A serial accumulation of memory, incident, consideration, reconsideration, personal discovery and attempts at truth.
It is intended for my attention and that of other interested persons
If that changes, I will extensively re-edit.
Warning:
I attempt to use inductive logic.
The National Labor Relations Board overturned a 2007 decision
prohibiting employees from using company email to engage in union
organizing on their own time.
After killings in New York, Ferguson, Mo., and Cleveland, some
analysts say a broad shift in training is needed, along with changes in
officers’ behavior and attitudes.
Police; Police Brutality, Misconduct and Shootings; Blacks; Racial
Profiling; Race and Ethnicity; Demonstrations, Protests and Riots;
Minorities
A Berlin-based friend of Liu Xiaobo, who is serving an 11-year
sentence in Beijing, said he had a received a message from him through
contacts in China.
Political Prisoners
The Chinese are working on their governance problem.
Conference W-L - conference win-loss record Conference Pct - conference winning percentage Conference Hm - conference home record Conference Rd - conference away record Conference Nt - conference neutral site record
Overall W-L - overall win-loss record Overall Pct - overall winning percentage Overall Hm - overall home record Overall Rd - overall road record Overall Nt - overall neutral site record vs Top 25 - record vs. Top 25 teams
We are now
in our seventh year at the zero lower bound. Over that period we’ve seen
massive deficits rise and fall, aggressive monetary expansion and
ill-advised monetary tightening, extreme fiscal austerity, and more. At
this point we should therefore have a pretty good idea of how things
work in this environment. And as I’ve often pointed out, everything has
been more or less exactly what you would have expected from IS-LM (with
the central bank controlling the monetary base, but not the endogenous
money supply).
It’s remarkable, then,
how much commentary in the media involves assertions that are
completely at odds with everything we’ve seen since the financial
crisis. I made fun
of belief in invisible bond vigilantes and the confidence fairy in
mid-2010, and sure enough, there have been no sightings of either in all
the years since. Yet you’d never know that from the media commentary.
Simon Wren-Lewis
offers a depressing example: he finds Robert Peston of the BBC
continuing to talk about interest rates by invoking the invisible bond
vigilantes – when as Wren-Lewis notes, France now pays much lower
interest rates on its debt than the UK, and as he doesn’t note, so does
Japan, with its very large debt and aging population. Worse still,
however, Peston describes his fantasies – OK, I guess you could call
them “speculations”, but anyway there is no evidence that they are
driven by anything outside his own imagination – as the message being
conveyed by “Mr. Market.” Through telepathy?
But belief in the
invisible bond vigilantes and the confidence fairy isn’t the only faith
that seems oddly impervious to evidence. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in an otherwise coherent description
of Europe’s deflation risk, approvingly quotes Tim Congdon blithely
declaring that monetary reflation in a liquidity trap is no problem:
The
interest rate is totally irrelevant. What matters is the quantity of
money. Large scale money creation is a very powerful weapon and can
always create inflation.
Sure. Just look, in
the accompanying chart, at the rate of M1 growth in the US versus the
Fed’s preferred measure of inflation. Feel the power! Seriously, how can
an alleged expert be talking straight monetarism at this point in
history?
You have to wonder,
where does conventional wisdom about how the economy works come from?
Not from economic models, which actually don’t lead to the popular
stories about bond vigilantes and confidence fairies, or say that the
money supply is decisive when you’re at the zero lower bound. Not from
experience, which has been utterly at odds with “mediamacro” for years.
Apparently it comes from the gut – or maybe from some other anatomical
feature in the same general vicinity. And then these gut feelings are
reported as facts."
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