Fiorella Isabel of The Convo Couch has the video You Hate Russia Because They Programmed You To: My Six Months in Moscow. I haven’t watched The Convo Couch in so long, I had no idea that Fiorella was in Moscow.

The Facebook post, where I first saw this, has already been removed. I hope that does not happen here.

Naked Capitalism has the post As Crypto-Crisis Metastasizes, Big Moves Are Being Made on CBDCs.

While all this is playing out, to breathless coverage in the media, big moves are being made around the world on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). And they are receiving virtually no coverage.

I had no idea other countries were so far ahead of the USA.

Michael Hudson says that this whole area of money is beyond his expertise. I think this article explains how it is not really beyond his expertise.

If you use a credit/debit card, the issuer of that card extracts a fee for every transaction. Will the Central Bank Digital Currencies do away with that economic overhead of that fee?

I’ll save you the effort of looking up how much a crore is. 1 Crore is equal to10 Million

YouTube has the video “We are in a debt trap” – Nouriel Roubini on 10 ‘megathreats’ to our world and how to stop them.

Nouriel Roubini is an economist, a professor in New York, a global economic consultant and an author who, amongst many distinguishing things, was one of those who foresaw the 2008 credit crunch and financial crisis.

…

His latest work is called ‘Megathreats’, and it details 10 trends that make it more likely than not that we are heading for a global economic crash of stagnant growth, debt crises and high inflation that will cause decades of dystopian suffering and injustice. No wonder they call him Dr. Doom.
In this episode, Nouriel joins Krishnan to talk about climate change, job-displacing artificial intelligence and our future.

Is there value in disputing conclusions that may be right but are based on the wrong reasons? I can’t tell you exactly what will go wrong when you base you predictions on the wrong reasons, but I have faith that the wrong reasoning will come back to bite you. In this case, the wrong reasoning is the refusal to differentiate private debt from the debt of a currency creator. There are some limits to how much different they are, but the differences do exist.

Here is the link to the Channel 4 News on YouTube.

Stephaie Kelton has a Substack article Policymaking in a Pan(dem)ic.

Talking about the 2020/2021 pandemic recovery, she made the following comments:

We did better this time not because we got better policy from the Federal Reserve. Indeed, we got mostly the same thing we got after 2008—i.e. zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) and massive bond-buying (QE). We did better because Congress delivered not one, not two, but three substantial pieces of legislation that actively supported the economy with around $5 trillion in additional spending.

And so, once again, Deficits Saved the World. But this time deficits didn’t increase mainly due to Congressional inaction—i.e. the automatic stabilizers—but because of the proactive—i.e. discretionary—actions of Congress and the White House.

Did they get everything right? No. Did we need all $5 trillion? Probably not. Could some of that spending have been better targeted? You bet. Should some of it have been set to phase out sooner? Probably.

But remember that the three biggest packages ($2.2 trillion in March 2020, $900 billion in December 2020, and $1.9 trillion in March 2021) were all passed in middle of a global pandemic. For better or worse (I think it was for the better), lawmakers decided it was preferable to err on the side of doing too much as opposed to doing too little.

In the future, we should try to avoid cobbling together multi-trillion dollar fiscal rescue packages in a state of panic. One way to do that is to begin to strengthen our automatic stabilizers. An old rule of thumb advised drivers to consider replacing the shock absorbers in their vehicle every 50,000 miles or so. When it comes to our economic shock absorbers, we’re long overdue for an upgrade.

Naked Capitalism has published the transcript of the interview Michael Hudson Discusses the Future of Europe and Global Restructuring.

Michael Hudson was interviewed Thursday on MEGA, a German news radio program, focusing on the economic impact of the war with Russia on major players, particularly Europe. We have a translated transcript below and will embed the YouTube version (in German) which is expected to be posted early next week.

Here is some of Question 10 and its answer.

10. … What is your take on digital currencies?

MH: It’s not my department. All banking is electronic, so what does “digital” mean? To libertarians, it means no government oversight, but in government hands, the government will have a record of everything that anyone spends.

If you understand data mining, the government already has a record of what everyone spends in crypto currencies. The ledger of these purchases is open to all to view. People think it is anonymous, but data mining takes out the anonymity.

Here is another good zinger that came earlier,

(8.) Currently we saw the collapse and bankruptcy of the crypto exchange FXT. The management of this company seems to be highly criminal. How do you judge that?

MH: Crime is what made crypto a growth sector for the past few years. Investors bought crypto because it is a vehicle for the fortunes being made in international drug dealing, the arms trade, other crime and tax evasion. These are the great post-industrial growth sectors in Western economies. 

Ponzi schemes often are good investment vehicles in their take-off stage – the pump-and-dump stage. It was inevitable that criminals would not only use crypto to transfer funds, but actually set up their own currencies “free of oppressive government regulation.” Criminals are the ultimate Chicago School free market libertarians.

