Charlie Rose

JohnGelles  05/03/2011 06:54 AM Report

General Petraeus will be President. Will he renew our industrial strength -- or count on crooked politics to be no worse than the competition? Who knows.

Bin Laden is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. He arrived late and good people died on account of that. Obama and his good luck won again. Four more years then David P.

Will we be back in charge of a post-totalitarian liberalism? Or will Asia take over -- as we suffocate from too much Las Vegas and lying in answer to every question?

The correct solution demands more than uni-polarity. Let's try EU, Russia, China, India, Japan, Brazil and the USA. That's a lucky number 7. But that leaves more than a dozen others -- many more advanced than the biggies.

Do we really need a new world order? YES.

JohnGelles  05/03/2011 06:30 AM Report

OK. Sorry for the many typos. Charlie is too lazy and cheap to add post-send edit to this software.

I'm too quick to post without proofing -- before I send this stuff.

Too cheap and too quick for our own good.

Nothing is new. As I've said before -- if you read through errors the way we decode messages you won't be slowed down with things as they are.

JohnGelles  05/03/2011 06:21 AM Report

There is on this page a complete lack of agreement on what money and its purpose are? If money is what people accept in exchange for food and shelter, we can say with confidence that money's essence is unknown, uncertain and changes all the time.

My son says money is backed by the H-Bomb, not by REMants brain.

I say money is backed by what it can buy -- which is a definition that relies on itself and means nothing more than money is money.

I add money is a created by law not business. This gets back to the bomb. You can hide your food and small stuff, but you cannot collect a debt withoutthe sheriff'd gun on your side.

We here can vote for Obama and Bernanke and money will be what it is now -- something we create too cautiously to help the middle class and the poor at the moment.

Or we can follow the austerity Austrian idiots, like those who disagree with me, and dry up all demand until the bankers cut their own throats.

Is it hopeless? Not at all. We will move left enough to bring back the middle class in time to prevent in America martial law in the streets like Arabia.

You may not love Abba Lerner and Maynard Keynes, but you will do as they say because in Thatcher's words, there is no alternative. She called in TINA and meant the opposite of what it means today.

I was once a student of Adolph Berle of Berle and Means, "The Modern Corporation and Private Property". He was one of FDR's brains trust in 1933 -- and a teacher, diplomat and all around gemntleman scholar. He said money and capitalist thought swung like a pendulum from side to side between Washington and Wall Street. He said it then and it remains true today.

People like REMant think profit is the answer. People like me think output of food, water, shelter and all the rest of our necessities is the answer. You cannot eat profit -- nor can you eat bad debt. You can only eat what work and brains can produce when nature is willing.

Once you have the necessities yhou can ACCOUNT for inputs and outputs using money as measure in certain arithmetic models. Add to you arithmetic the sheriff and the law, and money is what YOU say it is -- for as long as people love it and will fight on your side.

REMant and his few friends fight for austerity. They have nothing but snake oil in their wagon. My friends fight for full employment of men and machines. We won't cheat you blind in awe of Herbert Hoover.

tabs  05/03/2011 05:07 AM Report

When Mr Leonhardt is bouncing his Grandchild on his knee and his Grandchild asks, "Gramps what did you do during the Great Financial crisis of 08?" Mr Leonhardt can reply, "I shoveled shyte for the NYT."

One can only wonder if Mr Leonhardt doesn't live in Wonderland with his inference that Bernanke intended for the 10 year Treasury (long term rates) to rise. When in fact QE2 was supposed to take the 10 year rate from 2.5% to 2%. After that bit of tomfoolery one was tempted to turn the channel to Glen Beck for more credible programming

IRISH  05/02/2011 05:55 PM Report

More comments that are relevant, however the poison and pollution in American politics esp Congress that is owned by FIRE sectors of economy means the inability to govern for the betterment of America. No need for the enemy outside to destroy America, the politics in Congress will do it easily.

charlizecourriers  05/02/2011 03:29 PM Report

More gibberish from that paper which prints "all the news that's fit to tint." I watched the Chairman, too, and find it curious that no one asked the following question: Although you have not used the phrase, quantitative easing, could you talk us though a particular example of your program, with complete specificity, from start to finish?" I challenge the young prize winner to answer that question, since B.S.Bernanke didn't.

