Category Archives: India

OECD Calls an End to the Global Recession

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Guess it wasn’t as bad as most of the doomsday crowd thought?

They never give sufficient credit to the automatic stabilizers and fiscal policy in general.

I suppose that were understood there would have been a policy response at least a year ago to avert the damage that resulted by their lack of appropriate action.

Nor is a double dip out of the question, with proposals to tighten fiscal looming and interest rates very low.

OECD calls an end to the global recession

By David Prosser

September 12 (The Independent) — The global downturn was effectively declared over yesterday, with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) revealing that “clear signs of recovery are now visible” in all seven of the leading Western economies, as well as in each of the key “Bric” nations.

The OECD’s composite leading indicators suggest that activity is now improving in all of the world’s most significant 11 economies – the leading seven, consisting of the US, UK, Germany, Italy, France, Canada and Japan, and the Bric nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China – and in almost every case at a faster pace than previously.

Composite Leading Indicators point to broad economic recovery

September 11 (OECD) — OECD composite leading indicators (CLIs) for July 2009 show stronger signs of recovery in most of the OECD economies. Clear signals of recovery are now visible in all major seven economies, in particular in France and Italy, as well as in China, India and Russia. The signs from Brazil, where a trough is emerging, are also more encouraging than in last month’s assessment.


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India’s Growth Accelerates for First Time Since 2007

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India the next engine of growth where deficit spending remained high and the recession was largely averted?

All they need to do is let themselves become a large net importer.

India’s Growth Accelerates for First Time Since 2007

By Cherian Thomas

Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) — India’s economic growth accelerated
for the first time since 2007, indicating the global recession’s
impact on Asia’s third-largest economy is waning.

Gross domestic product expanded 6.1 percent last quarter
from a year earlier after a 5.8 percent rise in the previous
quarter, the Central Statistical Organisation said in New Delhi
today. Economists forecast a 6.2 percent gain.

India joins China, Japan and Indonesia in rebounding as
Asian economies benefits from more than $950 billion of stimulus
spending and lower borrowing costs. India’s recovery may stall
as drought threatens to reduce harvests and spur food inflation,
making it harder for the central bank to judge when to raise
interest rates.

“The weak monsoon has complicated the situation for the
central bank,” said Saugata Bhattacharya, an economist at Axis
Bank Ltd. in Mumbai. “Poor rains will hurt growth and stoke
inflationary pressures as well.”

India’s benchmark Sensitive stock index maintained its
declines today, dropping 1 percent to 15755.33 in Mumbai at
11:12 a.m. local time. The yield on the key 7-year government
bond held at a nine-month high of 7.43 percent, while the rupee
was little changed at 48.86 per dollar.

Before the rains turned scanty, the Reserve Bank of India
on July 28 forecast the economy would grow 6 percent “with an
upward bias” in the year to March 31, the weakest pace since
2003. It also raised its inflation forecast to 5 percent from 4
percent by the end of the financial year. The key wholesale
price inflation index fell 0.95 percent in the week to Aug. 15.

‘Recovery Impulses’

The central bank’s Aug. 27 annual report said withdrawing
the cheap money available in the economy would heighten the risk
of weakening “recovery impulses,” while sustaining inexpensive
credit for too long “can only increase inflation in the
future.”

As the global recession hit India, the central bank
injected about 5.6 trillion rupees ($115 billion) into the
economy, which together with government fiscal stimulus amounts
to more than 12 percent of GDP.

China’s economic growth accelerated to 7.9 percent last
quarter from 6.1 percent in the previous three months, aided by
a 4 trillion yuan ($585 billion) stimulus package and lower
borrowing costs. China and India are the world’s two fastest
growing major economies.

Interest Rates

The Reserve Bank of India kept its benchmark reverse
repurchase rate unchanged at 3.25 percent in its last monetary
policy statement on July 28 and signaled an end to its deepest
round of interest-rate cuts on concern that inflation will
“creep up” from October. The next policy meeting is scheduled
for Oct. 27.

