Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
It’s official: Chargers will move to L.A.
The San Diego Chargers will be moving to Los Angeles and taking on a new name. …read more
Source: It’s official: Chargers will move to L.A.
Cash-Banning Harvard Professor Slams "Ignorant" Negative-Rate-Naysayers
By Tyler Durden
Not satisified with demands for banning cash in America, Harvard economics professor Ken Rogoff has lashed out at critics of negative interest rates, calling them “ignorant” in their analysis of the unprecedented measures.
As a reminder of Rogoff's recent proclamations, according to the esteemed ivory tower academic, paper currency lies at the heart of some of today’s most intractable public-finance and monetary problems. As Rogoff explains in The Wall Street Journal, getting rid of most of it – that is, moving to a society where cash is used less frequently and mainly for small transactions – could be a big help.
Rogoff's begins by stating factoids as facts…
There is little debate among law-enforcement agencies that paper currency, especially large notes such as the U.S. $100 bill, facilitates crime: racketeering, extortion, money laundering, drug and human trafficking, the corruption of public officials, not to mention terrorism. There are substitutes for cash—cryptocurrencies, uncut diamonds, gold coins, prepaid cards—but for many kinds of criminal transactions, cash is still king. It delivers absolute anonymity, portability, liquidity and near-universal acceptance. It is no accident that whenever there is a big-time drug bust, the authorities typically find wads of cash.
Cash is also deeply implicated in tax evasion, which costs the federal government some $500 billion a year in revenue. According to the Internal Revenue Service, a lot of the action is concentrated in small cash-intensive businesses, where it is difficult to verify sales and the self-reporting of income. By contrast, businesses that take payments mostly by check, bank card or electronic transfer know that it is much easier for tax authorities to catch them dissembling. Though the data are much thinner for state and local governments, they too surely lose big-time from tax evasion, perhaps as much as $200 billion a year.
Cash also lies at the core of the illegal immigration problem in the U.S. If American employers couldn’t so easily pay illegal workers off the books in cash, the lure of jobs would abate, and the flow of illegal immigrants would shrink drastically. Needless to say, phasing out most cash would be a far more humane and sensible way of discouraging illegal immigration than constructing a giant wall.
So to clarify – Cash (and Donald Trump) are at the center of all of America's and the world's ills and therefore – as a PhD who knows best – we must destroy it (for your own good).
And now, as Bloomberg reports, anyone who questions this, or the imposition of negative interest rates (or a tax on cash) by central banks is “ignorant.”
It’s impossible to analyze the effects of the “early experiment” with negative rates because central banks were left to themselves amid a global fiscal retrenchment, Rogoff, a professor at Harvard University, said Wednesday in an interview after speaking at the Skagen Funds annual conference in Oslo.
“I find a lot of what is written by representatives of the financial sector, they’re very hostile to negative rates, to be kind of ignorant,” he said …read more
Source: Cash-Banning Harvard Professor Slams "Ignorant" Negative-Rate-Naysayers
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What’s Truly Progressive?
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
What's progressive? Pushing power, agency, skills, capital and solutions down to the individual, household, community, enterprise, town and city levels and focusing on doing more with much less.
We know what fake-Progressives support: neocon-neoliberal policies and narratives that enable elite privilege, power and Imperial pretensions.
So what's truly progressive? We can start with four things:
1. Focus on developing skills that build capital, not on issuing costly credentials controlled by cartels.
2. Accept that borrowing from future generations to pay today's expenses is morally and financially bankrupt.
3. Fix healthcare by integrating medicine with the causes of illness– lifestyle, diet, fitness, agency and culture–and decentralized programs of prevention.
4. Accept that “growth” of consumption, debt, GDP, etc. is no longer the solution, it's the problem: Degrowth is the solution.
Focusing on issuing more credentials fails students and enriches the institutions that monopolize the credentials. As I explain in my book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy, the solution is to accredit the student, not the school.
Education that actually has value in the emerging economy is based not on jumping through hoops at enormous expense to obtain a credential, but on acquiring the skills and values needed to build capital in all its forms.
Issuing a student another credential doesn't magically lift them out of poverty; to escape poverty, people need a wealth of real-world skills and the set of soft-skills/values I call the eight essential skills in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.
Accrediting the student rather than the institution will require upending the costly bureaucracy of higher education, radically reducing costs while radically improving outcomes.
Take a look at this chart of federally funded debt-serfdom, i.e. student loans, and explain what is remotely progressive about debt-serfdom in service of credentials with marginal market value.
And while we're looking at debt, look at the trajectory of federal debt and ask yourself: “does this look healthy or sustainable?” The answer is obviously no; this trajectory leads to fiscal bankruptcy, and it is morally bankrupt to burden future generations to pay today's bloated, wasteful expenses just to maintain the status quo.
It is insane to encourage an unhealthy lifestyle and then wonder why the costs of treating the illnesses we've generated are skyrocketing. The obvious solution is to look at health as an ecosystem of inputs and dynamics that interact in predictable ways. If we put garbage in, we get garbage (poor health) out. In essence, the current system relieves the participants (“patients”) of the responsibility to be part of the solution, and offers few ways for people to participate in regaining their health.
The solutions are visible, but they're not profitable to the status quo, so we get a system that is more expensive than any other on Earth while yielding subpar outcomes.
“Growth” as the solution to every problem may have worked in 1945, but runaway “growth” of debt-funded consumption was …read more
Source: What’s Truly Progressive?
Fiat Chrysler accused of cheating emissions tests
EPA accuses Fiat Chrysler over cheating on diesel emissions testing, the same way Volkswagen did. …read more
Source: Fiat Chrysler accused of cheating emissions tests
The other DJT — Dow Jones Transports is on fire
Shares of railroads, airlines and trucking stocks have enjoyed a nice pop since the election. Southwest is near an all-time high. Trump’s win could boost demand for shipping and travel. If the rally continues, it could lift the whole market. …read more
Source: The other DJT — Dow Jones Transports is on fire
Exxon ordered to turn over climate change research
A Massachusetts judge ordered Exxon on Wednesday to hand over more than four decades of the company’s climate change research. …read more
Source: Exxon ordered to turn over climate change research
CVS cuts cost for EpiPen competitor
CVS Health is selling generic Adrenaclick from Impax Labs, competitor to Mylan’s EpiPen, for $109.99. …read more
Source: CVS cuts cost for EpiPen competitor
