidas Hamodrakas, a lawyer in Athens, decided to pay closer attention to his family’s land holdings — some fields, a scattering of buildings and a massive stone tower — in Mani, a rural region in southern Greece.

But property ownership in Greece is often less than clear cut. So Mr. Hamodrakas put a padlock on his gate and waited to see what would happen. Soon enough, he heard from neighbors. Three of them claimed that they, too, had title to parts of the property.

In this age of satellite imagery, digital records and the instantaneous exchange of information, most of Greece’s land transaction records are still handwritten in ledgers, logged in by last names. No lot numbers. No clarity on boundaries or zoning. No obvious way to tell whether two people, or 10, have registered ownership of the same property.

As Greece tries to claw its way out of an economic crisis of historic proportions, one that has left 60 percent of young people without jobs, many experts cite the lack of a proper land registry as one of the biggest impediments to progress. It scares off foreign investors; makes it hard for the state to privatize its assets, as it has promised to do in exchange for bailout money; and makes it virtually impossible to collect property taxes.

Greece has resorted to tagging tax dues on to electricity bills as a way to flush out owners. Of course, that means that empty property and farmland has yet to be taxed.

Mr. Hamodrakas is far from resolving the dispute with his neighbors. The courts in Greece are flooded with such cases. “These things take years,” he said, “maybe a decade to settle.”

This state of affairs is particularly galling because Greece has thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem over the past two decades, but has little to show for it. At one point, in the early 1990s, Greece took more than $100 million from the European Union to build a registry. But after seeing what was accomplished, the European Union demanded its money back.

OPEC Is Cracking, thanks to fracking

OPEC is exactly the kind of rent-seeking organization the world needs to abolish

By Walter Russell Mead

Members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries are meeting Friday to discuss cutting production in response to the new US addition to the global oil market. But delegates have already hinted that the asymmetric impact of the shale revolution on OPEC’s member countries has weakened the bloc’s resolve and will mean no agreement on curbing supply.

That’s because US shale oil is pitting African members against Arab members. The new American oil bounty is of the light, sweet crude variety. It’s higher quality than the heavy crude produced by Gulf OPEC members. But countries like Nigeria, Algeria, and Angola have typically exported sweet crude to the US, and the shale boom is hitting them hardest. Exports from those African members dropped 41 percent from 2011 to 2012.

The countries hit hardest by this new supply source also have the least room to cut production. Their regimes need consistently high exports and oil prices to stay solvent and in power. If OPEC doesn’t cut production, the price of oil is going to drop. That’s going to hurt Venezuela and especially Iran, which is already reeling from Western sanctions on its exports.

Americans are, however, unlikely to be raising money to send to distressed OPEC countries anytime soon. As an aspiring monopoly cartel, OPEC is exactly the kind of rent-seeking organization the world needs to abolish. One of the many positive consequences of the new energy situation is that OPEC is weakening. 

Western Cultural Suicide

Falling out of love with your host can kill you both

By Victor Davis Hanson

Multiculturalism — as opposed to the notion of a multiracial society united by a single culture — has become an abject contradiction in the modern Western world. Romance for a culture in the abstract that one has rejected in the concrete makes little sense. Multiculturalists talk grandly of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, usually in contrast to the core values of the United States and Europe. Certainly, in terms of food, fashion, music, art, and architecture, the Western paradigm is enriched from other cultures. But the reason that millions cross the Mediterranean to Europe or the Rio Grande to the United States is for something more that transcends the periphery and involves fundamental values — consensual government, free-market capitalism, the freedom of the individual, religious tolerance, equality between the sexes, rights of dissent, and a society governed by rationalism divorced from religious stricture. Somehow that obvious message has now been abandoned, as Western hosts lost confidence in the very society that gives us the wealth and leisure to ignore or caricature its foundations. The result is that millions of immigrants flock to the West, enjoy its material security, and yet feel little need to bond with their adopted culture, given that their hosts themselves are ambiguous about what others desperately seek out.