Manufacturing in India rebounded to 3.4 percent growth in
the quarter ended June 30 after shrinking 1.4 percent in the
previous three months. Mining rose 7.9 percent compared with 1.6
percent while electricity growth almost doubled to 6.2 percent
during the period, today’s statement said.

India’s move to a higher growth trajectory is on course,
Ashok Chawla, the top bureaucrat in the finance ministry, told
reporters in Mumbai.

Drought or drought-like conditions has been declared in 278
districts in India, or 44 percent of the nation’s total, as
rainfall has been 25 percent below average so far in the four-
month monsoon season that started June 1, the farm ministry said
Aug. 27.


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Robert Pirsig

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From ‘Lila:’

“Of all the contributions America has made to the history of the world, the idea of freedom from a social hierarchy has been the greatest…”

“And yes, although Jefferson called this doctrine of socially equality ‘self evident,’ it is not at all self evident. Scientific evidence and the social evidence of history indicate the opposite is self-evident. There is no ‘self-evidence’ in European history that all men are created equal. There’s no nation in Europe that doesn’t trace its history back to a time when it was ‘self-evident’ that all men are created unequal. Jean Jacques Rousseau, who is sometimes given credit for this doctrine, certainly didn’t get it from the history of Europe or Asia or Africa. He got it from the impact of the New World upon Europe and from contemplation of one particular kind of individual who lived in the New World, the person he called the ‘Noble Savage.’

The idea that ‘all men are created equal’ is a gift to the world from the American Indian. Europeans who settled here only transmitted it as a doctrine that they sometimes followed and sometimes did not. The real source was someone for whom social equality was no mere doctrine, who had equality built into his bones. To him it was inconceivable that the world could be any other way. For him there was no other way of life.”


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Robert Pirsig on crime and freedom

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From ‘Lila:’

“What the Metaphysics of Quality indicates is that the 20th century intellectual faith in man’s basic goodness as spontaneous and natural is disastrously naive. The ideal of a harmonious society in which everyone without coercion cooperates happily with everyone else for the mutual good of all is a devastating fiction. It isn’t consistent with scientific fact…Primitive tribes such as the American Indians have no record of sweetness and cooperations with other tribes. They ambushed them, tortured them, dashed their children’s brains out on rocks. If man is basically good, than maybe it’s man’s basic goodness which invented social institutions to repress this kind of biological savagery in the first place…”

…We must understand that when a society undermines intellectual freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally bad, but when it represses biological
freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally good. The destructive sympathy of intellectuals lawlessness in the sixties and since is derived,
no doubt, from what is perceived to be a common enemy, the social system. But the Metaphysics of Quality that this sympathy was really stupid.”

The idea that biological crimes can be ended by intellect alone, that you can talk crime to death, doesn’t work…Only social patterns can control
biological patterns, and the instrument of conversation between society and biology is not words. The instrument of of conversation between society and
biology has always been a policeman or a soldier and his gun. All the laws of history, all the arguments, all the Constitutions and the Bills of Rights and
Declarations of Independence are nothing more than instructions to the military and the police.”

A culture that supports the dominance of social values over biological values is an absolutely superior culture one that does not, and a culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over social values is absolutely superior to one that does not.”

Where biological values are undermining social values, intellectuals must identify social behavior, no matter what its ethnic connection, and support it all the way without restraint. Intellectuals must find biological behavior, no matter what its ethical connection, and limit or destroy destructive biological patterns with complete moral ruthlessness, the way a doctor destroys germs, before those biological patterns destroy civilization itself.”


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India Should Rely on Lower Rates to Stimulate Growth, OECD Says

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India Should Rely on Lower Rates to Stimulate Growth, OECD Says

by Kartik Goyal

June 24 (Bloomberg) — India should cut interest rates
rather than boost government spending if further measures are
needed to stimulate growth, the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development said.

