This 2008 article in The New York Times, Obamanonics, is both prescient and perhaps unknowingly unmasks all that is wrong with it.

Among the policy experts and economists who make up the Democratic government-in-waiting, there is now something of a consensus. They agree that deficit reduction did an enormous amount of good. It helped usher in the 1990s boom and the only period of strong, broad-based income growth in a generation. But that boom also depended on a technology bubble and historically low oil prices. In the current decade, the economy has continued to grow at a decent pace, yet most families have seen little benefit. Instead, the benefits have flowed mostly to a small slice of workers at the very top of the income distribution. As Rubin told me, comparing the current moment with 1993, “The distributional issues are obviously more serious now.” From today’s vantage point, inequality looks likes a bigger problem than economic growth; fiscal discipline seems necessary but not sufficient.

No, the boom didn’t “also depended on a technology bubble and historically low oil prices”.  These factors were the main cause of the boom. The deficit reduction did not usher in the 1990s boom.  The deficit reduction tempered the boom by taking money out of the private sector to lower the government debt.  When the bubble finally burst, it was the continued deficit reduction that held the economy back.  This is one of the  things that might have made Bushes attempt to undo the damage the deficit reduction was doing had he chosen some other means  than the tax cuts for the rich.  Bush could have tried the infrastructure spending that Reich would go on to urge years later to Obama.

It is just amazing how people  can look at the same facts and some can draw the absolutely wrong lessons from them.  Read the article about the opposite prescriptions offered by Robert Reich and Robert Rubin.

In talking about Obama’s self proclaimed pragmatism in economics, The New York Times article had the following to say:

Invoking pragmatism doesn’t help the average voter much; ideology, though it often gets a bad name, matters, because it offers insight into how a candidate might actually behave as president. I have spent much of this year trying to get a handle on what is sometimes called Obamanomics and have come away thinking that Obama does have an economic ideology. It’s just not a completely familiar one. Depending on how you look at it, he is both more left-wing and more right-wing than many people realize.

It is the ideology that predisposes one to take certain lessons from the facts when deciding what lessons the facts teach.  The prescience of the article was the warning that Obama was more right-wing than many people realized.

Think Progress has the article Decades Ago, Robert Kennedy Explained Something That Trump Still Doesn’t Know About The Economy.

Weeks before he was killed, he spoke on this subject at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968 — in what President Obama called “one of the most beautiful of his speeches.”

 
You could include Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama among the people who don’t know this. I wonder if either Obama has forgotten what was in this speech, or if he didn’t understand the meaning of it when he heard the words. In Elizabeth Warren’s presentation about income inequality after the plenary session of the Massachusetts Democratic State Convention she used an understanding of these facts to motivate the rest of the talk.

I have been waiting for this to be posted to YouTube so I can share with you what I saw at the convention.

Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke at the Massachusetts Democratic Party State Convention in Lowell, MA on June 4, 2016.

Don’t just stay for the sound bites, as great as they are The whole thing is filled with important stuff (yes, even the substance is far from boring.)

Remember, that she also gave a 1 hour presentation on income inequality in a breakout session after the formal convention meeting. It was held in half a gymnasium to overflow crowd to the extent that the presentation had to be opened up to the other half of the gymnasium.

I suspect that this presentation will not be posted on YouTube for a while. This is a presentation that she is planning to give around the country. She didn’t say where or when she would be doing this. I suspect it will either form the basis of her Presidential campaign or at the very least in an effort to influence the outcome of the Convention in Philadelphia in July. Elizabeth Warren could be the consensus candidate if the convention should deadlock over the choice between Clinton and Sanders.

Entertainment Weekly has the article John Oliver surprises thousands with $14 million debt relief.

John Oliver was feeling generous on Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight — but first he wanted to paint a clear picture of the debt industry.

John Oliver uncovers and fixes a debt problem that is so obscene that every politician should be fighting over who will be first to propose a solution.

