A continued torrent of consumer demand, paired with an emerging atmosphere of normalcy as coronavirus caseloads and health restrictions fade away, led to a burst of new jobs last month, giving reason for optimism despite the year’s increasingly uncertain economic outlook.
U.S. employers added 431,000 jobs in March on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department said Friday. The figure was just shy of forecasts, and there was an upward revision of 95,000 for the previous two months of this year.
The unemployment rate was 3.6 percent, down from 3.8 percent a month earlier and just a touch higher than its levels right before the pandemic.
Among the industries with gains were leisure and hospitality (112,000), retailing (49,000) and manufacturing (38,000).
Job openings and the number of workers voluntarily leaving their positions remain near record levels, among the measures showing that demand for workers is the highest in decades. …
Wages climbed at a rapid pace in the year through March, another sign that labor shortages are prodding employers to increase wages to retain and attract workers.
Wages have picked up by 5.6 percent over the past year, a far quicker pace than the 2 to 3 percent annual pay gains that were typical during the 2010s. Compared to the prior month, wages rose 0.4 percent.
Leisure and hospitality pay shot up as wages rose broadly. (graph at link)
Quickly climbing pay is a sign that employers are competing for a finite pool of workers. There are roughly 1.8 job openings for every unemployed worker, and companies complain of struggling to hire across a range of skill sets and industries.
Over the past year, pay has picked up most markedly for workers in the leisure and hospitality industry, climbing by 14.9 percent, while workers in transportation and warehousing have also received double-digit pay gains. …
… (JM) Keynes was right to see World War I as the end of an era for the global economy. To take one clearly relevant example, in 1913 the Russian empire was a huge wheat exporter; it would be three generations before some of the former republics of the Soviet Union resumed that role. And the second wave of globalization, with its world-spanning supply chains made possible by containerization and telecommunications, didn’t really get going until around 1990.
So are we about to see a second deglobalization? The answer, probably, is yes. And while there were important downsides to globalization as we knew it, there will be even starker consequences if, as I and many others fear, we see a significant rollback in world trade.
Why is world trade taking a hit? Vladimir Putin’s botched war of conquest has, of course, meant an end to wheat exports from Ukraine, and it probably cut off much of Russia’s sales, too. It’s not entirely clear how sharply Russia’s exports of oil and natural gas have already been reduced — Europe has been reluctant to impose sanctions on imports of products on which, fecklessly, it allowed itself to become dependent; but the European Union is moving to end that dependence. …
Wait, there’s more. You mightn’t have expected Putin’s war to have much of an effect on auto production. But modern cars include a lot of wiring, including a specialized part called a wire harness — and many of Europe’s wire harnesses, it turns out, are made in Ukraine. (In case you’re wondering, most U.S. wire harnesses are made in Mexico.) …
… what Putin has taught us is that countries run by strongmen who surround themselves with yes-men aren’t reliable business partners. A Chinese confrontation with the West, economic or military, would be wildly irrational — but so was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Tellingly, the Ukraine war appears to have led to large-scale capital flight from … China.
So if you’re a business leader right now, surely you’re wondering whether it’s smart to stake your company’s future on the assumption that you’ll keep being able to buy what you need from authoritarian regimes. Bringing production back to nations that believe in the rule of law may raise your costs by a few percent, but the price may be worth it for the stability it buys.
If we are about to see a partial retreat from globalization, will that be a bad thing? Wealthy, advanced economies will end up only slightly poorer than they would have been otherwise; Britain managed to keep growing despite the decline in world trade after 1913. But I’m worried about the impact on nations that have made progress in recent decades but would be desperately poor without access to world markets — nations like Bangladesh, whose economic achievements have depended crucially on its garment exports.
Unfortunately, we’re relearning the lessons of World War I: The benefits of globalization are always at risk from the threat of war and the whims of dictators. To make the world durably richer, we need to make it safer.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
[Among the several times that I have Google’d for this excerpt from General Theory, this is the first time that a page from the blog of DeLong ranger topped the hits list.]