They need to read Bernanke’s 2004 paper which makes it clear lower interest rates are contractionary via the fiscal channel and need to be matched by fiscal expansion to overcome that effect.

Additionally, in today’s environment, lower rates hurt savers a lot more than the help borrowers. Rates for savers have fallen a lot more than rates for borrowers due to risk perceptions and implied capital costs as net interest margins for lenders have increased to over 4%. This also means reduced aggregate demand and begs additional fiscal measures to sustain GDP.

So while I strongly favor lower rates, I also recognize that one of the benefits of lower rates is that they allow reduced taxes or increased public expenditure to sustain output and employment at desired levels.


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BRICs Add $60 Billion Reserves as Zhou Derides Dollar

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They don’t like to buy dollars but they don’t want their currencies to appreciate and risk export market share.

And Bernanke, Geithner, and Obama want them to let their currencies appreciate to help our exports and ALSO want them to buy dollars and treasury securities because they think we need that to fund our deficit spending.

It is one confused and sorry state of affairs on our part.

On balance it looks like our exports won’t be going up nearly as fast as imports especially with crude prices higher. And a good chunk of domestic demand will be channeled towards imports (including those new fiats…). And with flattish GDP and rising unemployment and talk of spending cuts and tax increases it’s starting to look very grim again.

Not to mention no plan to cut imported energy bills anytime soon.

BRICs Add $60 Billion Reserves as Zhou Derides Dollar

by Shanthy Nambiar and Lilian Karunungan

June 8 (Bloomberg) — Reserves Reversal

Asian central banks, excluding China, ran down foreign-
exchange reserves by more than $300 billion in the 12 months
ended April 30, according to London-based HSBC Holdings Plc.
Russia’s slid by $213 billion in the eight months ended March 31,
central bank data show. Brazil’s reserves dropped $5.7 billion
in the six months ended Feb. 27.


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China policy obamanation

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We do not need China or anyone else to buy our securities and we net benefit enormously from net imports in general.

The profoundly confused China policy comes from an administration that both does not understand the monetary system and does not understand that imports are real benefits and exports real costs:

Policies are being held hostage to Communist China’s demands.

by Adrian Van Eck

May 29 — The communist rulers of China have laid down a threat to the government of the United States of America. They are the largest foreign holders of treasury bonds. They say they fear that the huge Federal deficit this year – four times the record deficit set last year – will bring on inflation of such a magnitude as to threaten the buying power of their treasury holdings. They have said that if Washington does not stop this massive deficit spending (much of it financed with money created by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve)

All–not some, or most of government spending is a matter of ‘changing numbers in bank accounts at the fed’ (as per Bernanke’s statement last month).
Govt spending adds varying degrees of aggregate demand, government taxing reduces demand, and government borrowing supports interest rates. ‘Financing’ as the word is generally used does not apply to the issuer of a non convertible currency with a floating exchange rate.

they will protect their own interests by dumping all of their holdings of U.S. treasuries on the market for whatever price they can get for them. They say they will do so even if that collapses the U.S. dollar and pulls down not only the American economy but the economy of the entire world.

To date ‘their own interest’ has been that of supporting their export industries by suppressing their real wages.
So this statement would indicate they are threatening to move away from an export led strategy. Possible, but hard to believe and contradicts what follows here.

Apparently Washington has taken this threat seriously. All of a sudden China is being overrun by important officials from the U.S. Government. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is one of the Americans traveling to Beijing. In past years she has been well known in both the U.S, and China as one who dislikes the rulers of Mainland China. A few years ago she barely escaped being arrested by a pack of Party goons as she led a group of Americans protesting China’s policies toward the formerly independent nation of Tibet, which China overran and conquered soon after they won the Chinese Civil War some 60 years ago. A few days ago she was fawning over China’s Government leaders, telling them how we want to cooperate with them in working to protect the environment. (As usual they blamed America for polluting the Earth, ignoring the fact that it is China which is the worst polluter anywhere.) She must have almost gagged on her own sweet words as she talked.

