The other day I stumbled upon an image that got me thinking. I’m still thinking. And I doubt I’ll be done anytime soon. So perhaps it’s a good idea to simply share both the image and my thoughts, and invite you to share what you think, and see where we get. I found it on the site of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education, where it’s part of an ‘exhibit’ of US Government – Office
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Both Japan and China have poured huge amounts of stimulus into their banking systems lately (yeah, sort of like the US). What they have to show for it is the – fully predictable – disaster of the born of despair, three arrowed Abenomics (fiscal stimulus, monetary easing and structural reforms) in Japan and a Chinese financial system that grew from $10 trillion to $24 trillion in just 5 years. Enter the Piper, stage left. Japan’s current account deficit widened to
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Forests and trees. We live in a world built on such an overkill of 24/7 propaganda and misinformation that some of it easily slips by. At that point you need to rely on the little man inside to raise a warning sign. That’s about how I felt when I read yesterday about EU plans to deliver gas to Ukraine by reversing the flow through existing pipelines. That made me wonder things like: ‘How would that work in practice?’ and: ‘Which
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175,000 new jobs (we await revisions) and a rising unemployment rate (6.7%). Which was not due to people re-entering the labor force, as has been suggested, since the labor force participation rate remained stuck at 63%. This hasn’t been going anywhere for years now, it’s all stuck around 150,000 or so – the running to stand still level – , sometimes up, sometimes down, with lots of revisions. It should worry the pants off of America, but stock markets set
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Crimea just declared itself part of Russia. Well, its government did. What the status is of that government is unclear, but then that’s also true for the Ukrainian government, which the west is all too eager to declare the one and only. Perhaps the first thing to do for the US and EU is to sit down with Russia and agree on the legal standing of the Kiev government, since without any such agreement no progress can be achieved. They’d
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The drivel that lies like a blanket over our societies still directs traffic, markets, news and the weather. If we have to believe CNN and BBC, “we” have forced Putin into some sort of moral submission (or whatever you’d call it), making him feel obliged to sit his ass down at the high diplomacy effort tables we want him seated at. The US, looking as powerful as a brainless haircut can, considers severe sanctions, say the “reporters”, and when Russia
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Arguably, the US lost its first PR war over Vietnam. When its young and hopeful started dying on live TV, it was over. Never again, swore spin doctors on all sides of Capitol Hill. Over the past 40-odd years, PR and spin techniques have been substantially refined, and the media – both written and TV -, hard as it may have seemed at the time, have moved much closer to the government’s PR interests. So much so that one can
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John Kerry made me laugh yesterday. Not that he seems to be a very amusing man, but then I don’t think he was looking to entertain. And there’s not a lot of funny material to be found in the Ukraine situation to begin with, obviously. But John still found an angle. Kerry, in his quest to appear muscular in his use of language and make Russia look like a nation filled with demons, said this on Sunday’s Face The Nation:
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There’s never just one side to any story. The eastern – largely ethnic Russian – past of Ukraine has been saying for a while that it feared being overrun by “hordes” of their western compatriots, who ousted Yanukovych and want to move closer to Europe. This morning the Russian Foreign Ministry stated that “Armed men dispatched from Kiev to the southern Ukrainian region of Crimea attempted an overnight storm of the local Interior Ministry”. Whether such a move, assuming there’s
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Well, at least these times are not dull. Normally, we would be looking with wary eyes at record unemployment in Italy, deflation in Spain and plummeting French consumer spending. Or at big, smart, institutional money leaving the US housing market. None of these are small matters by themselves, but they are dwarfed by the groups of as yet mysterious militia, mercenaries, whatever they may be, I used the term guerrillas yesterday, that would do, who have taken hold of, first,
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