Why did the family of the Boston bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, even wish to come to Boston? If they really were in danger back home in the Islamic regions within Russia, why would members of the family return to the source of their supposed dangers? And if the city of Boston, the state of Massachusetts, and the federal government of the United States extended the Tsarnaevs years’ worth of public assistance, why would such largesse incur such hatred of the United States in the hearts of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar? Obviously, the Tsarnaevs had some sense that the United States was a freer, more humane, and more prosperous place than the Russia they left, but they also felt no love for it, felt no pressure from their hosts to cultivate such love — and believed that they could continue to live as Russian Muslims inside the United States. Did not the Tsarnaevs flee the Muslim hinterlands of Russia because they did not like the thought of things like pressure cookers full of ball bearings exploding and killing and maiming the innocent on the street?

This Is What Happens When You Fear Free Speech

The Decay of Free Speech in USA

By David Harsanyi 

Perhaps these Obama administration scandals (popularly referred to as "so-called scandals" in liberal media circles) lack the explosive drama of a Watergate and the entertainment value of Bill Clinton's peccadilloes, but for those who are less obsessed with the political consequences and more troubled by constitutional fallout, there's plenty to see.

To begin with, the Internal Revenue Service scandal isn't just about the abuse of power; it's a byproduct of an irrational fear of free speech, which seems to permeate much of the left these days. The unprecedented targeting of conservatives wasn't incidental to this administration as much as it was an intuitive extension of the paranoia the left has about unfettered political expression.

Democrats, after all, hadn't been merely accusing political opponents of being radical twits the past four years; they'd been accusing them of being corrupt, illegitimate radical twits. The president endlessly argued that these unregulated groups were wrecking the process at the behest of well-heeled enablers rather than engaging in genuine debate.

Heck, some of these funders may even be foreign nationals! Senators called for investigations. Obama called out the Supreme Court during a State of the Union speech for defending the First Amendment in the Citizens United case (which prohibits the government from restricting political independent expenditures by groups). The New York Times editorial board (and others) advocated the cracking down by the IRS on conservative dissenters and getting to the bottom of the anarchy.

Live Free or Move

Economic freedom drives state job growth

by Scott Beyer

To listen to President Obama and the media, you would think America’s most pressing issues are gun control and immigration. But the issue that has plagued Obama from the start is job creation. Though unemployment has ticked down to 7.5 percent, the job numbers remain bleak when accounting for those underemployed or outside the workforce. Yet some areas of America are thriving, offering Obama a primer—if he wants it—for how to proceed.

Consider the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data on 2012 job growth for America’s 51 largest metropolitan regions. The data include a list of the top ten, which were mostly above 3 percent job growth, and the bottom ten, which were mostly below 1 percent. Previously stagnant San Francisco made a surprise entry among the leaders, but for the most part, the list reflected longtime trends—with Houston, Dallas, and Austin remaining near the top, and even San Antonio, which didn’t crack the top ten, growing jobs at a respectable 2.27 percent rate. The fast-growing South saw three cities—Charlotte, Raleigh, and Nashville—make the top ten, while Salt Lake City represented the resource-rich Intermountain West. Oklahoma City, which led in 2011, still ranked in the upper third for 2012. Meanwhile, the bottom ten featured typical Rust Belt offenders such as St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Buffalo. Despite only documenting metro areas, the data underlay the continued shift in job growth from some regions to others. Another study shows why the shift has occurred.

Why John McCain Wants to Aid Syrian Terrorists

His trip to Syria in support of lung-eating savages

by Justin Raimondo

When John McCain slipped into Syria the other day to meet with Islamist rebels, Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted “best wishes” to his fellow warmonger and claimed “dibs on his office if he doesn’t come back.” Leave it to Sen. Graham, who has been agitating along with McCain for the US to send weapons to the rebels, to joke about the untrustworthiness of the very people he wants to arm. But the rebels’ savagery is no joke: we are, after all, talking about people who eat the lungs of their enemies.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) had it kind of right when he admonished the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after it voted for a bill that would arm Syria’s Islamist insurgents:

“This is an important moment. You will be funding, today, the allies of al Qaeda. It’s an irony you cannot overcome.”

