Charlie Rose

finalfantasytown  12/26/2012 11:56 PM Report

It is the time to start talking about the great war. the cause

NeilMacCallister  12/24/2012 05:40 AM Report

At night, Barack and all other GOVERNMENT WORKERS sleep in silk sheets.

The rest of the time, Barack's supporters wear their sheets over their heads.

Gelles  12/21/2012 11:11 PM Report

On December 18th and 19th, Charley Rose interviewed Ken Rogoff and UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne on "austerity" versus "stimulus".

Most Americans reject any rule of thumb that holds an administration responsible for high unemployment and relatively low wages, both accompanied by a form of capitalism that screws over the working class and the poor.

In America this past November, voters knew and sensed that Romney would screw the working class, the middle class and the poor, even worse than they were being screwed by events that seemed to follow no agenda at all.

From the interviews, it seems to me, Rose, Osborne and Rogoff were baffled by events following the Lehman bankruptcy--but they assured us there was no magic bullet for rapid recovery, and, there was nothing else that they could offer as a cure of whatever ails us.

I say they are mistaken. Complexity and multi-factor causative patterns are in evidence.

..... But the sure cure for deficits in supply (in comparison with need,) and in consumption (in comparison with supply,) -- is for the Federal Government to SPEND money in anticipation of success.

..... SPEND it, as we develop an equivalent to a department of education and labor (combined as one department). That department will achieve productivity gains as the way to prevent hyper-inflation before it starts.

REMant  12/20/2012 01:12 PM Report

The credit agencies, as Fitch illustrated yesterday when it threatened a US credit downgrade if sequestration were allowed to take effect, don't seem to care or understand there's a big difference between paying debts, and attempting to inflate or "voodoo" them away. Demand comes from supply, not supply from demand, if for no other reason than because you have to know how to supply that demand if it is to be satisfied. A kid who cries is not necessarily going to find sustenance. And there's no hocus-pocus that makes printing money (and that IS what we are talking about now) any more efficacious. Any real value money has comes from its having first been earned.

The increasing productivity of emerging nations exerts downward pressure on prices, and hence on wages, which means in turn that debts are not going to repaid at more they are now worth, nor should they be. We have to face that, and it will certainly do no good to add further pressure by reducing savings, investment and productive incentive as a result of depreciating the currency, even in a specious attempt to stabilize things.

It's instructive that it's the proto-fascists who are pushing for this again now. Shinzo Abe, from the party which had until 3 yrs ago governed Japan for 50 yrs, has also been saber-rattling, while Berlusconi is denouncing "austerity."

As I've argued, the tendency of easy money is to value ownership over labor, and thus transform property into service in a scramble for status, and individualism into some variety of collectivism. Soon it is discovered that the military is the best place to spend the money, and then the necessity of using it to plunder others. We saw all this play out 75 yrs ago, and probably also in the run up to WWI, when a lot of the monetary dilution came from increasing supplies of gold. (It's a good hypothesis anyway.) If we really are interested in promoting internationalism (as FDR called it) then we have to accept the fact that living standards around the world are going to equalize and stop patronizing and exploiting others.

Yesterday, also, the president declared we owe it to Newtown's dead children to avoid the fiscal cliff, which I found strange considering he would otherwise have been asking them to pay for it. Even Fala would have resented that.

But I notice that Gallup has found the happiest ppl in places like Panama, Paraguay, El Salvador, Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, Thailand, Guatemala, the Philippines, Ecuador, and Costa Rica, with those in Singapore among the least, so maybe we're going about this pursuit of happiness business in entirely the wrong way.