The Financial Times has the article Why bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme

A Ponzi scheme is a zero-sum enterprise. But bitcoin is a negative-sum phenomenon that you can’t even pursue a claim against, argues Robert McCauley.

This is an even stronger opinion on Bitcoin than I have been saying myself.

The greater fool theory of “investing” certainly applies to Bitcoin. The idea is that when you want to cash out, there will always be a greater fool than you were who will buy your bitcoins at a price higher than what you paid.

It is amazing how some notable people cannot figure this out.Here is Glenn Greenwald as an example.

Rokfin has the video Syria is NOT a ‘police state’ and Chomsky’s health fascism.

Robert Reich has the post Psst: You want to know the truth about inflation? (It’s not what the Fed thinks it is.)

In sum, inflation isn’t driving these price increases. Corporate power is driving them.

This is what I have been saying for years, but I don’t have the credentials that Robert Reich has.

Read the article MONOPOLY POWER AND MARKET POWER IN ANTITRUST LAW.

Examination of key antitrust law opinions, however, shows that courts define ‘market power’ and ‘monopoly power’ in ways that are both vague and inconsistent. We conclude that the present level of confusion is unnecessary and results from two different but related errors: (1) the belief or suspicion that market power and monopoly power are two different concepts, when they are in fact, for antitrust purposes, qualitatively identical, and (2) the failure to recognize that anticompetitive economic power may manifest itself in two distinct ways.

ProPublica has the article The Great Inheritors: How Three Families Shielded Their Fortunes From Taxes for Generations.

In the early 1900s some of the wealthiest Americans claimed their fortunes would never last through the generations. A century of tax avoidance later, the dynasties are going strong.

This is a long article which I have not completed reading yet. The part that I have read is enough to give me an idea of how our current wealth inequality was created, and who are the people who created it.

The Guardian has the article The search is on for $50m in lost cryptocurrency after two Australian exchanges collapse.

I’ll start with a quibble.

To get to the bottom of what has happened to the cash and coins held in the accounts of ACX customers, Yeo will need to cut through a jungle of claims and counter-claims that have been playing out in court since last year.

The author of that sentence just doesn’t get the concept of a cryptocurrency. There are no physical coins. Despite the picture they show, there is no such thing as a physical Bitcoin. A Bitcoin is a concept that is recorded on a computer, but has no physical existence

Later on in the article is this quote

She believes cryptocurrencies are worse investments than the tulip bulbs that changed hands for fortunes during the tulipmania that gripped the Dutch in the 17th century, an episode in history that’s regarded as a classic example of a speculative bubble.

This is my view of cryptocurrency. Whether or not this will end in a big crash remains to be seen.

I have been retired so long that I got my Greek letters mixed up. There is Omicron Ο and omicron ο. I had forgotten about Omega Ω and omega ω.

Glenn Greenwald has a great interview Cryptocurrency and Blockchain: Liberation or Hoax? Interview with a Left-Wing Crypto Advocate.

Rumble — Influential leaders in numerous economic and technological sectors have been championing the economic and political potential of blockchain and crypto technology with increasing fervor. One of the most vocal has been Jack Dorsey, who resigned from Twitter as he devotes more focus to these tools. Many on the right view it as a tool of liberation. Many on the left are already opposed. Many are still learning what all this means. But today we speak with the Blockchain Socialist who argues that this technology frees individuals and movements from the tyranny of the state and Big Tech.

From a MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) perspective, the one thing that has always bothered me about crypto-currency is that there is nothing that gives a bitcoin,say, a value the way a country’s currency gets a value. For over 6,000 years of history, every currency that MMT has studied gets its value because the power that creates the currency can insist that you pay a tax in that currency. The examples of crypto-currency we see now have no ability to impose a tax, yet people value each different type of crypto-currency. Either crypto-currency will eventually collapse like the tulip-bulb mania did in history, or MMT will have to come up with another explanation about how crypto-currency gets its value.

This interview has got me thinking about alternatives to reconciling MMT and crypto-currency.

Naked Capitalism has republished this interview Michael Hudson on Truth Jihad Radio Discussing Super Imperialism, Rentierism, and the American Political Duopoly.

Michael Hudson has posted this on his web site as Falling into Line: Turning Endless Deficits into a Power Base.

I like Naked Capitalism’s title better than Michael Hudson’s title. The transcript is the same in both places.