Consortium News has the article The Petrodollar’s Long Goodbye.

China has three advantages which aid this diversification that the U.S. does not: a complete industrial system, a new type of productive force (immense-scale infrastructure project management and development) and a vast growing consumer market.

The USA hasn’t the foggiest idea of the possibility of win-win situations in international trade. These other countries see the promise of what the USA cannot even imagine.

Michael Hudson’s web site has just posted the transcript of China the Change Agent – Patreon Q&A #3.

The reason I don’t teach anywhere except in China is because there is no way that I can fit my ideas into the curriculum. The curriculum doesn’t talk about land or real estate or debt or national income accounting. It just says lower living standards, that’s the solution to everything. So, I don’t think studying Economics would help at all.

I think this is why there is a concerted effort by Western leaders to demonize China. It is not in working people’s interest to allow this to happen. We must fight the demonization. That is not a call to cover up problems in China. What I want to promote is a reasoned discussion of Michael Hudson’s ideas. It seems that China is one of the few places in the world where this is happening.

Michael Hudson has another great interview Oligopoly Unchecked.

After the Civil War, American students interested in economics mainly went to Germany to study, and they came back to the U.S. with an idea of Bismarckian state socialism. The chair of the first business school at Wharton School of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania was Simon Patten, who said that land, labor, and capital all receive the respective forms of income, but there is a fourth factor of production: public infrastructure. Public infrastructure differs in that it’s not trying to make a profit or an economic rent. It sells at less than the cost of production, because it’s trying to subsidize the economy, and its productivity should be measured in principle by the degree to which it lowers the economy’s overall cost of production by providing subsidized or free public services.

YouTube has the video Coffeezilla: SBF, FTX, Fraud, Scams, Fake Gurus, Money, Fame, and Power | Lex Fridman Podcast #345.

Coffeezilla is a journalist and investigator on YouTube who exposes financial frauds, scams, and fake gurus.

I have only had the time to listen to 1 hour of this 3 hour and 46 minute interview. One of the places where I think they are missing the boat is to not realize how fraudulent and worthless the whole idea of crypto-currency is. Read Michael Hudson’s many books on the history of money and how government money gets its value. If you haven’t read Michael Hudson or other experts in modern money theory, you have no idea how money works. Lex Fridman has not done the required reading. As good as the interview seems to be, it could have been so much better if Lex knew whom to talk to.

They talk about the importance of decentralization of power. I always think that decentralization is very important in making systems anti-fragile. Too much power in the hands of a small number of people whether they be in private enterprise or in government is very dangerous. One thing that gets missed in the argument of capitalism versus socialism is the value of competition among small centers of power. Diversification is a central tenet of safe investment. You never can be sure whose ideas will be best for the future. That’s why there is some wisdom in the rule of thumb that it is not safe to put all your eggs in one basket. It is valuable to have many people trying different ideas, to see which ones actually pan out over time.

The other issue is the inevitability of some fraud. If you build any system that depends on the absence of fraud, that system will be doomed to failure. Asking honest people and especially ones who have no experience detecting fraud how a con artist is going to invent a fraudulent scheme, then you have committed yourself to unilateral disarmament. That is what I learned from reading William K. Black’s book, “The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is To Own One.”

YouTube has the video Barack Obama – Protecting Democracy and the Commitment to Facts | The Daily Show

This starts around 23:29 in the video.

The point, though, is they’ve got some blend, some mix. There is an advantage in terms of efficiency and also freedom to a market system. You have a control system. You have some guy in an office is deciding how many potatoes we’re going to grow this year. That usually does not work. The flip side of it is that what we’ve also learned is that some guy in a boardroom is deciding, I’m going to ravage the environment to do whatever I want, that doesn’t work either. So we’re going to have a blend of some sort. We want some collective decision making about the social good. And we want something that’s efficient and dynamic and allows us to exercise our innovation and freedom. And we don’t need to worry so much about the labels as we do about being practical and thinking about what’s working and what isn’t.

This is what I call “what worksism”. The trouble with Obama’s administration is that he made some horrible decisions about what was working and what was not. We cannot exercise our innovation and freedom in a private market that is controlled by oligarchs as monopolists. Privatizing natural monopolies like infrastructure is a terrible idea. Efficiency is not always the primary feature you want to emphasize. There is a place for worrying about resiliency. If you have a system that is highly efficient, but highly fragile, then that is not a good compromise. It takes more nuanced thinking than saying you don’t want some guy deciding how many potatoes to grow this year is a necessary of part of socialism, than a guy deciding on just-in-time efficiency in private enterprise being a necessary part of capitalism. High resilience to the detriment of all concerns about efficiency is not a good compromise either.

Having a financialized and de-industrialized economy is not a good compromise either. Nobody talked about why China’s compromise, mixed-system was beating the USA all to hell in world trade.