And yet irony doesn’t quite cover it: insanity is more like it. Here is a man who is the Republican party’s voice when it comes to foreign policy, a role he has appropriated due to his intimacy with those who book the Sunday talk shows, and yet when it comes to America’s relationship with the rest of the world his utter and complete ignorance is appalling.

Hiding the Unemployed

Disability and the Politics of Stats

by WENDY MCELROY

Some statistics cannot be understood without setting them within a political framework because they reflect politics as much as or more than they do reality. 

The unemployment rate is an example and a cautionary tale. 

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the official unemployment rate for last February fell to a four-year national low of 7.7 percent. While the White House cautiously congratulated itself, Republicans quickly pointed to what is often called the real unemployment rate; it stood at 14.3 percent.

The BLS looks at six categories of different data, from U-1 to U-6, to analyze employment every month. U-3 includes people who have been unemployed but who have actively looked for work during the past month; this is the official unemployment rate used by the media. U-6 contains data excluded from U-3, including part-time workers and the unemployed who have unsuccessfully looked for a job in the last year; this is the real unemployment rate. 

Those politicians who want to take credit for lower unemployment thrust U-3 figures forward. Those who wish to deny them credit prefer U-6.

But matters may even be worse.

Now there is fresh reason to believe that even the 14.3 percent rate may be a considerable understatement.

The Beautiful City

Beauty emerges from paradox

by TROY CAMPLIN

What makes a city beautiful? It’s not its parks and architecture, decorative though they may be. It’s not the mannequins dressed in high fashion, or the creative window displays. A city’s beauty comes from its life, from how its structures keep people teeming on the sidewalks and arterials—pulsing like blood through a body. A city’s beauty comes about the same way all beauty comes about in nature: through the unity of apparently opposing phenomena.

“Neighborhood accommodations for fixed, bodiless, statistical people are accommodations for instability,” wrote the great observer of cities, Jane Jacobs. In order for a neighborhood to have staying power, Jacobs thought, the people in it must constantly change. A city only becomes stable through “a seeming paradox.” That is, to get a critical mass of people to stay put, a city has to have “fluidity and mobility of use.” And so the neighborhood itself must change and reorganize itself in order to keep its people there. Fixedness and change. Healthy cities exemplify such paradoxes.

Cities are also products of attraction and repulsion. These forces somehow find balance. Identical businesses may repel each other, but similar businesses can attract each other. You won’t typically find two hair salons next to each other, for example, but it’s not uncommon to find a nail salon, a shoe store, and a clothing store in proximity.

Russia Forces Out One of Its Best Minds

Putin's crackdown reaches into the establishment. Is anyone safe?

BY ANDERS ÅSLUND

The news that Sergei Guriev has been forced to leave Russia under legal pressure is truly shocking because he is not a member of the opposition but an eminent representative of the liberal wing of the establishment. If Guriev is compelled to leave the country, any Russian citizen can face that fate.

Guriev, 41, is a truly outstanding individual. He was trained as an economist at MIT and Princeton and has an impressive record of academic publications in the foremost international journals, with particular interest in the role of oligarchs and the economics of happiness. At the tender age of 32, he became the president of the New Economic School (NES), a distinguished graduate program in Moscow, which he has developed into the best economics education not only in Russia, but on the European continent.

When was the last time a prediction of yours was right?

We Are the Idiots

by Walter E. Williams

Dr. Henry Miller, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Gregory Conko, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in their Forbes article "Rachel Carson's Deadly Fantasies" (9/5/2012), wrote that her 1962 book, Silent Spring, led to a world ban on DDT use. The DDT ban was responsible for the loss of "tens of millions of human lives – mostly children in poor, tropical countries – have been traded for the possibility of slightly improved fertility in raptors (birds). This remains one of the monumental human tragedies of the last century." DDT presents no harm to humans and, when used properly, poses no environmental threat. In 1970, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences wrote: "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. ... In a little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable." Prior to the DDT ban, malaria was on the verge of extinction in some countries.

