New Economic Perspectives has the William K. Black article Modern Monetary Theory is On the March. Here is an excerpt Black quotes from a Wall Street Journal article.

In theory, high debt levels should cause interest rates to rise. That’s because investors will demand higher returns to compensate for the risk they take on when the government borrows at unsustainable levels or because they worry that so much debt could trigger inflation. The need to finance such high levels of debt also makes less money available for other investments.

In practice, investors are happy to keep lending to the U.S. in good times and bad, regardless of how much it borrows. In 2009, for instance, when the Obama administration’s stimulus efforts sent federal deficits rising to almost 10% of GDP, the highest since World War II, the interest on 10-year Treasury securities remained below where it had been before the recession.

Something that a colleague where I used to work would frequently say:

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice they are not.

He denies coining that aphorism, but I like it no matter who coined it. Some people have to learn that when theory does not match practice, they have to give up on the theory, not the practice.

YouTube has the video Leonard Cohen – Anthem.

YouTube has the video I’m Running For President.

Sen. Bernie Sanders announced he is running for president of the United States and called on Americans from all over the nation to join him in building a massive grassroots movement to win the Democratic primary, defeat Donald Trump, and enact an agenda that serves all people, not just the wealthy few.

Here is a 13 minute interview and article on Vermont Public Radio – He’s In For 2020: Bernie Sanders Is Running For President Again .

Unfortunately there is nothing in the printed article that I find worthy of excerpting here. The audio of the interview is much better.

Wired has the article Hacker Lexicon: What Is Credential Stuffing?

The strategy is pretty straightforward. Attackers take a massive trove of usernames and passwords (often from a corporate megabreach) and try to “stuff” those credentials into the login page of other digital services. Because people often reuse the same username and password across multiple sites, attackers can often use one piece of credential info to unlock multiple accounts.

The article has some suggestions on how to protect yourself. Never using the same password for two different applications is one suggestion I have been doing for years. I have not been taking advantage of two-factor authentication, which I will have to incorporate into my procedures. I also do not change my passwords on a regular basis. That one is going to be harder to figure out.

One thing I have seen lately is blackmail emails about having discovered one of my passwords. The blackmailer has discovered a password that I have used. I checked my password manager to find any accounts that used that password. Any such accounts that had that password were changed to a unique strong password, different for each account. The blackmailer keeps threatening to make use of that password, but since I no longer use it, I have not given the blackmailer any indication that I have read the blackmail emails.

Market Watch has the article Berkshire’s Charlie Munger has a very blunt response to those ‘driving rich people away’ as Amazon scraps HQ2.

Driving the rich people out is pretty dumb if you are a state or a city.
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The idea that beautiful real estate in Connecticut, down 50% in value, They’ve driven out all the rich people.

The second part of the excerpt helps us understand what Munger means.

In his book J is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception, Michael Hudson is frequently decrying “asset-price inflation” such as real-estate. I can’t find a succinct quote that explains what he is talking about, so I will try with the following excerpt. I’ll see if I can briefly explain the importance of this.

The Distortions of today’s statistical categories

These statistics do not reflect the major way in which the largest sectors – real estate, mining and fuel, banking and finance – take their economic returns. They seem to operate without reporting a profit, but their capital gains are not traced. Despite the fact that real estate and stock-market prices gains have become the way in which most homeowners, investors, and the One Percent have built up their wealth, this distinguishing financial phenomenon of the present era – asset-price inflation – does not appear in NIPA [National Income and Product Accounts] or anywhere else. “Capital” gains are excluded as being “external” to the post-classical model of how the economy works. There is nothing akin to Mill’s concept of landlords or other rentiers making land-price gains “in their sleep”.
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Instead of viewing the economy as multi-layered, the NIPA group “households”, from wage earners to rentiers, from the One Percent to the 99 Percent. Increased income for anyone is supposed [to] make everyone else better off, because “the market” or GDP expands, and all other variables are plugged into it – as if it does not seem to matter for whom this wealth accrues, or whether they get it by rent extraction, financial gains, wages[,] or profits on new direct investments. There is no recognition that economies may collapse from enriching financial or other rentier elites at the majority’s expense.

As Hudson points out in many places in his book, the increased asset prices just require the 99% to get larger mortgages. The financial sector reaps higher interest payments from these larger mortgages instead of landlords getting economically justifiable rents at lower asset prices for properties that are rented out rather than owner occupied. These capital gains from rising asset-price inflation can be illusory as the crash of 2008/2009 showed. If you borrowed 95% of the value with a mortgage, you had a good chance of defaulting on that mortgage and losing all of your “capital gains”. You also lost whatever other equity you had in the real-estate.

