This is a story that should raise an eyebrow or two on every single face in Europe, and beyond. I saw the first bits of it on a Belgian site named Express.be, whose writers in turn had stumbled upon an article in French newspaper Le Figaro, whose writer Jean-Pierre Robin had leafed through a brand new IMF report (yes, there are certain linguistic advantages in being Dutch, Canadian AND Québecois). In the report, the IMF talks about a proposal to
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Howard Hollem Sears Gasoline June 1943 “Virginia Lively, beauty operator, now works at filling station, Louisville, Kentucky” Last week I saw a headline in the Daily Telegraph that got me thinking. It encapsulates a lot of what poses as philosophy in our world today, as a valid way of thinking and a relevant approach to all the crises we live through simultaneously at the moment. One which, when you look longer and closer, appears at least at first glance to
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Dorothea Lange “Georgia road signs” July 1937Sometimes it seems you can never write enough about our various pension plans, and the threats to them. Matt Taibbi’s Looting the Pension Funds brings it all back with a vengeance, the things I’ve written about pensions in the past year, and Nicole’s recent article on Detroit etc. Put together, we get a broader context. Over the past week, I’ve read yet another slew of reports on what’s going wrong with pensions. You can
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I was (and still am) working on a story about – new-found – poverty, but then this morning I saw Matt Taibbi’s latest on the looting of US pension funds, and I find it such an integral part, along with earlier articles I wrote, like The Global Demise of Pension Plans and The Last Remaining Store Of Real Wealth of – upcoming – American poverty and the machinery that fabricates it, that I want to include it. An appetizer from
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John Vachon Pepsi goes to war March 1943 “Montgomery, Alabama. Soft drink truck”Is it merely a coincidence that the troika rode its Trojan horse into Athens again on the very day Angela Merkel went awfully close to an absolute majority in German elections? I’m sure it is. But it’s still very bad news for the Greeks, who now have their perhaps last chance to throw out the international financial system and decide their own fate, before most of their valuables
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If there’s one lesson to be drawn from the Federal Reserve’s non-taper decision yesterday, September 18, it’s that the Fed will continue to ignore the interests of the real economy, even if that’s what’s supposed to be its task and mandate. The Federal Reserve is part of the financial system, and as such it represents the interests of that system, not the people in the street. It will do whatever benefits the former, and whichever choices it makes will always
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Ansel Adams Biology class 1943 Japanese school at Manzanar War Relocation Center, CaliforniaLet’s see if I can keep this nice and short: in my view the article below from Reuters correspondents Yoshifumi Takemoto and Yuko Yoshikawa, while looking innocent enough at first glance, in fact borders on nonsensical disinformation. The background is familiar: Japan has been in deflation for decades, falling prices, falling wages, falling spending (velocity of money). Then recently, Shinzo Abe became PM and started spending big time
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With media and technology becoming faster and more pervasive at a rapid clip, it shouldn’t perhaps be a big surprise to see the ease with which war-mongering news flashes come to dominate the story of the day. But maybe this should be received with an increasing dose of skepticism, maybe we should today, even more than before, try to figure out who benefits from one story dominating all major headlines, as if all other things going on are only of
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Unknown Detroit, Corner of Michigan and Griswold 1920On July 18th, the city of Detroit filed for Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, the largest such filing in US history. After kicking the can down the road, with increasing desperation, for many years, then end of the line has been reached. The city is finally admitting that far too many financial promises have been made, and that the majority of these simply cannot be kept. It does not matter whether the promise-holders have
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We’ve used the analogy before, in particular to describe what happened to the Roman Empire during the latter days of its existence. Looking around various economies in the world today, the same analogy once again comes to mind. One might say that what we see these days is analogous to the more advanced stages of hypothermia. Early hypothermia may show in nothing more than cold feet, in itself an amusing analogy perhaps. But a body that is exposed to extreme
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