Happy Holidays! These links posts go out automatically, so don’t be surprised if one goes out tomorrow or the day after. I won’t be working on the blog though (and so the links will have the annoying tags feature they have in them today). I hope everyone has a festive holiday period and I look forward to blogging and writing the newsletter for you in the coming year. See you next week in semi-vacation mode again.
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Wolfgang Schäuble : Das Comeback des Mannes im Rollstuhl – Wirtschaft – FAZ
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Massenproteste in Moskau: Zehntausende demonstrieren gegen Putin – Ausland – FAZ
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Capital Account interview, December 20th 2011 | Steve Keen’s Debtwatch
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Satyajit Das on What Went Wrong With Finance « naked capitalism
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Juergen Stark admits ECB bond buying forced resignation – Telegraph
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VW to switch off BlackBerry servers outside work hours – Telegraph
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Terminally ill woman to stay in foreclosed home until she dies – Health and medical – sacbee.com
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Apple at the retail crossroads – John Dvorak’s Second Opinion – MarketWatch
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Monetary Theory, Crony Capitalism and the Tea Party – US Business News Blog – CNBC
The past few years have taught us a lot about the effects and operations of monetary policy in the United States.
The Federal government responded to the economic downturn by spending enormous amounts and Federal Reserve responded to the financial crisis with an enormous expansion of its balance sheet — what the proles call “printing money” — and both occurred without any attendant inflation or giant soaring of interest rates.
The so-called “bond vigilantes” turned out to be mythological creatures, at least as far as U.S. federal debt is concerned. Even the crisis over the debt ceiling and the downgrade of the U.S.’s credit rating only lead to lower interest rates.
The school of economics that best explains this phenomenon is called “Modern Monetary Theory” or MMT.
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Boehner Signs On to U.S. Payroll Tax Deal – Bloomberg
Deserted by many of his fellow Republicans, U.S. House Speaker John Boehner surrendered to attacks from President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats and agreed to a two-month extension of a payroll tax cut that he derided hours earlier.
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Euroland euphoria on Mario Draghi bank rescue – Telegraph
Southern Europe’s battered debt markets are basking in a glorious pre-Christmas rally as hedge funds and investors celebrate a blast of cheap liquidity from the European Central Bank.
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Call for QE to stave off euro deflation – FT.com
A top European Central Bank policymaker has called for “quantitative easing” to be used to boost the eurozone economy if deflation risks emerge across the 17-country region.
The comments by Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, ECB executive board member, are the strongest indication yet that the central bank would expand its policy tools to prevent a possible disastrous economic slump in continental Europe.