The drop in value in that Connecticut real-estate that so upset Munger, was like a return to real value that had previously been inflated by having all those rich people living there. I have been tempted to look at real-estate in Connecticut as it seems much cheaper than the real-estate over the border here in Massachusetts. The super-rich just do not understand the 99% the way that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does.

The Real News Network has the two part interview How Haiti’s Spontaneous Uprising is Connected to Venezuelan Solidarity (1/2).

Kim Ives of Haiti Liberté unravels how the new Haitian revolt entangles Duvalier style corruption of money stolen from Venezuela’s PetroCaribe program and subtle US intervention

How Haiti’s Spontaneous Uprising is Connected to Venezuelan Solidarity (2/2).

This lays out how the evil Clintons are up to their necks in this. This also explains why we are so against Venezuela. Since Hillary Clinton was Obama’s Secretary of State, surely he must have known what she was doing in Haiti. This really makes me wonder what Obama was all about.

RT has the interview US ‘Empire of Debt’ will go to war to stop emergence of petro-yuan – Max Keiser.

Countries worldwide are tired of funding the America’s “military adventurism by being a party to the ‘Empire of Debt,’ as it’s known around the world – the US dollar,” and therefore, will likely join the de-dollarization movement, Keiser said.

I think Keiser is correct about most of what he says. I would be very wary of his brief remark about crypto-currency. He seems to be a big fan of crypto-currency erroneously in my opinion. Here is a recent post The Lunacy of Cryptocurrency that is more in line with my thoughts on the subject.

There may be one possibility for crypto-currency that is worth keeping in mind. The proponents of Modern Money Theory state that what gives fiat currency its value is that governments that produce such currencies create demand for them by insisting that taxes can only be paid with that currency. At the moment, crypto-currencies have no similar mechanism to give them value. If, however, some sellers of oil demanded to be paid in a crypto-currency, this could give legitimate value to the chosen crypto-currency.

The dreaded New York Times has the November 2011 article The New Progressive Movement.

I started searching for an article like this when I was thinking about a previous progressive era. A Google search brought me to the following explanation of that progressive era.

Trust busting efforts during the Progressive Era, from around 1900 to 1917, spanned the presidencies of Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson. Antitrust lawsuits were used to break up monopolies and trusts found to be restraining trade and manipulating markets.

For the first time, I started to wonder how we ended up with the 1920s and the great depression if we had this progressive era.

This led me to this Google search where I found the article in The Dreaded New York Times.

The second gilded age was the Roaring Twenties. The pro-business administrations of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover once again opened up the floodgates of corruption and financial excess, this time culminating in the Great Depression.

In this article written by Jeffrey D. Sachs, he proved to be a little less than prophetic.

The young people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have started America on a path to renewal. The movement, still in its first days, will have to expand in several strategic ways.
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Those who think that the cold weather will end the protests should think again. A new generation of leaders is just getting started. The new progressive age has begun.

Though I was a fan of Occupy Wall Street, and participated in some events, I was one of those who knew the cold weather would put an end to it. Of course the reaction of Wall Street was key to crushing the movement, but it was the summer weather that let the movement resist the crush.

Michael Hudson the post Super-Imperialism at the Pentagon on his website. You can read the transcript there, or listen to the audio.

Professor Hudson, in January you warned in Berlin at the Rosa Luxemburg Conference, about the still “dangerous” US financial imperialism. The US uses “financial weapons“, you said. Can you explain that briefly?

After World War II, the US created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund IMF. These instruments were created as essential control mechanisms to control other countries financially. This became particularly apparent after the US abolished its gold-standard in 1971. Since then, the US has always sought to force other states to hold their own currency reserves in US dollars. That means that those governments must then obtain the money through the US Federal Reserve. To make it clear: You buy US government bonds, most central banks do not buy stocks or companies, they buy government bonds. At least that was the case until recently.

They talk about Michael Hudson’s 1968 book, Super-Imperialism : The Economic Strategy of American Empire, which I have not heard about before. However, this interview explains what you need to know.

I am sure I have read his biographical blurb before, but I was reminded of it by what was included with the interview.

Michael Hudson grew up as godson of Leon Trotsky. Today, the marxist US economist is considered a renowned financial expert. The analyzes of the Wall Street connoisseur are correct. Even the Pentagon is interested in his models. “Russia and China challenge nowadays the US financial empire,” he explains in the exclusive Sputnik interview with correspondent Alexander Boos.