Last Friday (October 7), the 82-year old French writer Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature, for what the panel described as an âuncompromisingâ 50-year body of work exploring âa life marked by great disparities regarding gender, language and classâ. A feminist and politically committed writer, Ernaux is the first French woman to win the award.
âFor 50 years, Annie Ernaux has written the novel of the collective and intimate memory of our country. Her voice is the voice of
the freedom of women and forgotten figures of the centuryâ.
Ernaux herself responded to the news by describing writing as a political act, a means of opening our eyes to social inequality. To that end, she uses language like âa knifeâ, to tear apart the veils of imagination. The next day (October 8), she turned that knife on Macron. (...)
isn't there something delightfully ironic about our in-house communist wailing about government intervention and making a desperate plea for a return to a free market?
Sorry, even with an open market, a return to business as usual ain't going happen. Russia breached trust. That's not something you can easily repair.
You are such a high priest of elevated morality.
And your understanding of economics and international relations is pretty damn weak.
What is interesting here in Germany is the pattern of dissension. You get a number of academics and Russian apologists still punching above their weight in public discussion and keep plugging the Kremlin's line, like this plonker. But the real hands-on business people know exactly what the situation is. The loss of Russian and Ukrainian markets has been factored into budgets for the coming year. The more pressing issue is supply chain issues which are hard to predict.
The actual cost of energy OTOH is something you can factor into your pricing. Some succeed better than others. The key point though is that all of these distortions are temporary until the market settles back into place with new parameters. Russia has basically cooked its goose.
Oil & gas dependency on Russia is never going to happen again.
has "tankie" which was originally a tease or mocking pejorative now morphed and crystalized into a badge of honor?
is it being embraced by intellectual western keyboard warriors? apparently so
surely he has reached out to putin and demanded that he cease fire, go home and make reparations to ukraine, no?
will this prompt the world to expedite its transition off of fossil fuels and onto greener sources?
what happens after putin?
will the next person in line reject violence/war for peaceful leadership?
acknowledge human rights and voluntary makets?
i would say yes
isn't there something delightfully ironic about our in-house communist wailing about government intervention and making a desperate plea for a return to a free market?
Sorry, even with an open market, a return to business as usual ain't going happen. Russia breached trust. That's not something you can easily repair.
um, I think you are missing the point. Nobody wants to do business with Russia until they get their shit sorted. It's got nothing to do with whether they are allowed to do business with Russia.
And if you think the sanctions aren't working, then what's your beef?
um, I think you are missing the point. Nobody wants to do business with Russia until they get their shit sorted. It's got nothing to do with whether they are allowed to do business with Russia.
And if you think the sanctions aren't working, then what's your beef?
pfft. we've seen worse. And the lesson? Don't do any business with Russia.
Keep going, Black Knight...
To some extent, the crisis is a blowback from European sanctions that were intended to punish Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine. The pain has undermined confidence at European companies and their ability to plan.
What is interesting here in Germany is the pattern of dissension. You get a number of academics and Russian apologists still punching above their weight in public discussion and keep plugging the Kremlin's line, like this plonker. But the real hands-on business people know exactly what the situation is. The loss of Russian and Ukrainian markets has been factored into budgets for the coming year. The more pressing issue is supply chain issues which are hard to predict.
The actual cost of energy OTOH is something you can factor into your pricing. Some succeed better than others. The key point though is that all of these distortions are temporary until the market settles back into place with new parameters. Russia has basically cooked its goose.
Oil & gas dependency on Russia is never going to happen again.
And the lesson? Don't do any business with Russia.
Keep going, Black Knight...
To some extent, the crisis is a blowback from European sanctions that were intended to punish Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine. The pain has undermined confidence at European companies and their ability to plan. (...)
Eschenbach Porcelain survived Germanyâs transition from communism to capitalism after 1989. But when its energy contracts run out at the end of this year, the company will face annual energy bills of 5.5 million euros, or roughly six times what it is paying now, said Rolf Frowein, its director.â
That would mean we have to more than double our prices, and nobody will pay that for our cups and plates,â he said. Eschenbach, a 130-year-old company in the eastern state of Thuringia, is in talks with local politicians about a potential solution. It is one of dozens of small and midsize firms in Germany fearing they will have to close for good.
Makers of metal, paper, fertilizer and other products that depend on gas and electricity to transform raw materials into products from car doors to cardboard boxes have announced belt-tightening. Half of Europe’s aluminum and zinc production has been taken offline, according to Eurometaux, Europe’s metals trade association.
