Debt-relief efforts are stalling as developing economies are being hit by higher interest rates, a strong dollar and slowing global growth.
Developing nations are facing a catastrophic debt crisis in the coming months as rapid inflation, slowing growth, rising interest rates and a strengthening dollar coalesce into a perfect storm that could set off a wave of messy defaults that inflict economic pain on the world’s most vulnerable people.
Poor countries owe, by some calculations, as much as $200 billion to wealthy nations, multilateral development banks and private creditors. Rising interest rates have increased the value of the dollar, making it harder for foreign borrowers with debt denominated in U.S. currency to repay their loans.
Defaulting on a huge swath of loans would send borrowing costs for vulnerable nations even higher and could spawn financial crises when nearly 100 million people have already been pushed into poverty this year by the combined effects of the pandemic, inflation and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The danger poses another headwind for a world economy that has been sputtering toward a recession. The leaders of the world’s advanced economies have been grappling privately in recent weeks with how to avert financial crises in emerging markets such as Zambia, Sri Lanka and Ghana, but they have struggled to develop a plan to accelerate debt relief as they confront their own economic woes. …
A longtime University of Chicago economist who served in the Obama White House will be president of one of the Fed’s 12 regional districts.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago said on Thursday that Austan D. Goolsbee will become its next president, taking a seat at the central bank’s policy-setting table as officials work to bring down the fastest inflation in decades.
Mr. Goolsbee, who was a member and later chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration between 2009 and 2011, has long been a faculty member at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He has a doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and studied for his undergraduate degree at Yale.
He will replace Charles Evans, who has been in the role since 2007 and at the Chicago Fed since 1991 and is retiring. …
… Goolsbee is no “Chicago” economist in the tradition of Friedman et al. He is a professor of economics from the University of Chicago. This says nothing about his ideology regarding economics. If he didn’t teach at Chicago, and taught at some other school, would you assign that school’s principle dogma to him? …
Goolsbee received his PhD at MIT. His B.S, and M.A. degree were at Yale. That is a “saltwater” background, not “freshwater” in the world of economics. It is more likely that Goolsbee adheres to the Tobin canon than the Friedman canon. This line of economic reasoning parallels the line one would find from a Paul Krugman, or a Joseph Stiglitz, or Alan Blinder. …
If you care about the environment, 2022 has been a rough year.
Coal use will likely hit an all-time high. Plastic waste is on track to triple. SUVs and pickups continue to outpace sedans. And then there’s the recent climate summit in Egypt, where countries couldn’t agree to any emissions cuts. …
We have a “nature deficit disorder,” the historian Douglas Brinkley said in an interview in Boston. “In the short term, people are going to judge things politically, on ‘my pocketbook’ issues. And if [the focus is] the economy, that’s never a great moment on the environment.”
Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University, is out with a weighty new book, Silent Spring Revolution, which argues that a group of leaders — John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon — shocked Americans into caring about the environment during the 1960s and early 70s.
But the backlash to that awakening marked capitalism’s revenge, thwarting the environmental movement for the last 50 years.
In many ways, Carson is the star of Brinkley’s story: a poetic marine biologist with a flair for the dramatic, who watched with dread as Americans began to embrace pesticides in the 1940s. During World War II, and in the years afterwards, DDT was sprayed on soldiers, doused on crops, and spread on emerald-green lawns. …
John Kennedy’s love of the ocean had turned him into a fan of Carson’s immersive books. And he would pick up her environmental baton, as would Presidents Johnson and, strangely enough, Nixon, who — in between paranoid phone calls — established the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the Clean Air Act, and presided over the first Earth Day.
But even as that Earth Day was being celebrated in 1970, regulations were mounting, and corporations felt increasingly jilted.
The turning point, Brinkley says — though it’s mostly beyond the scope of his book — came in 1971, when future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memo to a friend at the US Chamber of Commerce, alleging that environmentalism was tantamount to socialism.
Powell believed that environmentalism came from “the campus pulpit, the media, the intellectuals and literary journals.” He argued that “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack.” …
… Lewis F. Powell Jr (was) … a centrist, a lifelong Democrat and a judicial workhorse, writing more than 500 opinions, his most significant contribution to American legal history was made in secret, some five months before his January 1972 elevation to the bench, and it was anything but moderate.
On Aug. 23, 1971, Powell penned a confidential 6,400-word memorandum and sent it off to his friend and Richmond, Va., neighbor, Eugene Sydnor Jr., then-chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce education committee …
… Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University, is out with a weighty new book, Silent Spring Revolution, which argues that a group of leaders — John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon — shocked Americans into caring about the environment during the 1960s and early 70s.
But the backlash to that awakening marked capitalism’s revenge, thwarting the environmental movement for the last 50 years.