The second important American Government official in China was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She has never been thought of as an enemy of China’s communist rulers, so it was easier for her to talk with them. (There were rumors that money from China helped fund her husband’s re-election campaign.) Unfortunately the visit came about as China’s neighbor and close ally – North Korea – exploded a nuclear device reported to be as powerful as the one America dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. They also fired off several rockets. All of this violated the terms of an agreement they signed in 2006 – an agreement that brought them enormous quantities of fuel oil and food. When the nations that negotiated that treaty protested the nuclear explosion, North Korea announced that it was renouncing its agreement to a truce that ended the war in the 1950’s. That again called for Secretary of State Clinton to try and patch up relations without pushing the virtual outlaw nation into crossing the border and attacking South Korea. This made the response to China in threatening America – a definite form of blackmail, as nations such as India and Japan agreed – a secondary issue with Hillary.

That left Treasury Secretary Geithner to absorb the heaviest verbal blows from China’s leaders during his own visit to Beijing. They knew that Geithner, as the president of the independent Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the largest and most important of the privately-owned regional Feds, had himself made threats to China shortly before being confirmed by the Senate to take over the top job at Treasury. He had told the Senate that if China did not stop manipulating the yuan in the foreign exchange market to gain an unfair advantage in its trade he would be in favor of America taking steps on its own to counter this in the foreign exchange market.

What sense does all this make?

China was buying dollars to keep the dollar strong and the yuan weak as part of their strategy to support exports by suppressing domestic costs vs rest of world costs.

Geithner was pushing for a weaker dollar as a way to reduce China’s exports by, in effect, causing prices of goods made in China at Wal-Mart to rise to the point where they wouldn’t sell as well.

Now China is threatening to do the opposite- push the dollar down by selling its USD financial assets, and Geithner is doing the opposite by trying to stop them.

He has since had to swallow those words and now he has to swallow as well threats against America by China.

This administration is in it way over its head and is pursuing a totally confused policy.

We thought it was fascinating that no one in the media mentioned Ben Bernanke or commented on his complete absence from the dialogue with China. So I will take it on myself to make such a comment. Bernanke is, after all, the one man closely tied to the creation of the money that so offends the communists in Beijing and one might have expected him to be involved in current talks with China’s rulers – under normal circumstances. A while back, he went to China as part of a delegation and he was asked to make a speech at a university where China trains many of its economists. Bernanke was brutally candid in his remarks. He pointed out precisely all of the mistakes he felt they were making in their centrally planned economy – and predicted that they were heading for trouble so bad that it might bring the ruling Party and the country down, just as a dozen prior dynasties had come crashing down during China’s long history. The woman who serves as China’s economics minister was livid with rage after his remarks. She took over and screamed insults at him for a half hour. Then she called President Bush and said that Bernanke was “persona non grata,” a diplomatic phrase meaning he would never again be welcomed to China. Months later when a Chinese delegation paid a return visit to Washington, they carefully avoided the Fed’s marble headquarters.

Not a whisper has escaped that anyone knows about from the ideas expressed by Tim Geithner concerning China’s threats if America does not sharply curb its deficit spending.

For China’s export strategy to ‘succeed’ they need high levels of aggregate demand in the US.

Yet it is clear from everything happening in Washington that this Administration has absolutely zero intention of stopping its near reckless abandon of any restraint in Federal spending.

In fact, the deficit spending has not even begun to get high enough to restore aggregate demand to levels where unemployment stops rising, never mind falling.

We need to remove a lot more fiscal drag to restore demand, now the unsustainable (non-government) credit chennels have been capped.

Quite the contrary, as new demands are made they are coming up with more plans to lavish Federal spending on recipients. For example, the latest we are hearing regarding General Motors is that the Federal Government may be willing to hand the company $50 billion on top of the money allocated to them already. But Washington would then want to gain 70% ownership in what critics are calling “Federal Motors.”

