Najed Capitalism has the article Michael Hudson: The Vocabulary of Economic Deception.

For a long time, I have suspected that rising GDP was no longer a measure of a growing economy. Somehow, the non-productive income being “earned” by the financial sector was getting added to the accounting of GDP. This article is the first time that I have seen an expert confirm my suspicions.

But the rentier classes have taken over the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) to depict their takings as actual production of a service, not as overhead or a transfer payment, that is, not as parasitic extraction of other peoples’ earnings.
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Classical economists would have subtracted this financial rake-off from output, counting it as overhead. After all, it simply adds to the cost of living and doing business. Instead, the most recent statisticians have added this financial income to the Gross National Product instead of subtracting it, as the classical economists would have doneit or simply not counted it, as was the case a generation ago.
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Today’s ‘reformed’ GDP format pretends that the economy has been going up since 2008. A more realistic description would show that it is shrinking for 95 percent of the population, being eaten away by the wealthiest 5% extracting more rentier income and imposing austerity.

As for federal government deficits, Michael Hudson posed the question this way:

The great question is, what is the government going to spend money on, and how can it spend money into the economy in a way that helps growth? Imagine if this trillion dollars a year that’s spent on arms and military – in California and the districts of the key congressmen on the budget committee – were spent on building roads, schools, transportation and subsidizing medical care. The country could become a utopia. Instead, the rentier classes have hijacked the government, taking over its money creation and taxing power to spend on themselves, not to help the economy at large produce more or raise living standards. Special interests have captured the regulatory agencies to make them serve rent extractors, not protect the economy from them.

The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies has the article Post-Growth and MMT.

In an age of endless consumption which keeps the economic wheels turning it is no surprise that our leaders have failed dismally to address adequately the very real and long-term global issues of climate collapse and it has been left for too long on the political backburner. This week GIMMS extends a very warm welcome to Andrea Grainger, our guest MMT Lens author. Andrea takes a look at how modern monetary reality sheds a vital light on how to address the challenges we face to avoid global environmental catastrophe and extinction whilst still meeting human needs and keeping within the resource limitations of our life-giving planet.

If this article is talking about ideas that are farther into the future than you can tolerate, it is OK if you skip over this article. For those of us who like to contemplate what the future might look like after we handle the issues that are troubling us today, this opens up an interesting perspective.

The Kaiser Report broadcast on RT has the episode Canceling debt to avoid economic crisis (E1320).

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max and Stacy discuss David Graeber’s thought piece about the #GiletsJaunes and how the fact that intellectuals have failed to understand it proves we are living in revolutionary times. Graeber notes, as Keiser Report had only last month, that Cantillon effect has created the mass disparity in wealth against which those who must pay for this disparity are rising up. In the second half, Max interviews Dr. Michael Hudson, the author of the new book “… and forgive them their debts”, about the history of debt forgiveness. Hudson explains that the rulers of Byzantium wiped out the savings of rich people by forgiving debts because canceling debts does not cause economic crises but prevents them.

Have our oligarchs convinced you that Russia is evil yet? This episode of the Kaiser report is the most dangerous you can hear. Even RT says they may not agree with it. You may not follow the first half of the report if you haven’t done your own research on the topic. The second half with Michael Hudson lays it out as plainly as you may ever hear it.

December 20, 2018

This episode, Market sell-offs: Fake news or bots to blame? (E1321) includes the second half of the Michael Hudson interview. The interview occurs right after the utterly wacky “commercial” break.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Countering Chinese Accounting Control Fraud and Predation Against U.S. Investors.

What the China Hustle accounting control fraud schemes and the predation schemes described have in common is that neither would be possible if the SEC and either the Bush, Obama, or Trump administration were not so utterly spineless for at least 15 years as to allow the fraud and predation schemes to persist. The Chinese context should have been the easiest context for the U.S. to deny the ability of Chinese corporations to list on the U.S. markets unless the SEC had the power to prevent fraud and contract provisions in the U.S. that China agreed in a binding fashion were enforceable in China. The SEC has not required such a grant of power as a condition of approving Chinese stock listings in the U.S. and has not insisted on enforceable contract terms to prevent predation. The SEC is not even asking for such powers, warning Americans not to invest in Chinese stocks, or seeking to ban such listings.

I commented on the post as follows:

Thanks for the warning. I might have finally decided to invest in Chinese stocks if I hadn’t read this article. What frightens me though, is that I have no assurance that these shenanigans aren’t going on in the highly rated USA companies where I do most of my investing. I try to look at measures to assure myself that I am not investing in companies that are going deep into debt to buy back their own shares to boost the per share earnings and dividends. I’ll only know if I have succeeded when I don’t go broke in the coming market decline.

The Intercept has the article Elizabeth Warren Plan Would Allow the Government to Manufacture Its Own Generic Drugs.

Warren introduced legislation on Tuesday with Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., that would create an Office of Drug Manufacturing within the Department of Health and Human Services. That office would have the authority to manufacture generic versions of any drug for which the U.S. government has licensed a patent, whenever there is little or no competition, critical shortages, or exorbitant prices that restrict patient access.