REMant  05/02/2011 12:38 PM Report

I think the Pulitzer committee must be running out of newspaperpersons to give this prize to, particularly those at big urban newspapers, almost all of which it seem alike these days. He's a Keynesian true believer it seems, like Ezra Klein, whom I expect is next in line for commendation. His understanding of the Depression and the gold standard tho is astonishingly stupid. And surely he knows what recovery we've had is mostly due to govt and Fed transfers, downsizing and consolidation, plus investments overseas. I'm sure Bernanke does, whatever he says publicly. He's lowered his estimate for 2011 growth and employment, hinted that the Fed would not pump more money into the economy after June, and called on the government to tackle the country's debt. But I think everyone has concluded that while he used the word a lot the chairman doesn't fully recognize the inflation bomb he's created, which is only starting to make itself known, and will get much worse as economies overseas exclude us from their concerns. What do they think is increasing fuel, food and commodity prices? These things are not merely "headlines," they are "core."

Finagling inflation measurements is analogous to neglecting that if you maintain price stability you must be increasing inflation, since prices would otherwise go down with increased productivity or up with decreased productivity. What is considered "core" is only a measurement of monetary factors not real costs. The Fed plays around with money, but it has no relation to reality. And there is no point to measuring these things unless you are trying to run a command economy, and let's face it, that's what Keynesians are up to. But so are economists generally. They talk a lot about not being normative, but that's in fact about all they do.

Yes, the dollar is overvalued, but how do we reduce it? By printing more, or by lowering our wages and prices? You have to separate the value of the dollar from the price of the dollar. We can't print more and at the same time expect its purchasing power to remain the same unless the product or its production improves. This has happened to this point only because as the world economy has shrunk speculators have bought bonds, not, however, as is often supposed, driving the price of them down, but propping them up.

Like the trade situation with China, if the rest of the world dumps us our goose is cooked, but if they do not, they will surely slowly suffocate. I note that Buffett is over in India buying up things. But we can certainly not expect them, as has been argued by the admin, to lead us out of this depression.

At the same time Keynesians believe we can consume our way to success, and that debts either don't matter or are good, it being MONEY and, in a mercantilist way, a sign of wealth. But I shouldn't suppose they think a wheelbarrow of 1923 Reichmarks a sign of riches.

To the extent that leaving the gold standard in 1933 worked, it did so through depreciation - paying down monetary debt so to speak - not because it pulled cash like rabbits from a hat. The problem was not with having a gold standard, but in not using gold itself, and failing to appropriately adjust currencies, notably the pound sterling, to it. The 1929 Crash and Depression was sparked precisely because the UK tried to rejoin the gold standard before it was legitimately able to do so and the US supported them in that.

We are going, one way or the other, to have deflation, like it or not, but I would not expect to see any kind of real recovery until that happens, and the longer we try to hold out for better terms, like the UK back then, the worse off we will be. The issue here is really a struggle between two conceptions of economic and social organization, the one akin to a pyramid scheme always running into "liquidity traps" and then trying desperately to either inflate itself out of them, and/or by directing production, and the other relying on and not getting ahead of the ability of autonomous individuals to get the job done. The one assuming that ppl being so innately greedy or puritanical they can't discover their true self-interest and the other that it will not help to baby, bribe or police them. We have had crises of the former sort on avg of every ten years since banking began in this country, and it seems no one has learned anything from it. The reason why we are in the fix we are today is not because someone slashed taxes, but because profligate credit polices have slashed taxpayer incomes. There are far too many on both sides of the Congressional aisles, who are longing to get back to business as usual. But I suspect when inflation starts to get out of hand, we will start hearing from them pleas for price control.

IMHO Mr Leonhardt and these other media sages need to take some time off and go back to school (and not Princeton). He might start by reading Henry Hazlitt's 1953 classic The Failure of the New Economics.

Speaking of Princeton and the NYT, I ran across this on Wikipedia the other day: "In 1994, noted economist Paul Krugman published an article attacking the idea of an 'Asian economic miracle.' He argued that East Asia's economic growth had historically been the result of increasing capital investment. However, total factor productivity had increased only marginally or not at all. Krugman argued that only growth in total factor productivity, and not capital investment, could lead to long-term prosperity. Krugman's views would be seen by many as prescient after the financial crisis had become apparent, though he himself stated that he had not predicted the crisis nor foreseen its depth." He should have, of course, and likely the same applies to China.