Weekend Reading: John Maynard Keynes: On Speculation, from The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Moneyhttps://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/02/weekend-reading-john-maynard-keynes-the-general-theory-of-employment-interest-and-money-by-john-maynard-keynes-1.html: ‘The professional investor is forced to concern himself with the anticipation of impending changes, in the news or in the atmosphere, of the kind by which experience shows that the mass psychology of the market is most influenced. This is the inevitable result of investment markets organised with a view to so-called ‘liquidity’. Of the maxims of orthodox finance none, surely, is more anti-social than the fetish of liquidity, the doctrine that it is a positive virtue on the part of investment institutions to concentrate their resources upon the holding of ‘liquid’ securities. It forgets that there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole. The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelop our future. The actual, private object of the most skilled investment to-day is ‘to beat the gun’, as the Americans so well express it, to outwit the crowd, and to pass the bad, or depreciating, half-crown to the other fellow…
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
The capital gains tax preference is the primary artifact of the liquidity fetish as well as the great enabler of LBO and mergers in general where a healthy, profitable firm is targeted for either absorption or liquidation. From that we get market dominance, price in-elasticity, monopoly, monopsony, offshoring, union busting, employee pension fund busting, and influential political lobbyists. What am I forgetting?
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
Forgot loss of competition to incentivize product quality innovation as well along with lower prices. There is of course considerable innovation put into market dominating products, but more to bury competition rather than to be useful to customers.
Ukraine’s army claimed to be in control of dozens of towns to the west and east of Kyiv where some of the most intense fighting has been going on since the beginning of the war. If Ukraine’s stated gains hold up in areas where Russia has withdrawn its troops, these movements would mark the largest shift in fighting around the capital in weeks. …
Russian troops are in retreat from areas surrounding Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, military analysts and Ukrainian officials say, a stunning reversal in what could signal a broader shift in Russia’s assault in the sixth week of war. …
…
According to the latest British defense intelligence assessment, Ukrainian forces are continuing to advance against the withdrawing Russian forces. Russian forces are reported to have withdrawn from nearby Hostomel airport, which had been the center of fierce fighting since the start of the invasion, the assessment added. …
The Russian forces that stormed toward Kyiv in the opening days of the war in imposing tanks columns were in retreat from the capital on Saturday, pulling back under fire in dozens of outlying towns and villages and leaving behind burned tanks and dead soldiers, according to Ukrainian officials, satellite images, military analysts and reporting from the towns themselves.
Russian attacks elsewhere in Ukraine have not abated, and the Pentagon has cautioned that Russian formations near Kyiv could be repositioning to refit or resupply for renewed assaults. But by Saturday, suburban towns just outside Kyiv that had for weeks echoed with a cacophony of gunfire and artillery booms had gone quiet. …
… Overall, more than 20 tankers that have departed from Russian ports since the invasion — together carrying almost 8.5 million barrels of oil — now list their status as “For Orders” or “Drifting,” which indicates a lack of destination, according to the Russian Tanker Tracking Group, an initiative led by the Ukraine government to observe Russian oil sales. Other tankers now list final destinations like “ZZZ.”
[It is] uncommon to see so many tankers sailing under “for orders” status, and it likely had to do with the U.S. ban on Russian imports combined with self-sanctioning among oil companies. (Tankers sometimes do change destinations or are turned back if there is a mishap at the accepting refinery, for example.) …
At the same time, at least seven tankers are still sailing toward the United States to offload their shipments before the U.S. ban on Russian oil takes full effect on April 21.
The United States imports only a small fraction of its oil from Russia, but nevertheless gasoline prices in America have been soaring in part because of the uncertainty over global supplies caused by the Ukraine invasion. On Thursday, President Biden, under pressure to bring down high American gasoline prices, said that the United States would release up to 180 million barrels of oil from its emergency reserves, a release at an unprecedented scale. …
Research indicates that people with authoritarian tendencies find life easier and more fulfilling. What does it take to counter the emotional appeal of absolutist ideas?
When Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered troops to march into Ukraine, he kicked off an invasion that has since claimed tens of thousands of lives and forced at least 4 million refugees to flee the country. Putin’s war lays bare the damage that can be done by a despotic leader with authoritarian followers — people who prize conformity, clear hierarchies, and absolute authority. Several independent polls have recently pegged Putin’s approval rating among Russians well above 50 percent.
