RobertoG

Many other economists agree. Those that disagree should explain the last 30 years of Japan to all of us.

If after a pandemic, an energetic crisis, a global politic crisis and a war in Europe, the explanation for inflation is "public debt", maybe there is some bias there to be examined.

-Public subsidies come from public expenses. If you are already importing more than exporting, you will have a public deficit. Public deficit are not allowed beyond a limit. So, if you are already a successful export economy, you have the resources to invest, otherwise you don't.

-It's a common market, so not import taxes are allowed. That means that any new industry will have to compete with developed companies already established.

-Public companies are encourage to be privatized, so, you can't keep an industrial base that it's not, for now, competitive.

-The result is desindustrialization. Then those desindustrialized countries are accused of not being competitive.

-In some cases, at the European level they realize that they are losing the strategic edge to other blocks, and some kind of program at the federal level is created. Like the current thing with the chips. Of course this programs never will result of giving the edge to one of the PIGS.

The idea that the ECB is apolitical is similar to the idea that economics is apolitical, a fantasy created to avoid answer to the public.

There are little things more political than economics and money.

You are probably right that there is not malice on the part of the OP, but the original intention was clearly derogatory. If you believe otherwise I have bridge to sell you.

What Germany could have done is to accept a change in the treaties for a real fiscal capacity at the European level.

But, instead of that, Germany preferred to enjoy access to a common market and devaluated Mark (that is basically what the Euro is) while pontificating from a high horse.

Instead of a functional monetary union we get this mess. And now we all have to be solidary with Germany energy problems. We will see.

Some obvious (or should be obvious) realities of our beloved currency area:

-All countries can't be net exporters at the same time. If Germany want to be a net exporter, somebody have to be a net importer.

-High public debt in your own currency supported by your central bank it's not problematic. High private debt is very problematic.

-For the same import/export ratio, if you reduce public expenditure, or the GDP will fall, or the private debt will grow. That's mathematics.

-The current agreements of the Euro-Area forbid investment in industrial policies. If Spain wanted to spend money in creating some kind of industry that compete with Germany and protect it until is competitive, it would not be allow to do that.

-Government spending in Spain could be better (if it was allowed, that it's not), but it's better than nothing, at least that you want the economy to collapse after a high grow of private debt.

-The program of support of the PIGS(1) public debt of the ECB is not to help the PIGS, is for protecting the Euro. The moment they stop doing it, the Euro is done. That's how well this currency union was designed, that if follows its rules it disintegrate.

(1) -By the way, it seems that we can call 120 million person PIGS and nobody think is a bad thing.

Are you comparing the utility of elevators to the utility of private jets?

It has been done in the past and can be done in the future. If we can't even do something like that forget about other changes. And I'm not talking about nuclear.

In fact, if your goal is really only defend your territory, you could keep nuclear and downsize all those war airplanes and tanks burning oil, and you would not be worse for it.

When I say the military, I mean, all the military, that's the minimum we the citizens of the world should be requesting.

Anyway, if you are talking about the USA military budget, that's just nonsense. Just check the numbers.

Before asking people in developing countries not to have a proper house, we could try to forbid private planes and reduce military spending by half, for instance.

The military use of fuels is just ridiculous. If we are not able to stop "small" and superfluous things like that, then, simply there is not hope.

Technology means power and power is never apolitical.

Thanks for the link. That video is crazy to me.

All that people waiting for hours in huge pickups, with the motor on, in order to put their huge boats in the water, while complaining how the water just go down and down every year. There is a metaphor there somewhere. I get some Rapa Nui vibes.

There is also immersion cooling. The liquid is not water and it seems is pretty efficient:

https://submer.com/immersion-cooling/

Better today that they were in Precolonial South-America and better that they were in Europe at the time.

Ironically, part of that gold came from Spain. History is complicated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_gold_(Spain)

In that case your conclusion shouldn't be that civilizations are only biological. Your conclusion should be: because we have not observed life outside Earth, the more likely thing is that there is not life outside Earth, not that it's biologic.

But I think that you are using correctly your likelihoods but forgetting your priors. The prior in this case is: there is no reason that we know for this not to happen, so, it has to be happening somewhere.

Markets are not oriented around innovation but around profit.

Innovation can eventually be produced, but it's an accidental sub-product. Innovation it's not the metric that markets are optimizing.

That's true, but it seems to me that, in many circumstances, people are using a truck when all they need is a wheelbarrow.

That's not what MMT says. It says that excessive spending in the economy can create inflation. A possible way to compensate (not the only one) is to raise taxes.

But it doesn't say that the only cause of inflation is excessive spending. That idea is a monetarist fantasy, who are able to keep saying that even in the middle of a pandemic, with a logistic collapse, an energy crisis and a major war. Still, they think that everything will be OK raising interest rates and taxes.

Totally crazy. I'm curious to see what they will say if we see something a lot worse, deflation, in the next years.

Well, if we know exactly how the war would go without the external support, now with all that external support, should be a walk in the park.

Putin mistake was not in his understanding of the capabilities of the Russian military, but in the reaction to expect to the invasion from the Ukraine and NATO leaders.

Not a fan of the CIA, but, in the Iraq case, the push for the invasion came from some elements in the White House (you know who), they have already decided that Iraq would be invaded and were searching for a reason. In fact, the CIA didn't lie to the White House.

"The report is rife with what now are obvious red flags that the Bush White House oversold the case for war. It asserts that Iraq had an active chemical weapons program at one point, though it admits that the CIA had found no evidence of the program’s continuation."

From:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/03/cia-iraq-bush-w...

But Russia has not mobilized. That's why they keep calling this clusterf*ck a 'special operation'. In fact, I don't know the exact numbers, but my impression is that they have less troops than the defenders in Ukraine.

And your comparative is kind of unfair. I mean, the war is kind of stuck, with all the support from NATO. Imagine how it would go without external support.

It really bothers me being "that guy", because I have not special love for Putin and its band of kleptocrats, but come on, let's have a little of critical thinking. Or do you think that the USA support of Ukraine is for "defending freedom"?

a) Well, now that we have realized the truth, I'm sure everybody is going to be on board with reducing the NATO military budgets and dedicating the resources to more productive endeavors.

b) No doubt about that, starting by invading.

c) I'm not sure about the manpower advantage. What are the numbers? And Ukraine is fighting in its own territory with unlimited intelligence and supply support from the richest countries in the world. We shouldn't forget about that.

20 years ago you would have understood! ;-)

I'm not expert but I, more or less, follow the war (from my comfortable sofa) and I would like to point some observations.

-We see a lot of Russian bad decisions and result of that decisions but never Ukrainian. That should you make you stop and think.

-If you look only to the maps, and not the news, it's not obvious that the war is going so well for Ukraine, despise they have logistic and intelligence support from NATO.

I could be wrong, but that makes me think that we are the target of a marketing operation.

Actually, I'm not sure I understand exactly the rational here. How this avoid child abuse?

People always talk about debts GDP ratio and forget to tell in what currency the debt is.

It's, obviously, not the same, a debt in your own currency that in a currency that you don't control.

A country that is taking debt in a currency that they don't control is, almost always, searching for trouble.

This company is trying to do that:

https://www.kreiosspace.com/

I think that's the case too for 'The Expanse'. It seems it followed the path role game -> books -> tv show.

At the moment of watching the show I didn't realized but, after learning the fact, it was obvious that I had been watching a role campaign.