I don’t get it. Drugs become generic when the patent runs out. This used to be the brake on rising drug prices until the industry figured out they could get away with violating the laws by fixing prices. If we just enforced the laws we already have, life would get back to normal when we used to have a Department of Justice that was not blind to white collar crime at the highest levels.

The concept of “restraint of trade” seems to have let the public conversation, so I looked it up to see if I was dreaming that such a concept ever existed. WikiPedia has a long article on Restraint of Trade. Here is part of what it said with respect to the concept in the USA.

In the US, the first significant discussion occurred in the Sixth Circuit’s opinion by Chief Judge (later US President and still later Supreme Court Chief Justice) William Howard Taft in United States v. Addyston Pipe & Steel Co.[9] Judge Taft explained the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890[10] as a statutory codification of the English common-law doctrine of restraint of trade, as explicated in such cases as Mitchel v Reynolds.[11] The court distinguished between naked restraints of trade and those ancillary to the legitimate main purpose of a lawful contract and reasonably necessary to effectuation of that purpose.[12] An example of the latter would be a non-competition clause associated with the lease or sale of a bakeshop, as in the Mitchel case. Such a contract should be tested by a “rule of reason,” meaning that it should be deemed legitimate if “necessary and ancillary.” An example of the naked type of restraint would be the price-fixing and bid-allocation agreements involved in the Addyston case. Taft said that “we do not think there is any question of reasonableness open to the courts to such a contract.” The Supreme Court affirmed the judgment. During the following century, the Addyston Pipe opinion of Judge Taft has remained foundational in antitrust analysis

There is an entire YouTube channel dedicated to explaining Modern Money Theory.

Modern Monetary Theory is partly a description of how our modern fiat, floating exchange rate currencies actually work, and partly a prescription of what we ought to do with this knowledge. MMT realizes that many of the constraints we place on our money system today as well as many of our models for understanding it are actually holdovers from the era of gold-standards and fixed exchange rates that don’t apply at all today.

Here is the first video in the series.

The Real News Network has the story US Consumer Board Conceals how Wells Fargo Fleeces Students.

The Consumer Financial Protection Board kept a detailed report about how Wells Fargo has long been involved in charging students up to three times more for financial services than other banks do. Why did the CFPB not reveal this? Bill Black explains.

Elizabeth Warren had a good idea with the CFPB, but perhaps she didn’t think of what a President like Trump could do with such an agency. I wonder what she thought Hillary Clinton would do. Bill Clinton was infamous for reducing regulation of the Savings and Loan Banks that were collapsing around his ears.

Word Press has come out with a new editor called Gutenberg. I don’t know to whom it is aimed, but it doesn’t do anything for me, and it takes away the Classic Editor that I used with great ease. In fact I never used the GUI option of the editor. I always used the text editor. The Gutenberg editor also has a text editor (called the code editor) which it completely messes up compared to the old one. The old text editor had a few buttons that gave me the only kind of GUI help that was valuable to me in a text editor.

I constructed this post with the add on that brings back the classic editor. The button that I used was the one that assists in creating links. I used that button to create the link above to the Classic Editor add-on. All that button does is to place the link template around the text you want to turn into a link. Now, I can perfectly well type that template myself, but it is handy to have one button that inserts it. That is my idea of a language sensitive editor, where the language in this case is HTML. In other contexts, I have my own LSE for HTML, C, C++, PERL, Fortran, and perhaps a few other languages that slip my mind at the moment.

Bill Mitchell – Modern Monetary Theory blog has the article When two original MMT developers get together to discuss their work.

Last week, Warren Mosler and I had one of our regular catchups and we discussed at length the state of play in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). We are quite protective of it. We mused about how we started out on this Project and where it has gone. As old stagers do when they get together. We also reflected and compared notes on what the state of MMT is now, given the increasing visibility of the ideas in the mainstream media all around the world and the proliferation of social media activists who have chosen to identify and promote our ideas. There were aspects of that development that we identified as being of concern for us and other aspects which we considered to be a cause for optimism (celebration is too strong a word). We thought it would be a good idea to take a breath and document what we considered to be the essence of MMT – as a sort of checklist for people who want a fairly precise account of the body of work. I agreed to write this document after input from Warren. So, this is what we mean by MMT. What follows is my account of our conversation expanded to add meaning where required.

This article clarifies the actual meaning of Moden Money Theory. I haven’t read it all yet.

Evonomics has the article How Bronze Age Rulers Simply Canceled Debts.

A nice summary by Michael Hudson of his book “…and Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year” In the article, he talks about how these ideas might apply in modern times.

My book “And forgive them their debts”: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year  is about the origins of economic organization and enterprise in the Bronze Age, and how it shaped the Bible. It’s not about modern economies. But the problem is – as the reviewer mentioned – that the Bronze Age and early Western civilization was shaped so differently from what we think of as logical and normal, that one almost has to rewire one’s brain to see how differently the archaic view of economic survival and enterprise was.