Propaganda and repression explain those numbers to some extent. But authoritarians don’t just follow a leader out of fear. There’s also a lot in it for them, psychologically speaking. Not only are authoritarians generally happier than the rest of us but they find life more meaningful and they’re less prone to some poor mental health outcomes, such as the loss of purpose that often accompanies depression. As a result, countering the appeal of rising authoritarianism — in the United States as well as Russia — will require offering people other means to the same psychological ends. …
Researchers who study authoritarianism have found that about a third of people, across a range of cultures, embrace authoritarian ideas. Political scientist and “On Fascism” author Matthew MacWilliams reports that in the United States, about 18 percent of people are highly authoritarian, while another 23 percent score just a hair below them on authoritarianism scales.
Though post-World War II social scientists like Theodor Adorno suspected authoritarians’ views made them feel secure, only in recent years have experts more precisely spelled out the mental benefits.
In a survey of about 250 Canadian college students, Acadia University psychologist Cara MacInnis found that those who scored higher on measures of authoritarianism also enjoyed better subjective well-being, which reflects daily happiness and overall life satisfaction. Likewise, when University of North Carolina psychologist Jake Womick surveyed over 2,000 people about their beliefs and outlook, more-authoritarian respondents reported feeling that their lives were more meaningful — a finding that holds up independent of their religious beliefs. And though some authoritarians in Womick’s studies were depressed, they retained a stronger sense of life’s meaning than non-authoritarians with similar symptoms.
In part, people who follow strongman leaders in the Putin or Trump mold are likelier to be cheerful because they believe they’ve found a foolproof way to navigate life. Authoritarianism gives people “a sense of certainty about who they are and where they belong,” Womick says. It also tends to rush in when existing sources of meaning vaporize: Before Hitler’s rise, German churches were declining as centers of authority, much as religious communities and stable career paths are vanishing today in much of the West. …
Researchers who study authoritarianism have found that about a third of people, across a range of cultures, embrace authoritarian ideas. Political scientist and “On Fascism” author Matthew MacWilliams reports that in the United States, about 18 percent of people are highly authoritarian, while another 23 percent score just a hair below them on authoritarianism scales.
Though post-World War II social scientists like Theodor Adorno suspected authoritarians’ views made them feel secure, only in recent years have experts more precisely spelled out the mental benefits.
In a survey of about 250 Canadian college students, Acadia University psychologist Cara MacInnis found that those who scored higher on measures of authoritarianism also enjoyed better subjective well-being, which reflects daily happiness and overall life satisfaction. Likewise, when University of North Carolina psychologist Jake Womick surveyed over 2,000 people about their beliefs and outlook, more-authoritarian respondents reported feeling that their lives were more meaningful — a finding that holds up independent of their religious beliefs. And though some authoritarians in Womick’s studies were depressed, they retained a stronger sense of life’s meaning than non-authoritarians with similar symptoms. …
In part, people who follow strongman leaders in the Putin or Trump mold are likelier to be cheerful because they believe they’ve found a foolproof way to navigate life. Authoritarianism gives people “a sense of certainty about who they are and where they belong,” Womick says. It also tends to rush in when existing sources of meaning vaporize: Before Hitler’s rise, German churches were declining as centers of authority, much as religious communities and stable career paths are vanishing today in much of the West.
In the face of such upheaval, it’s soothing to latch onto leaders and philosophies that tell you exactly what your mission is, what really matters — and, just as important, what (and who) doesn’t. Authoritarianism, Womick writes, “helps people answer some of life’s big questions, much like religion does: What should I do with my life? What is right and what is wrong? Who are the people I should associate with and who should I distance myself from?” …
It has now been 37 days since Vladimir Putin’s forces reportedly thought they could capture Kyiv within 48 to 72 hours. Many news reports describe the Russian invasion as “stalled,” but as I read the detailed analyses, that isn’t quite right: Ukrainian forces are counterattacking, and in many places Russia appears to be losing ground.
One thing Russia has managed to defend quite effectively, however, is the value of its currency. The ruble plunged in the days after the Ukraine invasion, but it has since recovered almost all of its losses (graph at link).
One thing worth noting is that Russia’s economic officials appear to be more competent than its generals. Elvira Nabiullina, the governor of Russia’s central bank — a role equivalent to that of Jerome Powell at the Federal Reserve — is especially well regarded by her peers abroad. Nabiullina reportedly tried to resign after the invasion started, but Putin wouldn’t let her leave.