The World Health Organization estimates that malaria infects at least 200 million people, of which more than a half-million die, each year. Most malaria victims are African children. People who support the DDT ban are complicit in the deaths of tens of millions of Africans and Southeast Asians. Philanthropist Bill Gates is raising money for millions of mosquito nets, but to keep his environmentalist credentials, the last thing that he'd advocate is DDT use. Remarkably, black congressmen share his vision.

Wackoism didn't end with Carson's death. Dr. Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist, in his 1968 best-selling book, The Population Bomb, predicted major food shortages in the United States and that "in the 1970s ... hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ehrlich saw England in more desperate straits, saying, "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." On the first Earth Day, in 1970, Ehrlich warned: "In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish." Ehrlich continues to be a media and academic favorite.

Millennials Won't Be Debt Free Until They Die

The trouble starts with ever-skyrocketing student loan debt

By Brian O'Connell

How bad have things gotten for millennials?

Their financial situation is so grim that they may never get completely out of debt -- in their entire lives.

That's the conclusion of a study from Ohio State University.

The real culprit is credit card debt, which tends to stifle economic growth of younger Americans, primarily because they pay it off so slowly, the OSU study says. But millennials are paying off all their debts so slowly they may accumulate credit card debt well into their 70s and die still owing, researcher say.

"If what we found continues to hold true, we may have more elderly people with substantial financial problems in the future," says Lucia Dunn, a lead author of the study and an economics professor at Ohio State.

Perhaps -- let's go out on a limb here and say definitely -- that's a big reason millennials say debt is their "biggest financial concern" of their lives.

The fall of the last bastion of free speech in Venezuela

When all the critics are gone, officials will no longer have anyone to blame for "media conspiracies" and other such nonsense

By Juan Nage

For years, Venezuela's government has dodged accusations that it does not protect freedom of speech. Critics usually point to the frequent use of public airwaves to broadcast government propaganda, as well as the many TV and radio stations the government has shut down for playing critical content. The government usually responds by citing the continued operation of Globovisión, a sharply critical all-news station (or rather, the only critical news station). Chavistas claim that its survival throughout the Chávez era refutes any allegations of censorship.

But the government will have to find another weak alibi. As of the last few days, Globovisión's critical presentation of the news feels like a thing of the past.

Last March, Globovisión's owners announced that the station had been sold to a group of Venezuelan businessmen linked to the insurance industry. The decision did made sense both economically and politically. Globovisión has been under siege for years by being routinely fined for covering news that regulators felt would "stir public anxiety." Because of their work, Globovisión's owners and journalists are also under constant threats of being arrested.

Drowning in a Liquidity Trap?

The foundation of lending is real wealth and not money as such

by Frank Shostak

Bruce Bartlett recently lamented in The New York Times that given the current state of economic affairs we need more Keynesian medicine to fix the US economy. According to Bartlett, the core insight of Keynesian economics is that there are very special economic circumstances in which the general rules of economics don’t apply and are in fact counterproductive. This happens when interest rates and inflation rates are so low that monetary policy becomes impotent; an increase in the money supply has no boosting effect because it does not lead to additional spending by consumers or businesses. Keynes called this situation a “liquidity trap.” Keynes wrote,

There is the possibility ... that, after the rate of interest has fallen to a certain level, liquidity-preference may become virtually absolute in the sense that almost everyone prefers cash to holding a debt which yields so low a rate of interest. In this event the monetary authority would have lost effective control over the rate of interest.[1]

Egypt's Summer of Discontent

A Combustible Political Environment

By Eric Trager

Due to a moribund economy, fuel and food shortages, and a lack of political opportunities, Egypt faces a tumultuous summer, and conditions will likely continue to deteriorate thereafter. While Washington should encourage Cairo to undertake necessary political and economic reforms that might calm the situation and improve governance, the Obama administration should concentrate on preserving vital strategic interests in the event of renewed upheaval.