I would remark on how easy it would be for the government to buy back this debt for pennies on the dollar and forgive it, but that isn’t even necessary.

The debt that John Oliver bought and forgave isn’t even legally collectible. So the laws have already forgiven it, but debt collectors still harass people to collect it. Why? Because who is going to stop them?

Furthermore, John Oliver had to forgive the debt in a specific way so that the debtor wouldn’t become liable to the IRS for taxes on the amount of the debt forgiven. The IRS imputes this as income so that you owe income taxes when you are released from a debt by someone “paying” it off for you.

Now do you believe Bernie Sanders when he says the system is rigged against you?

Salon has an excellent article How the rich stole our money — and made us think they were doing us a favor.

Big business and wealthy interests pushed through Wall Street deregulation during the Reagan and Clinton eras, which not only boosted the stock market but also allowed large banks to make unprecedented money off of home loans. The end result was that wealthy landlords and asset owners got much richer while rents increased and wages declined, but most Americans didn’t feel the pinch because rising home values made them feel rich on paper until the Great Recession.

As I remember it, I think it must have been some time in the 1980s when I realized that depending on a salary was never going to lead me to financial independence.  That was when I realized that taking advantage of the 401K/IRA system would allow me to become an asset owner.  I never wanted to be a landlord.  That would require too much interaction with real people on a timely basis.  I decided to finally learn how to become a stock owner in a way that was compatible with my tendency to procrastinate.  I did manage to become financially independent enough to retire shortly after I reached the age of 62.

Getting to this stage of independence did force me to learn how to play the oligarchs’ game even though I didn’t like the way that game was set up.  That is a moral conundrum many of us have been forced into.  We may not like what this system does to people, but as a matter of survival, we have to learn how to use it.  At least that is my excuse, and I am sticking to it.

My excuse could be the one that Elizabeth Warren could use to justify her financial success in the world.  It would be great if she had the courage to openly discuss this.

Tech Times has the article New Ultra-Thin Metalens Could Replace Bulky Lenses in Cameras, Phones And Telescopes.

The new planar lens is also capable of resolving nanoscale features. A very thin assembly of minuscule waveguides called “metasurface” bends the passing light. The process is similar to that of today’s curved lens.

My reading of the article makes me interpret the word as meta-lens, not metal-lens.  It sounds like a  very promising development.  Again, as I read it, this is not an electronically programmable lens.  This “limitation”  does not detract from the significance of this invention, but it might limit some wild speculations.  On the other hand, wild speculations might inspire some wild inventor to come up with a way to make it electronically programmable.  There is the field of micro-electro-mechanical engineering that I became aware of when I worked on software that could analyze such devices, plus knowing a friend who worked on designing such devices. (For all I know , I suppose it might already be electronically programmable but just not hinted at in the article.)

Update on 2016/06/06 – I discovered that the problem was limited to one browser, Firefox, on one of my three computers.  Turns out that clearing the cookies solved the problem.

———— Original post below ————–

If you are unhappy that you can’t easily query Yahoo for a list of stock quotes as of today, vote for this suggestion I have made to Yahoo.

Make list of quotes query from the URL work again, or provide an alternative

Without signing in, the following query used to get me a list of stock quotes.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CAT+CBRL+CINF+CMI+COP+CVX+EMR+EPD+GIS+GPS+KO+LMT+MCD+MDP+PPL+SON+T+TGT+TMP+WEC

This does not work anymore. How do I get the same functionality that used to work so well. That functionality was just about the only reason why I used Yahoo. Without it, you have lost another customer. Why would you do that?

This is an historical occurrence  that too few people today remember or were educated about.  Rather than continue to talk about this based on my own recollections, I decided to search for a telling of the story  on the internet.  The Federal Reserve History web site has this article Nixon Ends Convertibility of US Dollars to Gold and Announces Wage/Price Controls.

