Political Economy

Video embedded below. See also Democratic Rep. DeFazio Calls for Geithner and Summers to Be Fired - Yves Smith

This is a crucial question because Devon Energy, the Oklahoma-based independent oil and natural gas producer has just decided to put billion of dollars in Deep sea Gulf of Mexico assets on the market. Canada’s National Post reported:…

Max Keiser certainly has a way with words. In one of his latest TV appearances, using the colorful analogy of “Warren Buffett’s toilet paper,” he calls the U.S. dollar worthless. He goes on to say that China is addicted to this worthless…

On the eve of U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to China, a major Chinese official has criticized U.S. monetary policy in unusually harsh language. Liu Mingkang, China Banking Regulatory Commission chairman said the zero interest rate…

Hong Kong’s leader Donald Tsang has come out with a scathing criticism of U.S. monetary policy, comparing it to Japan’s which he believes contributed to 1997’s Asian crisis. This is the most direct and strident criticism of the U.S. Federal…

Is it just me or did Secretary Geithner just talk out of other side of his mouth? Today he wrote an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal with two Asian leaders to mark a big meeting of APEC (Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation) in Singapore.…

L. Randall Wray has a post up at New Deal 2.0 which puts forward an idea which is pretty innovative. I would label it a private sector replacement for unemployment insurance. It’s the kind of thinking that might bring Obama out of a policy…

You could see this one coming given the humiliating circumstances under which the German Chancellor learned that GM was pulling out of the Magna deal. The BBC is now reporting that Germany will give General Motors no aid to restructure…

Tim Geithner has issued a Code Red on the U.S. dollar, but he doesn’t think Americans can handle it. I believe deeply that it’s very important to the United States, to the economic health of the United States, that we maintain a strong…

You have probably heard the term money illusion.  I want to coin a related new term called unemployment rate illusion because I think it is significant in light of some of the things David Rosenberg said earlier today about the…