Unwilling as she may have been to stay in her job, Nabiullina and her colleagues pulled out all the stops to defend the ruble. They raised the key interest rate — more or less equivalent to the federal funds rate in the United States — from 9.5 to 20 percent, to induce people to keep their funds in Russia. They also imposed extensive controls to prevent capital flight: Russians have faced restrictions on moving their money into their foreign bank accounts, and foreign investors have been prohibited from exiting Russian stocks, and more. …
But there’s a mystery here. No, it’s not puzzling to see the ruble recover given such drastic measures. The question is why Russia is willing to defend its currency at the expense of all other goals. After all, the draconian measures taken to stabilize the ruble will probably deepen what is already looking like a depression-level slump in Russia’s real economy, brought on by surprisingly wide and effective sanctions imposed by the free world (I think we can resurrect that term, don’t you?), in response to its military aggression. …
Let’s take a brief excursion into economic theory here. One of the classic propositions in international economics is known as the “impossible trinity.” The idea is that there are three things a country might want from its currency. It might want stability in the currency’s value in terms of other currencies — for example, a stable value of the ruble in dollars or euros — to create greater certainty for businesses. It might want free movement of funds across its borders, again to facilitate business. And it might want to retain freedom of monetary action — the ability to cut interest rates to fight recessions or raise them to fight inflation.
The impossible trinity says that you can’t have it all, that you have to choose two out of three. You can, like Britain, have open capital markets and independent monetary policy, but that means allowing the value of the pound to fluctuate. You can, like countries that have adopted the euro, have free movement of capital and currency stability, but only by giving up monetary independence. Or you can, like China, have a stable currency and your own monetary policy, but only by maintaining capital controls. (Those controls, by the way, are one main reason the renminbi isn’t going to rival the dollar as a global currency for the foreseeable future.)
So what’s puzzling about Russia? Normally a country can choose two out of three legs of the trinity; Russia has decided to take only one. It has imposed severe capital controls, but it has also sacrificed monetary independence, drastically raising interest rates in the face of a looming recession.
In effect, Russia is taking a belt-and-suspenders (not to be confused with Belt and Road) approach to defending the ruble, and this has seemingly taken priority over all other economic goals. Why? …
Let me offer a speculation, with the clear proviso that it’s only a speculation, not based on any direct evidence. My guess is that the value of the ruble has become a crucial target not so much because it’s all important but because it’s so clearly visible.
Suppose that, as seems highly likely, Russia sees a huge surge in inflation and a plunge in gross domestic product in the months ahead. Will Putin’s government admit that these bad things are happening? Quite possibly not. Authoritarian regimes often try to suppress unfavorable economic data. Recently, for example, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, responded to reports of high inflation by sacking the head of his nation’s statistical agency. …
If Russia’s economy deteriorates as badly as most expect in the near future, it seems all too likely that the nation’s muzzled media will simply deny that anything bad is happening. One thing they couldn’t deny, however, would be a drastically depreciated ruble. So defending the ruble, never mind the real economy, makes sense as a propaganda strategy.
A further thought: Among the people who might not be aware of deteriorating Russian economic conditions, as long as the ruble holds its value, might be Vladimir Putin himself. U.S. intelligence claims that Putin’s military advisers have been afraid to tell him how badly the war is going. Is there any reason to believe that his economic advisers will be any more courageous?
So Russia’s defense of the ruble, while impressive, isn’t a sign that the Putin regime is handling economic policy well. It reflects, instead, an odd choice of priorities, and may actually be a further sign of Russia’s policy dysfunction.
Presumably this ‘defense of the ruble’ has a lot to do with Russia demanding payment for gas & oil deliveries from Russia, payment demanded in rubles.
Perhaps US withdrawals from strategic reserves will satisfy demand somewhat, but going forward, Europe would need on-going supplies from Russia, and for that they are going to need to obtain rubles. Fortunately, warmer weather is just around the corner.
