Here's more proof that these Corporate People
are a bunch of sociopathic assholes
["I'll believe a corporation is a person
when Texas executes one"]
1 The assholes know they can always pay off the smart kids-
checkit: Salon
This
is why Piketty matters: Davos
and the real story about economists and the 1
percent
Economists
take heat for failing to predict crises, but not disclosing financial ties is a
bigger problem
Janine
R. Wedel
Davos,
that yearly exercise in cognitive dissonance formally known as the World
Economic Forum, is over, as is the time-honored, and highly entertaining
tradition of Davos-bashing. Jon Stewart rarely lets Davos pass, railing last
week at the hypocrisies of “Wealthstock,” where the super-elite wax on about
sustainability, but use a reported 1,700 private jets to get to the Swiss ski
mecca. Economic blogger Felix Salmon calls it the “sybaritic alpine gabfest.”
One of my favorite takedowns is Salon’s simple headline from a year ago:
“Welcome to Davos, Where Rich People Talk About Poor People.”
Beyond
some of the contradictions that Davos offers are real questions of relevance.
Should Davos provide some geo-econo-political crystal ball for the year ahead?
As the New York Times put it last week: “Longtime participants of the forum
noted that for all the brainpower there in past years, those at the event did
not predict significant upheavals in recent years — like the financial crisis
or the Arab Spring or the Russian takeover of Crimea.”
Among
the attendees at Davos are some of the world’s most elite economists and they,
too, have been lambasted since 2008 over the same question: Should they have
been able to predict the crisis? This was an issue taken up by one of the most
famous among them just as Davos began last week.
I am
loath to take issue with much that Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller
has to say because his crystal ball seemed to be working very well a decade
ago, when his colleagues’ were not. In warning that real estate and stock
prices might indeed be “irrationally exuberant” when so many others shrugged,
he stood outside the consensus.
But as
I read his recent piece defending the work of fellow economists, I thought
there was something very much missing. He wonders in part why the public
expects economists to have predicted the 2008 crash, when they had never
foreseen crises in the past. And he is puzzled by the enormous public anger
toward economists this time around, where there was little evidence of such ire
in past crises.
Shiller
writes:
One reason may be the perception that many
economists were smugly promoting the ‘efficient markets hypothesis’—a view that
seemed to rule out a collapse in asset prices. Believing that markets always
know best, they dismissed warnings by a few mere mortals (including me) about
overpricing of equities and housing. After both markets crashed spectacularly,
the profession’s credibility took a direct hit.
But
that credibility has also taken a direct hit from another perception. It comes
not from what economists were prognosticating, per se, but rather what they
were not saying when making those prognostications.
Namely,
they were not consistently disclosing
their own affiliations outside academe that could compromise their impartiality.
And this, as I argue in my book “Unaccountable,” is a violation of public trust
that has helped sour the public on the economics profession. Davos, too, has
this element: We, the public, get to receive that group’s public
pronouncements, but we hardly know what motives might be at play in making
those pronouncements.
…
2 The assholes will always try to pay off the rulers-
checkit: Zerohedge
"QE
Benefits Mostly The Wealthy" JPMorgan Admits,
And Lists 8 Ways ECB's QE
Will Hurt Everyone Else
Submitted
by Tyler Durden on 01/24/2015 15:21 -0500
Over
the past 48 hours, the world has been bombarded with a relentless array of
soundbites, originating either at the ECB, or - inexplicably - out of Greece,
the place which has been explicitly isolated by Frankfurt, that the European
Central Bank's QE will benefit everyone.
Setting
the record straight: it won't, and not just in our own words which most are
familiar with as we have been repeating them since 2009, but those of JPM's
Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, who just said what has been painfully clear to all but
the 99% ever since the start of QE, namely this: "The wealth effects that
come with QE are not evenly distributing. The boost in equity and housing
wealth is mostly benefiting their major owners, i.e. the wealthy."
Thank
you JPM. Now if only the central banks will also admit what we have been saying
for 6 years, then there will be one less reason for us to continue existing.
And of
course, even the benefits to those who stand to gain the most from QE are only
temporary. Because the same asset prices which rise thanks to money printing
are only transitory, and ultimately mean reverting. To wit: "It
potentially creates asset bubbles by lowering asset yields by so much relative
to historical norms, that an eventual return to normality will be accompanied
with sharp price declines."
So
enjoy your music while it lasts dear 0.1%. Collateral eligible for monetization
is becoming increasingly scarce and by our calculations there is about 2 years
worth of runway left for G3 assets before central bank interventions in the
private market result in a complete paralysis of virtually every asset class,
and the end of capital markets as we know them.
As for
everyone else, here is a list of 8 ways that the ECB's QE will hurt, not help,
by way of JP Morgan.
…
more soon
