Remember how the Tories are the party you want to vote for in tough economic times because they’re great managers and willing to make the tough decisions? Remember all that stuff? Yeah, well, the Tories are poking holes in the Canadian economy faster than the rest of us can bail.
Continue readingTag: double-dip recession
RedBedHead: Harper’s Unearned Economic "Credibility"
It’s one of those “truths” in politics that is beyond questioning, like the “necessity” of an independent (i.e. free from democratic controls) central bank, but which, like everything else has evolved from a time when it wasn’t actually the truth. I’m,…
Continue readingRedBedHead: Stock Markets Have A Mood Disorder
There are so many ways that capitalism is absolutely irrational (not to mention inefficient at allocating resources) – the fact that the USA spends $1 trillion on “defence” while children die from lack of clean drinking around the world (or while growi…
Continue readingRedBedHead: Debt Is Not The Cause Of The Crisis
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Stephen Harper are all over the media attacking European Union politicians for failing to take decisive action to deal with the “debt overhang”, particularly in places like Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy. This failu…
Continue readingRedBedHead: "Karl Marx, it seems, was partly right…"
Well, there’s something you only ever hear from economists when they’re pooping their pants because the system is going in to meltdown. We heard it in the early 1990s and again when the financial crisis hit in 2008. And now Nouriel, who resists the del…
Continue readingRedBedHead: Why Keeping Interest Low Won’t Save The Economy
As the old saying goes – expecting different results while repeating the same act over and over again is a sign of psychosis. That, however, has never stood in the way of government policy where bureaucratic inertia, the desire of the ruling class to c…
Continue readingRedBedHead: More Capitalism vs Democracy
I was reading this article in Foreign Policy – a “debate” between two highly respected international economists, Nouriel Roubini and Ian Bremmer when I came acros the two quotes below. What was interesting was just how similar they were to the quote I …
Continue readingRedBedHead: Babylon Burns While I Fish
I’m on a bit of a holiday this week, at a rental cottage up in the Muskokas. It’s quiet, the air is clean and the loons are warbling as sun sets. Meanwhile the world seems to be going to hell in a hangbasket – what’s up with that?
Global stock markets…
Continue readingRedBedHead: Capitalism vs Democracy
This article in the Globe & Mail about the ongoing debt crisis in the USA and Europe caught my attention. Not because it offered any interesting or unique insight into the origins or solution to the present debt crisis facing western capitalist nat…
Continue readingRedBedHead: Greece: Bigger Than Lehman Brothers
What a frigging disaster. Back in 2008, the US Federal Reserve let the Lehman Brothers investment bank – which held more than a bellyful of toxic debt, go to the wall. It was meant to bring “calm” to increasingly panicked financial markets. That will p…
Continue readingRedBedHead: Today’s U.S. Economic News: This Parrot Is Dead
The jobs report is out and like all of the other economic indicators, it shows that the US economy is going nowhere fast. The whole of this year has been about watching the optimism that started the year turn sour bit by bit as the remaining effects fr…
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