Boston Globe – April 4 – Bill McKibben, environmentalist
If the United States delivers millions of heat pumps to Europe before October, then Russian President Vladimir Putin’s energy weapon would be much less potent
Those of us at Third Act — the new national group organizing people over 60 in defense of climate and democracy — started pushing a plan we call Heat Pumps for Peace and Freedom in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Some of our members are old enough to have fought in World War II; some remember the national efforts that preceded and followed that titanic conflict. In the years before America officially entered the war, the Lend-Lease program provided massive quantities of materiel to nations standing up to Adolf Hitler; in the years after VE Day, the Marshall Plan rebuilt the continent’s economy.
Now all of us face not only the too-familiar threat of Russian President Vladimir Putin — and perhaps his nuclear weapons — but also the peril of climate change, the urgency of which is made more imperative with the release Monday of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Both threats are, in different ways, products of fossil fuel. …
In 2013, the French economist Thomas Piketty, in his best seller “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” a book eagerly received in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, put forth the notion that returns on capital historically outstrip economic growth (his famous r>g formula). The upshot? The rich get richer, while the rest of us stay stuck in the mud. Now, nearly a decade later, Piketty is set to publish “A Brief History of Equality,” in which he argues that we’re on a trajectory of greater, not less, equality and lays out his prescriptions for remedying our current corrosive wealth disparities. (In short: Tax the rich.) If the line from one book to the other looks slightly askew given the state of the world, then, Piketty suggests, you’re looking from the wrong vantage point. “I am relatively optimistic,” says Piketty, who is 50, “about the fact that there is a long-run movement toward more equality, which goes beyond the little details of what happens within a specific decade.” …
It would have been better before his election. If you had told the American public before the elections that he wanted a wealth tax — which again is something that is very high in opinion polls — this would have been much easier. This could have forced the Democratic Congress to take a stand. It’s more complicated now. But if it works, it’s better than nothing.
I understand what you’re saying about the popularity of a proposed billionaire tax, but do you believe America is at a place where a phrase like “wealth redistribution,” which is what you’re talking about, is broadly politically plausible? When you say Americans don’t like redistribution, some certainly don’t like it, but in the 20th century, high, progressive taxation of income and inherited wealth was to a large extent invented in the United States. That’s why it always makes me skeptical when people say, Americans don’t like this, don’t like that. Look at history! There’s no deterministic reason why a given country should be this or that. Sometimes, in my country and in the U.S. also, people tell you, “Look, we are not Swedes.” This is used as an argument to say that there is a culture of equality in Sweden, which we would never have. …
A wave of legislation, particularly in the West, is making states “not only a little different but radically different,” says one expert on government.
After the governor of Texas ordered state agencies to investigate parents for child abuse if they provide certain medical treatments to their transgender children, California lawmakers proposed a law making the state a refuge for transgender youths and their families.
When Idaho proposed a ban on abortions that empowers relatives to sue anyone who helps terminate a pregnancy after six weeks, nearby Oregon approved $15 million to help cover the abortion expenses of patients from out-of-state.
As Republican activists aggressively pursue conservative social policies in state legislatures across the country, liberal states are taking defensive actions. Spurred by a U.S. Supreme Court that is expected to soon upend an array of longstanding rights, including the constitutional right to abortion, left-leaning lawmakers from Washington to Vermont have begun to expand access to abortion, bolster voting rights and denounce laws in conservative states targeting L.G.B.T.Q. minors.
The flurry of action, particularly in the West, is intensifying already marked differences between life in liberal- and conservative-led parts of the country. And it’s a sign of the consequences when state governments are controlled increasingly by single parties. Control of legislative chambers is split between parties now in two states — Minnesota and Virginia — compared with 15 states 30 years ago. …
The US economy added 431,000 jobs in March.
NY Times – April 1
Rising wages are good news for workers but a worrying sign for inflation
NY Times – April 1
Will Putin Kill the Global Economy?
NY Times – Paul Krugman – March 31
[Among the several times that I have Google’d for this excerpt from General Theory, this is the first time that a page from the blog of DeLong ranger topped the hits list.]
