News Links 01/24/2012
- David Cameron, the new Edward Heath? | Business | The Guardian
The coalition prime minister’s austerity programme is taking us back to 1970s Britain, a time of slow growth, rising unemployment and soaring bankruptcies, writes Larry Elliott
- IMF chief unveils euro plan and warns of ‘1930s moment’ – Telegraph
IMF head Christine Lagarde set out Monday a raft of proposals to fight the eurozone crisis, including a bigger rescue fund, lower ECB rates and eurobonds as she warned of dimmer world growth prospects.
- Spanish central bank warns of double dip recession – Telegraph
The Spanish economy shrank by 0.3pc in the fourth quarter of 2011, the country’s central bank said, reflecting falling domestic demand and slowing exports.
- Days of Easy Money Are Over for Fund Managers: Alice Schroeder – Bloomberg
after a couple of decades in which asset managers floated along in ease and splendor, economics is now grinding down the business. The easy money is going away. Investment management is in the early stages of a historic transformation. Like most tectonic shifts, it probably will take years to fully develop.
- Joe Paterno, Fallen Penn State Coaching Legend, Dies of Lung Cancer at 85 – Bloomberg
Joe Paterno died of lung cancer surrounded by family members yesterday, just over two months after he was fired as Pennsylvania State University’s football coach, ending a record-setting 46-year run in which he collected 409 wins and two national championships. He was 85.
- Stop Internet Censorship
What these bills actually do is force website owners to police the internet; create entry barriers to the only relatively free and open medium of communication; and threaten to break the technological structure of the internet itself. They also violate our 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech and our 4th Amendment freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.
I found it hard to get passed the “Condition one is met” nonsense in the Elliot Article.
Here’s the Kahn Academy on SOPA/PIPA https://youtu.be/tzqMoOk9NWc (ht Wenzel)
The UK economy was growing slowly at the time of the election. It was not a strong recovery. So condition one was met. What the masses forget was that right up to the crisis the Conservatives were signed up to Labours spending program for the next three years. So hardly a sign of excessive profligacy. It also does not explain the crisis in Ireland where they had a small government surplus and low debt prior to the crisis, and are now on the verge of bankruptcy, facing a further IMF bailout next year, as well as decades of stagnation. The well qualified young have left en masse. On a scale unheard of since the potato famine.
I don’t consider that growth real, it was based on unsustainable debt growth as was much of the past decade.
To clarify, (have to be short, on phone) both the UK and Ireland are reaping the effects of massive private sector debt based mal investment. Brown’s “frugality” is only real of you consider the growth and tax take on that mal investment real. I don’t.
Yes it was all a bubble but no one complained. I could see that it was a spectacular bubble and that the level of debts were excessive but few economists criticised it. Mainstream economists failed to see this. They still fail to realise that the economy cannot be maintained by inflating debt bubbles.