Here he starts to explain that there are two opposing ways to go about the investment in infrastructure

Michael Hudson: There are two kinds of infrastructure spending. The United States in the late 19th century developed the whole philosophy of infrastructure spending. And Simon Patton, who was the first economics professor in the United States at a business school—he was a business school professor at Wharton School—said: “Infrastructure is a fourth factor of production alongside labor, land and capital. But the purpose of infrastructure isn’t to make a profit, it’s for the government to invest and provide low cost essential needs education, transportation, communication and to provide low cost infrastructure so that the American industrialists can employ labor that doesn’t have to pay a high cost for education, doesn’t have to pay a high cost for health care, doesn’t have to pay a high cost for communications or cable TV or telephones or anything else.” Well, all this changed after the 1980s with the neoliberalism of Margaret Thatcher and Reagan and Bill Clinton.

Here is more of the explanation of infarstructure.

Michael Hudson: So that’s part of the system. Infrastructure as the Democratic Party sees it is a travesty of what American infrastructure was a century ago. And they don’t realize that the way infrastructure is financed, and what it’s priced for, is the key. Of course, Bernie Sanders said, “look, American companies won’t have to pay their employees so much money if the government pays for all of their medical costs.” Right now, eight percent of America’s GDP goes for health insurance and health care. That’s higher than any other country, and the health care is much worse because it’s all done for profit and done as cheaply as possible, and it’s been financialized.

Here he makes a point I have been trying to convey in several articles on my blog (which you are reading). I have been castigating the MMT experts for not hammering on this enough.

This quantitative easing has created trillions and trillions of dollars, but it’s all been used to buy stocks and bonds and package mortgages. It hasn’t been used to spend into the economy, which is what Stephanie wants. So the question is: if the government’s going to create money, is it going to be spending into the economy, which is what the MMT group that I’m a member of is advocating? Or is it going to be given to Wall Street just to support stock and bond prices and promote financialization? That’s really the the great issue financially in economic policy today.

The above excerpt was Michael Hudosn’s answer to these misconceptions expressed by the interviewer. I decided to show you the right answer before I showed you the wrong question.

Kevin Barrett: Ellen Brown has been on the show many times, talking about the need to make banking a public utility. And I recently read Stephanie Shelton’s[sic] The Deficit Myth. She argues that we can fix all kinds of problems and bring back full employment and have all sorts of goodies simply by having the government spend more money. This is the modern monetary theory position. And maybe that is true to a certain extent in the U.S. due to these privileges that you describe in Super Imperialism. I doubt if it’s nearly as true anywhere else, for all these reasons that you’ve been describing. Do you think that if the U.S. ever does opt for more of a Bernie Sanders style modern monetary theory approach, would they quickly run into the limits of spending money due to these international factors?

The interviewer, Kevin Barrett, introduced this interview by claiming to have been a follower of Michael Hudson for years. Even people who think they understand MMT can sometimes get it so wrong that I almost want to cry. How could he have been reading Michael Hudson, and get this basic stuff so wrong?

I just realized that I know the answer to my last question. The interviewer said he has had Ellen Brown on his podcasts. Ellen Brown poses as an expert, but she gets a lot of this stuff very wrong. Having listened to Ellen brown myself, I tend to stay away from listening to her anymore.

By the way, the name is Stephanie Kelton.

CounterPunch has the Richard D. Wolff essay What China Learned From U.S. Capitalism’s Development.

U.S. capitalism was, in certain ways, the world’s most successful capitalism until recently. Better than the capitalist systems of Britain, Germany, and Japan, U.S. capitalism avoided two key traps. First, it found a remarkable way to manage the capitalist-worker class struggle for a long time before it lost that capacity. The United States also found a way to organize its imperial rule without the overt colonialism that provoked rising resistance that eventually became too costly and unmanageable for Britain, Germany, Japan, and other colonial powers. But in recent decades, U.S. capitalism failed to manage its class struggles or to reverse the decline in its informal imperialism.

Chinese leaders have learned, implicitly or explicitly, from how U.S. capitalism lost those capacities.

Wow, this explains how I have viewed recent economic history. Richard D. Wolff saves his speculative view on what the future holds until the very last sentence or two. I think holding that back is what makes this article so much more impressive than some of Wolff’s other essays.

YouTube has the video Fadhel Kaboub On Saving The Planet With #MMT — The Political Vigilante.

Graham interviews Professor of Economics, Dr. Fadhel Kaboub, about MMT and it’s impact on saving the earth from climate collapse.

Fadhel explains the key feature of Modern Monetary Theory in a way that would be hard not to understand. Specifically, the irrefutable explanation focuses on how the USA funded WW II. The audio from Graham Elwood’s side is not the greatest, but Fadhel’s audio is much better.