The problem here is the administrations looks for public purpose in the ‘input’ side rather than the output side. The public purpose of industry is the output it produces, not how the inputs, particularly labor, get rewarded.

Output is directed by markets working within institutional structure which can be modified to influence output towards public purpose while sustaining full employment at all times. But not with an administration that has it all backwards.

And now we have California’s demand that the Federal Government guarantee $18 billion in State borrowing to fund their own wild deficit spending. Political pressures are building to make this happen. If that does happen, a lot of other states will be lining up at the White House front door to demand the same treatment.

The answer here is to give all states $500 per capita of revenue sharing with no strings attached. California would get about $17 billion.

That way it’s ‘fair’ and there is no ‘moral hazard’ issue.
But, again, this hasn’t even been discussed.

This brings us to a topic that is being brushed aside as being too unlikely to even deserve treatment as a rumor. Thus it is being dismissed out of hand in the national media. Yet it is springing up from several key Washington sources and that makes us suspicious that where there is so much smoke there may be fire. What I am talking about, of course, is the sudden discussion of an American Value Added Tax – another name for a national sales tax. It would apply to goods and services alike. Most nations in the world including China itself now have such a VAT tax. It is called value added because each company is taxed only on the value it adds to raw materials or parts it buys and manufactures or assembles into a product. Trucks and hairdressers and even lawyers would be taxed under a VAT.

Even at a rate as low as 10%, which would be seen as very low in the world, it would raise a ton of money. Some are proposing a rate high enough to allow the income tax to be ended but that idea is being shot down by agents of the Administration. The idea would be sold to conservatives as a way to avoid the huge inflation that China is warning against… and also to make unlikely that America would be forced to go back to pre-Reagan Federal income tax rates of just about double those paid today. And industry would be told that – just as happens in other nations with a VAT – it would be forgiven on any goods or services marked for export. I think these VAT tax rumors are for real and I suggest you keep an eye on this. More next week. Adrian Van Eck.

The VAT is even more regressive than the payroll taxes still on the books.

And with consumption being the entire point of the economics it makes no sense to tax consumption in general.

‘Sin’ and ‘luxury’ taxes are different- the idea is to limit consumption of those items subject to the tax, and not to raise revenue. The success of the tax is then judged by how few dollars are collected, not how many as with the VAT.

Now more than ever the US would benefit from an administration that understood the monetary system and the simple fundamentals regarding imports and exports.

But this is not going to happen, and we will continue to pay the price.


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Singh May Set Record in India Asset Sales After Election Victory

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>   On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 8:52 AM, Michael Pede wrote:

>   
>   Singh May Set Record in India Asset Sales After Election Victory
>   

Asset sales are deflationary.

>   
>   Taiwan’s Unemployment Rate Climbs to Record 5.77%
>   
>   Vietnam’s Central Bank Keeps Key Rate Unchanged at 7%
>   
>   Philippines Can Meet 2009 GDP Growth Target, Central Bank Says
>   
>   Indonesia Says Recovery in India, China to Add to GDP Growth
>   


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Singh’s ‘Game Changer’ Win to Unlock India Economy; Shares Soar

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Make room for another billion consumers increasing their resource consumption:

India Stocks, Rupee, Bonds Surge on Congress Win; Shares Halted

by Pooja Thakur

May 18 (Bloomberg) — India’s benchmark stock index jumped
a record 17 percent, bonds rose and the rupee gained the most in
two decades after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Congress Party
won nationwide elections.

Share trading was halted for the first time ever after the
Sensitive Index, or Sensex, breached a daily limit set by the
market regulator. The rupee climbed 3.1 percent against the
dollar and the benchmark bond yield fell 16 basis points, the
biggest decline in a month.

“Markets are euphoric,” said Rahul Chadha, the Hong Kong-
based head of Indian equities at Mirae Asset Global Investment,
with $46 billion in global equities. “The focus by federal and
state governments on development will lead to a structural re-
rating of India.”