In many ways, Carson is the star of Brinkley’s story: a poetic marine biologist with a flair for the dramatic, who watched with dread as Americans began to embrace pesticides in the 1940s. During World War II, and in the years afterwards, DDT was sprayed on soldiers, doused on crops, and spread on emerald-green lawns. …
The turning point, Brinkley says — though it’s mostly beyond the scope of his book — came in 1971, when future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memo to a friend at the US Chamber of Commerce, alleging that environmentalism was tantamount to socialism.
Powell believed that environmentalism came from “the campus pulpit, the media, the intellectuals and literary journals.” He argued that “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack.” …
Washington Post via Boston Globe – Dec 3 – not a free link
The White House issued a stern rebuke on Saturday after former president Donald Trump suggested suspending the Constitution in his ongoing crusade to discredit the results of the 2020 election.
“Attacking the Constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation and should be universally condemned,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement, calling the Constitution a “sacrosanct document.”
“You cannot only love America when you win,” he added.
Trump’s message on the Truth Social platform reiterated the baseless claims he has made since 2020 that the election was stolen. But he went further by suggesting that the country abandon one of its founding documents.
“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote.
The post came a day after Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, claimed he would expose how Twitter engaged in “free speech suppression” in the run-up to the 2020 election. But his “Twitter Files” did not show that the tech giant bent to the will of Democrats.
“UNPRECEDENTED FRAUD REQUIRES UNPRECEDENTED CURE!” Trump followed up in another post on Saturday afternoon on Truth Social.
Trump, who last month announced he would run again for president, helped launch Truth Social after he was banned from Twitter following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Musk has said he would allow Trump back on Twitter but the former president has not rejoined the platform.
Trump’s sustained and unfounded attacks on the 2020 election result culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol. Many GOP candidates also echoed his false claims ahead of this year’s midterms, but lost their efforts to win key state posts. …
The Democratic National Committee condemned his comments on Saturday, as did several other politicians.
“Trump’s words and actions are unacceptable, they stoke hatred and political violence, and they are dangerous,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) wrote in a tweet.
“Trump just called for the suspension of the Constitution and it is the final straw for zero republicans, especially the ones who call themselves ‘constitutional conservatives,'” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) wrote on Twitter.
As he has done before, the former president also baited GOP leaders into weighing in on his claims.
“I wonder what Mitch McConnell, the RINOS, and all of the weak Republicans who couldn’t get the Presidential Election of 2020 approved and out of the way fast enough, are thinking now?” he wrote Saturday in a subsequent Truth Social post.
Amid yet another rant about his two-year-old election defeat, Trump claimed that “a massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” He then suggested that the “Founders” (which he also put in quotation marks) would agree with him.
It’s not clear what, precisely, Trump believes “allows” for the termination of parts of the Constitution or how that would or could happen. There is, at this point, ample evidence that Trump has never had much of a grasp of what the U.S. Constitution is or means, let alone how much time, effort, and bipartisan consensus is required to modify it (legally). But Trump’s latest comment indicates he may have finally figured out that the Constitution stands in the way of his efforts to do something unconstitutional, like overturn the result of a presidential election. …
President Biden has reveled in a reputation as perhaps the most outspoken supporter of organized labor ever to sit in the White House. On his first Labor Day as president, he hailed unions as necessary “to counter corporate power, to grow the economy from the bottom up and the middle out.” But it has been easy for Mr. Biden to praise unions in an era in which they have little power to make a president uncomfortable.
The threat of a railroad strike presented the first time that Mr. Biden’s statements about unions have been put to a stress test. Americans are learning, as a result, that this president shares with many of his predecessors a queasiness about letting workers wield power.
Tens of thousands of freight railroad workers have labored without a contract for two years. In September, the Biden administration narrowly averted a strike by brokering a deal for a new contract, including a significant pay increase. But that deal was rejected by workers in four of the 12 covered unions, which together represent more than half of the industry’s unionized work force. Many of those who voted against the deal said they were holding out for paid sick leave, which the railroads have refused to provide.
Mr. Biden is not just a vocal proponent of unions. He is also a vocal proponent of requiring employers to provide paid sick leave. But this week, fearing the economic consequences of a strike, he intervened again, urging Congress to pass legislation that would impose on the unions the terms of the September deal — with no paid sick leave — without their agreement. …
Mr. Biden can still deliver a more equitable outcome. He said in a statement on Thursday that he will sign the bill as soon as he receives it. But if the president means a word of what he says about the value of unions and the needs of workers, he will instead refuse to sign this bill and press the railroads to offer workers a better deal. …
Securing a better deal for railroad workers isn’t just about helping railroad workers. A healthy work force is vital to maintain a functioning freight railroad system. And the terms of this deal will establish a standard for other workers — for better or for worse.
