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.

Richard Wolff presented this video China – US’s First Real Competitor in a Century.

For the first 30 minutes of this talk, I was thinking so highly of this video, that I almost couldn’t wait to share this on my Facebook page. It all turned sour at about 30 minutes. Here is the comment I posted about his attempt to explain USA debt to China.

I was going to praise this talk highly until you went off the rails at about 30 minutes. This is where you let your ignorance of Modern Money Theory get the best of you. You talked about the problem of the USA paying China for the money that China “lent” to the USA by its purchase of USA Government bonds. You wonder what will happen if China demands repayment of the loans. You should wonder more deeply about that very question. What kind of repayment of these loans can China expect? What do we have to give them to replay the loans? The only thing they are legally entitled to for repayment is more USA money. Who can create this money out of thin air? The USA Government agency called the Federal Reserve Bank creates this money. The money does not come from collecting taxes from the USA citizens who are also recipients of money created by the FED. Just having you think about this ought to be enough to give you pause.

As I post this, I am not sure I can stand to watch the remaining 20 minutes or so of this video. Now that I have gotten this off my chest, maybe my curiosity will take me through the rest of this piece.

Naked Capitalism has this great post Why the US Supply Chain Crisis Is Intractable and Will Get Worse

Readers bwilli123 and Carolinian flagged a must read post by Ryan Johnson, I’m A Twenty Year Truck Driver, I Will Tell You Why America’s “Shipping Crisis” Will Not End. You really really really need to consume it in its entirely. It makes a detailed, cogent case as to why the America’s ports are a mess and why there is no simple and even not so simple way out. No wonder Pete Buttigieg is in hiding, um, on paternity leave, rather than putting his hands on the supply chain tar baby.
.
.
.
Now the labor shortages are only one part of the problem, but the point is that this is more addressable than Johnson suggests if you assume a muscular government. That alternative likely did not occur to Johnson since it has been absent during his professional life, except to save the banking system during the financial crisis and mainly the well off in March 2020. It might take six weeks to two months to see across the board improvements in manning levels, while doing nothing assures more trucker attrition.

I have seen one network news story that goes anywhere near this issue. That story concluded that if we clear the ports, we are then faced with a warehouse bottleneck.

Stephanie Kelton has a substack post Unfinished Business.

Earlier today, I joined CNN host Fareed Zakaria to talk about deficits, inflation, and whether we’re focusing on the wrong things when we debate the price of the Build Back Better agenda and how to “pay for” it. I knew ahead of time that we would have only 5-6 minutes to cover a lot of ground, and I did my best in the short time we had.

Here was my reaction.

Totally inadequate response. Instead of wasting time trying to say that the inflation people see isn’t what they think, you should have spent all your time explaining what is the cause of the inflation that they do see. As I see it, the supply chain that we have that depends on “just in time delivery” may be efficient under normal circumstances, but it is very fragile in the face of the unexpected. The disruption to the supply chain from the pandemic is now showing up even as we are making feeble attempts to restart the economy. We need to take steps to fix the supply chain situation. I have seen a report that the backup at the ports of entry is just the tip of the iceberg. We don’t have the warehouse space to even store the goods if they went through the ports with no backup. These are problems that need solving, but they may be outside your area of expertise.

For years I have been warning MMT proponents to stop dismissing inflation just because there has not been any inflation up to now. Instead MMT should have discussed why there was no inflation before, and what would have to change to see inflation rise. Up until know there has not been enough consumer demand to raise consumer prices. The oligarchs, who have been receiving trillions of dollars that the Fed has pumped in, aren’t the ones who buy consumer good. The oligarchs take excess money and put it into the stock market, which has been rising. (Stock market price inflation).. Now that consumers have started receiving a little money from the government/Fed, they are trying to buy more, but the supply chain is in a big mess. The disrupted supply chain wasn’t so much of an issue as long as the consumers couldn’t afford to buy things. You could also point out that when workers couldn’t go to work they couldn’t produce the supply of goods that was needed. The external supply from China was also being disrupted.

This resort to economic reports from “experts”, is not going to convince the many people who have become skeptical of all experts lately (and with good reason). Explain things in understandable ways without resorting to playing the credentials game.

I also note that MMT has always said that all the historical hyper-inflations have resulted from supply disruptions. This is what is going on, so MMT has always had an explanation. Now is the time to bring it up. Also explain that MMT is not able to predict unexpected supply disruptions. But MMT proponents should have been looking out for their occurrence when they happen. MMT should have been able to predict this inflation as soon as they saw the huge supply disruption caused by the pandemic.