The ruling Congress party won the most seats since 1991,
when then-finance minister Singh abandoned Soviet-style state
planning and introduced free-market reforms that have helped
India’s economy quadruple in size. With almost twice as many
seats as the main opposition, Singh, 76, may further reduce
barriers to foreign investment in insurers and retailers, plans
that had been frustrated by communist lawmakers.

Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd., whose turbines and
generators light up three of every four homes in India, leaped
33 percent. The Congress victory will clear the way for the
government to proceed with billions of dollars in pending orders
and should also give foreign investors confidence in the country,
Bharat Chairman K. Ravi Kumar said in a telephone interview.

Kamal Nath, trade minister in the outgoing administration,
said in an interview the government “should aim” to boost
growth to 8 percent in the business year that started April 1.
The $1.2 trillion economy is expected by the central bank to
expand 6 percent, compared with average growth of 8.6 percent in
the previous five years.


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Off Topic Comments

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Submitted on 2009/04/10 at 1:07pm by high tech redneck

“profits for investing, not for working for a living”
There used to be a time I was amazed how the labor class kept taking the abuses piled upon them.
On Cspan I just watched Jesse Jackson say Obama would have been the first president to enter office with a student loan if his books hadn’t been so successful and he recently got to pay off the loans with his book profits. Jesse was very angry that blacks still have to pay for student loans and housing loans when bankers can get much cheaper or even free talf loans. He was adamant that we should give free education to everyone that wants it. I go into the library and I read mosler economics and it doesn’t cost me anything but my very valuable time, so what is Jesse so mad about? MIT offers many of thier courses for free over the internet. I think most laborers could put down the budweiser and not go fishing this weekend and READ if they really wanted too.
Who wants to enable working class to equality in the investor class?
Warren you don’t want a bunch of poor working class blacks to be ahead of you in line to fill up their boats with gas when you want to take the superboat out for a joyride do you? Why should their boating needs/wants eat into 3 or 4 hours of your boating time while you wait to gas up? Also you don’t want a bunch of working class blacks out clogging the roads on sunday drives when you want to take the supercar out for a 200mph jaunt do you? What good does a supercar do you when you are in bumper to bumper traffic doing 5mph? There are very deep rooted desires in most of the “investor” class to keep the status quo.
The gods of Greece lived up on Mt. Olympus, they didn’t want to be burdened with the sufferings of overcrowded streets and cities down in the valley.

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Submitted on 2009/04/12 at 3:14am by Comments Encouraged

If they have little purchasing power, what does it matter how many social security dollars you get? How sad you worked your whole life for a promise from the government that was used like a carrot to sucker you like a donkey.
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Submitted on 2009/04/10 at 4:55pm by Pocahontas

Making Banking Boring – Paul Krugman

I agree Warren, I think they should do what Krugman says and take away your supercar, your house, and your superboat. It is not enough to just make banking boring again, to stop this boom/bust cycle we need to strip YOU and every other person like you of the wealth you have to send a message this will not be tolerated anymore. That will remove the incentive for future generations to try these tricks again, thinking they can get away with it.
It is ridiculous that because you clicked buttons back and forth trading financial instruments that you should live so much better than other human beings. My native american indian friends tried to play the white mans game and open casinos on the reservations and the governator is taxing us and taking all our wealth back – where are our bailouts?
Your distribution of the wealth in this world needs to be returned to the borg, sooner rather than later.