A SUMMER OF SHORTAGES

Since Egypt's 2011 revolution, persistent political uncertainty and plummeting domestic security have undermined foreign investment and harmed the country's once-vibrant tourism industry. According to the Interior Ministry, the past year has witnessed a 120 percent increase in murders, 350 percent increase in robberies, and 145 percent jump in kidnappings. Foreign currency reserves dropped from approximately $36 billion at the time of Hosni Mubarak's ouster to $14.42 billion at the end of April 2013, with a $2 billion Libyan cash deposit in late March inflating the latter figure. Meanwhile, according to the Financial Times, Egypt's public sector salary bill has risen by 80 percent since the uprising to $25 billion annually; 400,000 government jobs have been added, and an additional 400,000 will be made permanent by the end of June.

This combination of shrinking reserves and growing expenditures is threatening the government's ability to import wheat and fuel, which it sells at subsidized rates. Fuel and fertilizer shortages have also impacted domestic wheat production, which is unlikely to reach Cairo's goal of 9.5 million tons -- a benchmark intended to reduce Egypt's dependence on foreign imports. The fuel shortages have also catalyzed regular electricity outages (including multiple times in one day at Cairo International Airport), and rural areas are reporting water outages. These problems are expected to worsen as Egyptians turn on their air conditioners during the summer; the situation will become especially uncomfortable once Ramadan begins in early July, when approximately 90 percent of the population will be observing the month-long fast during daylight hours.

Naming a nameless war

The Eternal War

By Andrew J Bacevich 

For well over a decade now the United States has been "a nation at war". Does that war have a name? 

It did at the outset. After 9/11, George W Bush's administration wasted no time in announcing that the US was engaged in a "Global War on Terrorism", or GWOT. With few dissenters, the media quickly embraced the term. The GWOT promised to be a gargantuan, transformative enterprise. The conflict begun on 9/11 would define the age. In neoconservative circles, it was known as World War IV. 

Upon succeeding to the presidency in 2009, however, Barack Obama without fanfare junked Bush's formulation (as he did again in a speech at the National Defense University last week). Yet if the appellation went away, the conflict itself, shorn of identifying marks, continued. 

Does it matter that ours has become and remains a nameless war? Very much so. 

Names bestow meaning. When it comes to war, a name attached to a date can shape our understanding of what the conflict was all about. To specify when a war began and when it ended is to privilege certain explanations of its significance while discrediting others. Let me provide a few illustrations. 

With rare exceptions, Americans today characterize the horrendous fraternal bloodletting of 1861-1865 as the Civil War. Yet not many decades ago, diehard supporters of the Lost Cause insisted on referring to that conflict as the War Between the States or the War for Southern Independence (or even the War of Northern Aggression). The South may have gone down in defeat, but the purposes for which Southerners had fought - preserving a distinctive way of life and the principle of states' rights - had been worthy, even noble. So at least they professed to believe, with their preferred names for the war reflecting that belief. 

Schoolbooks tell us that the Spanish-American War began in April 1898 and ended in August of that same year. The name and dates fit nicely with a widespread inclination from president William McKinley's day to our own to frame US intervention in Cuba as an altruistic effort to liberate that island from Spanish oppression. 

Yet the Cubans were not exactly bystanders in that drama. By 1898, they had been fighting for years to oust their colonial overlords. And although hostilities in Cuba itself ended on August 12, they dragged on in the Philippines, another Spanish colony that the United States had seized for reasons only remotely related to liberating Cubans. Notably, US troops occupying the Philippines waged a brutal war not against Spaniards but against Filipino nationalists no more inclined to accept colonial rule by Washington than by Madrid. 

So widen the aperture to include this Cuban prelude and the Filipino postlude and you end up with something like this: the Spanish-American-Cuban-Philippines War of 1895-1902. Too clunky? How about the War for the American Empire? This much is for sure: rather than illuminating, the commonplace textbook descriptor serves chiefly to conceal.