Here is the OpEd that The Dreaded New York Times published from Stephanie Kelton – Just Use ‘the Computer’ at the Fed to Give People More Money.

Naked Capitalism has the post Yanis Varoufakis: Why Bitcoin Is Not a Socialist’s Ally – Reply to Ben Arc

In summary, the monetary system is like the dog’s tail. It cannot wag the capitalist dog, in the sense that democratising money by means of a monetary commons will not democratise economic life but, rather, make capitalism uglier, nastier and more dangerous for humanity.

Having said all this, a monetary commons (that may very well rely on something like the blockchain underpinning Bitcoin) will, I have no doubt, be an essential aspect of a democratised economy; of socialism.

The article gives reasons to support the first paragraph quoted above. I have no idea what thinking backs up the second paragraph. For all the problems he raises about Bitcoin, I don’t see how taking control of the money supply out of the hands of government is going to help anything. Yanis needs to explain the automatic stabilizers he envisions for such a system before I can imagine hos such a system would prevent the crises he depicts in his post.

Yahoo! Market Watch has the opinion piece Private-equity crowd wants your 401(k) money — ‘yikes!’,

From the Department of Dangerous Ideas comes the news that your employer may soon offer you the “opportunity” to invest some of your hard-earned money in private equity as well as in the public stock and bond markets.

I read most of this. “yikes!” is the appropriate response. One thing the article didn’t mention in the part that I read is that much of the superior performance is attributable to insider trading which has caused a few hedge fund managers to go to jail. As William Black titled his book, “The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is to Own One“. Just imagine how rich we could all be if we just resorted to robbery.

Every now and then, I need to refresh my memory about what Richard Wolff had to say about the labor theory of value. I have been a little off the mark lately.

Here is another explanation from Richard Wolff.

This makes a nice ending to the trilogy. Wolff’s explanation of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is a bit apocryphal compared to the way Modern Money Theory explains it, so take the point his is trying to make, but the details are somewhat ahistorical. Markets and the division of labor have existed throughout history. They were not invented by capitalists.

I think the USA today is an example of how market pricing misallocates labor in the USA. Too much labor is going into the financialization of our economy instead of productive uses that makes life better for us all. Financialization means making profits from moving money around rather than producing anything that improves people’s lives.

Naked Capitalism has the post Financialization: Tackling the Other Virus.

Financialization has involved reorganizing finance, the economy, and even aspects of society, to enable investors to get more from financial market investments, effectively undermining sustainable growth, full employment and fairer wealth distribution.

Most people seem to have no idea of the pernicious effects of this virus. For years, I have been trying to raise awareness with my blog where you are reading this post now.

Some people don’t know that our former Governor, Mitt Romney, made his fortune as a vulture capitalist, which is my word for some practitioners of financialization. Even our erstwhile former progressive Governor, Deval Patrick, could not resist the lure of vulture capitalism when he left office. Patrick now works for Bain Capital where Mitt Romney made his fortune.

I suspect that former President Barack Obama is making money this way. The fact that Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, refused to prosecute the worst crimes of financialization is now being well rewarded.