Mr. Biden has repeatedly said that he knows all of this. The hard part is paying the price. …
… A healthy work force is vital to maintain a functioning freight railroad system. And the terms of this deal will establish a standard for other workers — for better or for worse. …
(Workers are entitled to paid sick leave. Unionized or non-unionized – it doesn’t matter.)
If non-Unionized workers get paid sick leave (Mrs Fred & I always did), then one might believe that Unionized workers would also. Unless the lack of such could be considered a penalty for being in a union, one might suppose. Is this a great country or what?
(Generally speaking, non-unionized workers get such benefits to get them to believe that being in a union is unnecessary. So, maybe such benefits for non-unionized workers should be taken away, forthwith.)
Ukraine executed its most brazen attack into Russian territory in the nine-month-old war on Monday, targeting two military bases hundreds of miles inside the country, using unpiloted drones, according to the Russian Defense Ministry and a senior Ukrainian official.
The drones were launched from Ukrainian territory, and at least one of the strikes was made with the help of special forces close to the base who helped guide the drones to the target, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity to convey sensitive information.
The strikes signaled a new willingness by Kyiv to take the fight to bases in the heart of Russia, raising the stakes in the war, and demonstrated for the first time Ukraine’s ability to attack at such long distances. Shortly after the attacks on the bases, Russia sent a barrage of missiles streaking toward Ukrainian cities. …
… The Kremlin said that the weapons launched by Ukraine were Soviet-era jet drones and were aimed at bases in Ryazan and Engels, about 300 miles from the Ukrainian border. …
Ukraine’s government declined to publicly acknowledge the strikes, in keeping with its practice with other attacks on Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea.
The Engels air base and the Ryazan military installation are between 300 and 450 miles from the Ukrainian border, which is beyond the range of any known missile in Ukraine’s arsenal.
Even before Russia’s Defense Ministry accused Ukraine of sending drones to attack, the blast at the Engels airfield had prompted some of Russia’s influential pro-invasion bloggers to call for more strikes against Ukraine, and to renew criticism of the Russian armed forces. …
Defaults Loom as Poor Countries Face an Economic Storm
NY Times – Dec 3
Debt-relief efforts are stalling as developing economies are being hit by higher interest rates, a strong dollar and slowing global growth.
Economist Austan Goolsbee Is Named to Lead the Chicago Fed
NY Times – Dec 1
A longtime University of Chicago economist who served in the Obama White House will be president of one of the Fed’s 12 regional districts.
Austan Goolsbee-Not a “Chicago” Economist
How capitalism crushed the environment, according to historian Douglas Brinkley
Boston Globe – Dec 1 = (not a free link)
The Right-Wing Legacy Of Justice Lewis Powell And What It Means For The Supreme Court Today
How capitalism crushed the environment, according to historian Douglas Brinkley
Boston Globe – Dec 1 = (not a free link)
… Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University, is out with a weighty new book, Silent Spring Revolution, which argues that a group of leaders — John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon — shocked Americans into caring about the environment during the 1960s and early 70s.
But the backlash to that awakening marked capitalism’s revenge, thwarting the environmental movement for the last 50 years.
In many ways, Carson is the star of Brinkley’s story: a poetic marine biologist with a flair for the dramatic, who watched with dread as Americans began to embrace pesticides in the 1940s. During World War II, and in the years afterwards, DDT was sprayed on soldiers, doused on crops, and spread on emerald-green lawns. …
The turning point, Brinkley says — though it’s mostly beyond the scope of his book — came in 1971, when future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memo to a friend at the US Chamber of Commerce, alleging that environmentalism was tantamount to socialism.
Powell believed that environmentalism came from “the campus pulpit, the media, the intellectuals and literary journals.” He argued that “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack.” …
White House rebukes Trump’s suggestion to suspend Constitution over 2020 election
Washington Post via Boston Globe – Dec 3 – not a free link
Trump wants to suspend US Constitution
NY magazine – Dec 4
If Biden Is Really Pro-Union, He HAD One Chance to Prove It
NY Times – Dec 1
If Biden Is Really Pro-Union, He HAD One Chance to Prove It
NY Times – Dec 1
If non-Unionized workers get paid sick leave (Mrs Fred & I always did), then one might believe that Unionized workers would also. Unless the lack of such could be considered a penalty for being in a union, one might suppose. Is this a great country or what?
(Generally speaking, non-unionized workers get such benefits to get them to believe that being in a union is unnecessary. So, maybe such benefits for non-unionized workers should be taken away, forthwith.)
Ukrainian drones attack military bases hundreds of miles inside Russia
NY Times – just in