The World Socialist Web Site has the article Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara makes a fool of himself.

While proclaiming his support for the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, Sunkara also declares that he will back Elizabeth Warren if she beats out Sanders and Joe Biden if he is eventually the Democratic Party nominee.

Well, that sure puts a damper on my reading Sunkara’s latest book. After I finish the book, I’ll have to come back and contemplate these remarks.

It’s a good thing I didn’t know of this view of Biden by Sankara or I might have foregone reading the book. Maybe, after I finish the book, I will conclude that it was a waste of time. Yet, I did learn a few things that I had not known before even if I completely write off any conclusions he may come to.

RT has the article ETF whale: Bank of Japan (E1391).

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max and Stacy discuss the fact that the Bank of Japan now owns 73 percent of the country’s ETF market, and how this creates some relative winners at the expense of the growing pile of global “deplorables.” They also discuss the spread of negative rates to mortgage bonds, and how Trump’s Huawei ban may harm rural cellphone users. In the second half, Max interviews Randy Voller, a former Bernie delegate and former head of the Democratic party in North Carolina, about the entry of Joe Biden into the 2020 race for the Democratic nomination.

This is one of those Keiser report episodes where it is hard to figure out where the insights stop and the craziness begins. The insights are in the facts they quote, presuming that those are actual facts. What those facts mean as a prediction of events has the parts that may contain some craziness.

RT has the story Russia-China real gold standard means end of US dollar dominance.

The BRICS are considering an internal gold trading platform, according to Russian officials. When this happens, the global economy will be significantly reshaped, and the West will lose dominance, predicts a precious metal expert.

When I hear predictions like this in the USA oligarchs’ news media from “precious metal experts”, I am always skeptical. I suspect that they are heavily invested in precious metals, and they want to pump up the prices. RT may have different motivations for taking this line.

I post this because I cannot be absolutely sure that none of this will come true. I wonder if this will eventually undermine the policy prescriptions from Modern Money Theory. MMT has the phrase, “The USA government will always have the money to buy whatever is for sale in USA dollars.” They tend to ignore and most MMT devotees tend to ignore what happens when there is very little that is for sale in USA dollars. Such an outcome was hard to imagine until Donald Trump came to office.