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/01/weekend-reading-john-maynard-keynes-on-speculation-from-the-general-theory-of-employment-interest-and-money.html
Weekend Reading: John Maynard Keynes: On Speculation, from The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money https://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/02/weekend-reading-john-maynard-keynes-the-general-theory-of-employment-interest-and-money-by-john-maynard-keynes-1.html: ‘The professional investor is forced to concern himself with the anticipation of impending changes, in the news or in the atmosphere, of the kind by which experience shows that the mass psychology of the market is most influenced. This is the inevitable result of investment markets organised with a view to so-called ‘liquidity’. Of the maxims of orthodox finance none, surely, is more anti-social than the fetish of liquidity, the doctrine that it is a positive virtue on the part of investment institutions to concentrate their resources upon the holding of ‘liquid’ securities. It forgets that there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole. The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelop our future. The actual, private object of the most skilled investment to-day is ‘to beat the gun’, as the Americans so well express it, to outwit the crowd, and to pass the bad, or depreciating, half-crown to the other fellow…
I fell in love with Keynes when I first read this from here –
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/index.htm
The capital gains tax preference is the primary artifact of the liquidity fetish as well as the great enabler of LBO and mergers in general where a healthy, profitable firm is targeted for either absorption or liquidation. From that we get market dominance, price in-elasticity, monopoly, monopsony, offshoring, union busting, employee pension fund busting, and influential political lobbyists. What am I forgetting?
Forgot loss of competition to incentivize product quality innovation as well along with lower prices. There is of course considerable innovation put into market dominating products, but more to bury competition rather than to be useful to customers.
Russian troops are in retreat from areas surrounding Kyiv
NY Times – April 2
Strains in the Market for Russian Oil
NY Times – April 2
Vladimir Putin’s fans are happier than you are
Boston Globe – March 31
(Many links, that won’t post.)
Vladimir Putin’s fans are happier than you are …
Researchers who study authoritarianism have found that about a third of people, across a range of cultures, embrace authoritarian ideas. Political scientist and “On Fascism” author Matthew MacWilliams reports that in the United States, about 18 percent of people are highly authoritarian, while another 23 percent score just a hair below them on authoritarianism scales.
Though post-World War II social scientists like Theodor Adorno suspected authoritarians’ views made them feel secure, only in recent years have experts more precisely spelled out the mental benefits.
In a survey of about 250 Canadian college students, Acadia University psychologist Cara MacInnis found that those who scored higher on measures of authoritarianism also enjoyed better subjective well-being, which reflects daily happiness and overall life satisfaction. Likewise, when University of North Carolina psychologist Jake Womick surveyed over 2,000 people about their beliefs and outlook, more-authoritarian respondents reported feeling that their lives were more meaningful — a finding that holds up independent of their religious beliefs. And though some authoritarians in Womick’s studies were depressed, they retained a stronger sense of life’s meaning than non-authoritarians with similar symptoms. …
In part, people who follow strongman leaders in the Putin or Trump mold are likelier to be cheerful because they believe they’ve found a foolproof way to navigate life. Authoritarianism gives people “a sense of certainty about who they are and where they belong,” Womick says. It also tends to rush in when existing sources of meaning vaporize: Before Hitler’s rise, German churches were declining as centers of authority, much as religious communities and stable career paths are vanishing today in much of the West.
In the face of such upheaval, it’s soothing to latch onto leaders and philosophies that tell you exactly what your mission is, what really matters — and, just as important, what (and who) doesn’t. Authoritarianism, Womick writes, “helps people answer some of life’s big questions, much like religion does: What should I do with my life? What is right and what is wrong? Who are the people I should associate with and who should I distance myself from?” …
The Curious Case of the Recovering Ruble
NY Times – Paul Krugman – April 1
Presumably this ‘defense of the ruble’ has a lot to do with Russia demanding payment for gas & oil deliveries from Russia, payment demanded in rubles.
Perhaps US withdrawals from strategic reserves will satisfy demand somewhat, but going forward, Europe would need on-going supplies from Russia, and for that they are going to need to obtain rubles. Fortunately, warmer weather is just around the corner.
Heat pumps could help ease the climate crisis — and the war in Ukraine
Boston Globe – April 4 – Bill McKibben, environmentalist
Thomas Piketty Thinks America Is Primed for Wealth Redistribution
NY Times magazine – April 1 (Interview)
Fred
“No free rides.”
But I’m telling you,
they got me by the balls..
“City Slickers”
It is an Alternative Minimum Tax for rich f*cks.
It has been around for decades. Came close a couple of times.
Flurry of New Laws Move Blue and Red States Further Apart
NY Times – April 3