Among them is Arcelor Mittal, Europe’s largest steel maker, which is idling blast furnaces in Germany. Alcoa, a global aluminum products producer, is cutting a third of production at its smelter in Norway. In the Netherlands, Nyrstar, the world’s biggest zinc producer, is pausing output until further notice.
Even toilet paper is not immune: In Germany, Hakle, one of the largest manufacturers, announced that it had tumbled into insolvency because of a “historic energy crisis.”
pfft. we've seen worse.
And the lesson? Don't do any business with Russia.
Makers of metal, paper, fertilizer and other products that depend on gas and electricity to transform raw materials into products from car doors to cardboard boxes have announced belt-tightening. Half of Europeâs aluminum and zinc production has been taken offline, according to Eurometaux, Europeâs metals trade association.
Among them is Arcelor Mittal, Europeâs largest steel maker, which is idling blast furnaces in Germany. Alcoa, a global aluminum products producer, is cutting a third of production at its smelter in Norway. In the Netherlands, Nyrstar, the worldâs biggest zinc producer, is pausing output until further notice.
Even toilet paper is not immune: In Germany, Hakle, one of the largest manufacturers, announced that it had tumbled into insolvency because of a âhistoric energy crisis.â
You'd think someone that smart wouldn't be so political and only mention one part of the equation that drives up prices.
Inflation often builds up over time, and has diverse and complex reasons behind it.
Some of these are â cheap $ policies (low rates and printing $ or QE); strong demand for goods; rising costs from wars that make commodities more scarce and disrupt supply chains, or simply running out of the commodity (oil); concentration of companies (big getting bigger, Reich's point above); and reversing years of cheap labor, both domestic and international.
It's not hard to see each of these and how the contributed to our current inflation trends, which was exasperated by the pandemic and our response.
Couple of what should be fairly obvious articles on where we are now, and heading. Deglobalism â or more near shoring (not necessarily domestic production of cheap stuff like apparel and footwear) will lead to more spending, but this is the good type of investment needed to ensure a better future. Unfortunately, after decades of cheap labor and capital, the spending could lead to more s-t inflation. This and higher rates, will lead to even more debtâ¦which could strangle our ability to continue to make these needed investments.
Unlike many progressives, I worry a lot about debt. Public debt, private debt, personal debt â I donât like any of it. You could maybe chalk it up to my Midwestern upbringing or being the child of immigrant parents. I like having cash on hand, and have always been willing to pay a return price to hold it. You never know when bad times are coming.
So I was particularly interested in a paper by economists Francesco Bianchi of Johns Hopkins and Leonardo Melosi of the Chicago Fed, that made a huge stir last week in Jackson Hole. The typically low key academic title, âInflation as a Fiscal Limit,â belies the heat that it is generating in academic, policy and even financial media circles. The frightening upshot of the work is that it doesnât matter what the Federal Reserve does right now in terms of hiking rates to try and get inflation under control. If monetary policy isnât accompanied by appropriate fiscal policy (or to be more accurate, a âmutually consistent monetary and fiscal policyâ), then stagflation will be the result.
Once upon a time, many progressives were fiscally conservative. Social democrats in northern Europe have generally been very fiscally conservative. But I support your concerns.
Today's trendy, vain, narcissistic progressives seem totally divorced from the real world. They seem absolutely determined to accelerate the hegemonic decline of the USA. Once again, and contrary to Sachs and others, I am using the term hegemony as a 'good thing'.
As for de-globalization leading to more inflation... that is not necessarily the case. It depends on monetary policy and to some extent fiscal policy AS ALWAYS. Given the across the board, rock solid support for the Federal Reserve's dual mandate, it is reasonable to expect more crack-cocaine like macroeconomic fluctuations.
De-globalization driven by US Neo-Mercantilism will reduce the growth in US per capita income and wealth. Given the ongoing importance of racism in US economic and foreign policy and the propensity of American political leaders (of all stripes) to constantly mislead and lie to their citizens, I see this as inevitable.
The real tragedy is that lying about the China and its policies will not help solve extremely difficult, tough structural economic problems in the USA. It will not help lift poor and low-income Americans out of poverty.
Then there was the President Joe Biden BIG LIE called the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Are Americans that gullible and stupid?
you can create an account and get access to a few free reports each month.
basic premise, we need to be making these critical investments in existing and new infrastructure,
but may be strangled by our massive debt from high discretionary spending and entitlements, in a new era of higher rates.
debt does matter.
