By Noni Mausa We Need To Be Kind To Be Cruel Aug 15 2015 In press conferences and TV panels, we keep hearing important people discuss budgets, entitlements, deficits, and the big knobs and levers of the economy.  Those spokesmen or dignitaries who have positioned themselves as deciders, judging what everyone else deserves, never tire of telling us all about it. They imply they can control economic and political ups and downs, in order to take credit for the ups and assign blame for the downs, and sometimes they are even correct.  But what they seldom do is look at how we we’re hollowing out the living world, burning here, poisoning there, concreting everywhere and trampling the rest with our billions.  They like control, but they never claim they any control over core social problems like overpopulation.  That would be social engineering!. That would be unnatural and cruel!. The truth is, we’re heading for a literal world of hurt, and to reverse course, however cruelly and unnaturally, we first need really solid, reliable, almost lavish social supports. It sounds nuts, eh?. Another of those lefties, laying out a buffet on somebody else’s dime? But believe me, the alternative is catastrophic.  A Royal Fork for the world is a picnic by comparison to the fork we have ahead of us. We’re on the brink of disaster. There are too many of us.  We use too much stuff, we make too much mess, we’ve outgrown our resources.  We need social deflation– fewer people, less stuff, less waste, less war, more sharing.  We need to downsize. So, who will agree to constrain themselves for the sake of a future they may not live to see?. Who goes first?

by Joseph Joyce The Challenges of the Greek Crisis The Greek crisis has abated, but not ended. Representatives of the “troika” of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund returned to Athens for talks with the Greek government about a new bailout. This pause allows an accounting of the many […]

by Joseph Joyce Global Liquidity and U.S. Monetary Policy The events in Greece and the Ukraine have only partially drawn attention away from the financial markets’ focus on changes in U.S. monetary policy. Federal Reserve officials seem to be split over when they will raise their Federal Funds rate target, and by how much. But […]