President Richard Nixon’s actions in 1971 to end dollar convertibility to gold and implement wage/price controls were intended to address the international dilemma of a looming gold run and the domestic problem of inflation. The new economic policy marked the beginning of the end of the Bretton Woods international monetary system and temporarily halted inflation.

This history is key to understanding our current fiat money system that is described as the USA being sovereign in its own currency.  I doubt that economists at the time this action was take would have had a full appreciation of all the ramifications of this change.  However, after more than 55 years of living with this situation, some open minded economists are starting to come to grips with what this all means.

There are at least two web sites that I regularly follow to try to keep abreast of recent research and thinking.  They are New Economic Perspectives and Naked Capitalism.  Some other web sites are Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, and The Institute For New Economic Thinking.

Economists that I used to think were Liberals and Progressives, Paul Krugman, e.g., seem to be highly resistant to understanding how different the economic world is from when they received their training in the subject.

According to the Wikipedia biographic article on Paul Krugman:

Krugman earned his B.A. summa cum laude in economics from Yale University in 1974 and his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1977 with a thesis titled Essays on flexible exchange rates.

I wonder if this timing of his education is what has him boxed in to his current refusal to understand how things have  changed.  Having finished is thesis in 1977, there were only 6 years of experience with the new monetary system for him to study.  I am sure this put him on the forefront at the time.  Since then, he seems to have stagnated, perhaps with his over egotistical view of his own infallibility.

Not being nearly as smart as Paul Krugman, I find it a little easier to shed my previous views in light of new information.  Of course, it is not being smart that is the problem.  It may be, as I have conjectured, that being too smug is the problem.  By the way, Paul Krugman is one of the eminent advisors and defendants of Hillary Clinton.  Economists from the newer camp, Stephanie Kelton and William K. Black are Bernie Sanders’ advisors.  Perhaps the fact that Bernie Sanders is older than Hillary Clinton and Paul Krugman, but has chosen advisors that are younger than those two may explain why he can understand the modern world better.

Naked Capitalism has the post New IMF Paper Challenges Neoliberal Orthodoxy about an IMF paper.

While the IMF’s research team has for many years chipped away at mainstream economic thinking, a short, accessible paper makes an even more frontal challenge. It’s caused such a stir that the Financial Times featured it on its front page. We’ve embedded it at the end of this post and encourage you to read it and circulate it.

The article cheekily flags the infamous case of the Chicago Boys, Milton Friedman’s followers in Pinochet’s Chile, as having been falsely touted as a success. If anything, the authors are too polite in describing what a train wreck resulted. A plutocratic land grab and speculation-fueled bubble led quickly to a depression, forcing Pinochet to implement Keynesian policies, as well as rolling back labor “reforms,” to get the economy back on its feet.

Voters need to become more aware of these ideas before they just accept Hillary Clinton’s economics advisers’ pronouncements over Bernie Sanders advisers’ pronouncements .

For instance, this extract from a section of the paper gives a hint as to the overturn of some cherished economic beliefs.

It is surely the case that many countries (such as those in southern Europe) have little choice but to engage in fiscal consolidation, because markets will not allow them to continue borrowing. But the need for consolidation in some countries does not mean all countries—at least in this case, caution about “one size fits all” seems completely warranted.

So when we say that the need for fiscal austerity does not apply to the United States at this point in time, remember that we are not saying that other countries are immune from this need nor are we saying that the United States will always be immune.

Perhaps this next excerpt best encapsulates what I think is the message of heterodox economists of this day.

Faced with a choice between living with the higher debt—allowing the debt ratio to decline organically through growth—or deliberately running budgetary surpluses to reduce the debt, governments with ample fiscal space will do better by living with the debt.

If we can get people to understand that this is all we are saying, and not some other horrible thing that they imagine, then maybe we can make some progress in having a rational discussion.  To have this rational discussion, we cannot dismiss the provisos as unimportant frills – governments with ample fiscal space. If a government does not have ample fiscal space, then it cannot  follow these prescriptions.