Yahoo! Finance reprinted the article ‘Black Swan’ author Nassim Taleb says years of zero interest rates destroyed the economic structure and created ‘tumors like bitcoin’.

“At zero interest rates … for long periods of time, you are hurting the economy. You’re creating bubbles, creating tumors like bitcoin, creating hedge funds that should not exist but have existed for 15 years,” said the former options trader whose New York Times bestseller focuses on understanding extreme and unpredictable events.

This is why I am such a fan of Taleb.

Stephaiee Kelton has written the article The Odds of a Bad Outcome are Rising.

My piece was full of ideas about how to tackle a potential—but not yet real—inflation problem. I wrote about supply bottlenecks, immigration and trade policies, taxes, lowering health care costs, building manufacturing capacity, and more. I described a whole suite of inflation-dampening policies, many of which were later embraced by the administration and by some of the economists who initially dismissed my piece on the grounds that mainstream economics tells us that any inflation threat can easily be contained by monetary policy. I explained in this thread why I disagreed with that view.

Loads of reference that I’ll have to check out.

YouTube has the video Scott Ritter on Ukraine’s counter-offensive, Russia’s next move.

Was the Ukrainian military’s advance around Kharkiv a turning point in the Ukraine proxy war? Will Russia have to escalate? Has the US crossed a red line with its participation in the war? Military expert and former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter joins The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate live to discuss.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of this comes at the very end. In essence, they reveal that the USA Congress and Government has appropriated money to have these reporters killed.

Naked Capitalism has posted the article Michael Hudson on Student Debt Relief, Inflation, Ukraine Disaster Capitalism, Petrodollar Challenge. It has a transcript of the interview below.

Economist Michael Hudson joins Multipolarista host Ben Norton to discuss partial student debt relief in the US, inflation and the Fed, disaster capitalism in Ukraine, and China’s challenge to the petrodollar.

As a fan of both Michael Hudson and Fadhel Kaboub, this interview was a powerful reminder of the one area where I disagree with Fadhel Kaboub and strongly agree with Michael Hudson, I think Michael Hudson’s view of the inflation battles of the 1970s and 1980s is much closer to reality than Fadhel Kaboub’s explanation. Fadhel, being originally from Tunisia, has a view of the 1970s and 80s that is constrained by affairs of the middle east. Michael Hudson’s views are much more focused on the events in the USA’s military adventures in the far east, particularly surrounding the Vietnam War. I wish I could get Fadhel to pay more attention to what Michael Hudson has to say. Even in this interview, Michael Hudson had some surprising (to me) clarifications of some economic history.

Consortium News has published the article SCOTT RITTER: Mikhail Gorbachev, a Vector of Change.

From the ashes of failure, a new world order is arising some 30 years after Gorbachev and the Soviet Union entered the history books as has-beens. The multi-polar challenge to U.S. singularity that is being mounted by Russia, China and others was only made possible by the forces of change that were unleashed because of Gorbachev’s spectacular failure as a Soviet leader.

While this was not the objective of Gorbachev when he initiated his Perestroika-based “revolution,” it is an undeniable consequence. History is made by what can best be described as vectors of change.

For better or for worse, that emerges as the most fitting epitaph for the man: Mikhail Gorbachev, a vector of change who shaped world history.

This is about the most even-handed analysis that I could imagine.

YouTube has the video Stephanie Kelton on how to cancel student debt. This is from October 2018, but it still applies.

Stephanie Kelton speaks at The Student Debt Crisis: Policy, Economics, and Politics of Student Debt Cancellation, Harvard University, October 3, 2018. Stephanie Kelton is Professor of Public Policy & Economics at Stony Brook University. She previously served as chief economist on the Senate Budget Committee and a senior economic adviser to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.

If you are willing to listen, you might learn something. Otherwise, you could claim that economics is so simple, you already know it all, so there is no reason to learn more.

Matt Stoller has a guest author who wrote the article Closing Down the Billionaire Factory.

In a memoir with the cringeworthy title “What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence”, Stephen Schwarzman, the co-founder of Blackstone explains how his private equity giant came to control money from the nation’s largest public pension funds.

I have known some of this before, but this is worse than I thought.

Stepahine Kelton has the post Can We Still Afford Social Security and Medicare?.

As promised, today’s post is a rejoinder. With the political fight over entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare heating up—and, yes, they are entitlements because people are entitled to coverage under the law as long as they meet program eligibility requirements—it’s important to bring some clarity to the debate.

I am not sure that this brings clarity for most people. I understand what she is trying to say, and I think I can say it more clearly.

The USA Government’s Federal Reserve Bank creates all USA money (except for the small part created by the mint or the paper currency). That ability to create money means that the USA Government can always create the money to satisfy all future Social Security obligations.

Where the problem could arise is when the retirees use that money to buy things. The issue is whether or not the economy can produce all the things the retirees have the money to buy. If we don’t invest enough in expanding our economy in the future, then the productive part of the economy may be too small to produce what the retirees have the money to buy.

The non-productive part of the economy includes the part of the economy that collects debt interest payments from the people. Paying interest on debt makes banks richer, but it does not increase the economy’s ability to produce what people want to buy.

YouTube has the video Retired US Army Colonel on Ukraine, Taiwan & the state of the US Empire.

If the title had said Larry Wilkerson, I would have jumped to watch this much faster. I didn’t recognize him from this very old picture.

Even this interviewer had a certain perception of the Ukraine War, but Wilkerson would not let him get away with echoing USA propaganda. If Larry Wilkerson, Scott Ritter, and Michael Hudson all seem to agree on certain fundamentals, I feel even more confident in those fundamentals.

Michael Hudson posted an interview he did recently – The Big Context.

I have noticed a change in Michael Hudson’s interviews. He isn’t mincing words anymore. He is openly airing his full pessimism. Here is the shortest excerpt that I could come up with that gives a hint as to his current thinking.

The US economy cannot recover its industrial power. Its debt is too high, its cost of medical care, 18% of GDP is too high, it’s the rent is so high, 48% of income. There’s no way in which the United States can grow again. Every business recovery since 1945 has started from a higher and higher and higher level of debt, and now it’s reached the limit. A year ago the Federal Reserve said that half of Americans could not raise 400 dollars in a crisis. The recent increase in interest rates have raised credit card rates and debt service by about 450 dollars per average American. So here are people who couldn’t raise it.

All of a sudden they are shifting their consumption patterns to downsizeable. The dollar stores’ spam is now in short supply because people are moving from expensive meat on to that. So Americans are going downhill. So what is it that Russia and China and India represent? They’re countries that are industrializing and moving forward. The American economy and American society is run by the financial sector; they’ve shifted planning away from government to the financial sector which lives in the short run, and essentially the growth of the one percent is shrinking the ninety-nine percent.