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Submitted on 2009/04/08 at 5:22pm

Wikipedia review of Lila:
Major themes
As in his past book, the narrative is embedded between rounds of philosophical discussion. The main goal of this book is to develop a complete metaphysical system based on the idea of Quality introduced in his first book. Unlike his previous book, in which he creates a dichotomy between Classical and Romantic Quality, this book centers on the division of Quality into the Static and the Dynamic.
Another goal of this book is to critique the field of anthropology. Pirsig claims traditional objectivity renders the field ineffective. He then turns his concept of Quality toward an explanation of the difficulties Western society has had in understanding the values and perspectives of American Indians. One interesting conclusion is that modern American culture is the result of a melding of Native American and European values.
Another theme analyzed using the Metaphysics of Quality is the interaction between Intellectual and Social patterns. Pirsig states that until the end of the Victorian era, social patterns dominated the conduct of members of the American culture. In the aftermath of World War I, intellectual patterns and the scientific method acceded to that position, becoming responsible for directing the nation’s goals and actions. The later occurrences of fascism are seen as an anti-intellectual struggle to return social patterns to the dominant position. The hippie movement, having perceived the flaws inherent in both social and intellectual patterns, sought to transcend them, but failed to provide a stable replacement, degenerating instead into lower level biological patterns as noted in its calls for free love.
Criticism
The book has been criticised for being presented in a way that suits neither fact nor fiction. The title suggests a factual inquiry, but the characters appear fictional. While the book’s narrative is mostly from the perspective of the main character, who is a thinly disguised version of the author, some sections come directly from Lila, and since her thoughts generally support the author’s viewpoint in real life, appear a bit dishonest. [3]
The basis of the philosophical argument presented by the book is that Quality (which can be very basically understood as similar to Sophocles’ ‘good’, or as, in some religions, ‘god’, in the sense that Quality is universal and undefinable; at once the stimulus and the goal of human development) is a property of the interaction between subject and object and is more fundamental than either; subjects and objects only attain existence through interaction, and that interaction, Quality, therefore comes first. This has been challenged as unconvincing when set aside an alternative explanation in terms of evolutionary psychology. One of Pirsig’s examples, of a man sitting on a hot stove and perceiving the experience as one of ‘low quality’, to some, fails to demonstrate that quality is a fundamental property of things, since it is easy to explain his actions in terms of an evolutionarily evolved instinct to avoid things that our senses tell us will damage our bodies.[3]
In an interview, the author has said that he is disappointed that more ’seriously thinking people’ do not really understand his ideas fully. Many people, he says, write to him that they re-read the book many times but still don’t really understand it, adding “I have read many reviews criticising my ideas, but I have yet to see anything that proves me wrong. I’d like to give a prize to the first person who can convince me that my ideas about a metaphysics of quality are wrong.”[4]

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Submitted on 2009/04/08 at 1:44pm by Comments Encouraged

Comments Encouraged, that needs to be revised to – Mosler Economic Hitler Youth Comments Encouraged – dissenting voices will be silenced. What point am I missing exactly when I walk into a miami bank and because I am a native american indian I don’t get a loan, but if I was the latino cousin of the loan officer, I get lots of money?

Trust the government – just ask my forefather geronimo!

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Submitted on 2009/04/08 at 1:39pm by Richard Benson

Censorship, so that like minds can stroke each other’s pet theories, wonderful!

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Submitted on 2009/04/08 at 1:34pm by Keynes Liquidity Fetish

Energy technology, superboat technology, supercar technology, aids and cancer research, etc etc etc – how does any of this progress with everyone on the planet becoming a Mike Norman clone and clicking buttons back and forth on a trading terminal all day? The whole system is a heaping pile of dogs**t, it does not make humans do anything productive, all it does is make them zombies to a bloomberg terminal.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123915041409099017.html#mod=todays_us_personal_journal

…For much of the past decade, Kenneth Kimmons of Bedford, Texas, was a buy-and-hold investor. He regularly socked away money in mutual funds across his 401(k) plans, individual retirement accounts and a brokerage account.

But after watching his investments fall by about 50% last year, he started trading individual stocks and options full-time last fall. He generally buys stocks at the start of the trading day — lately, it’s been bank stocks — and sells them a few hours later. “I just got tired of putting money away and losing it,” says the 31-year-old. He says he’s doubled his money since he started trading full-time.

…Mr. Catalano trades mostly stocks and exchange-traded funds, usually four to five times a week. He writes covered-call option contracts to generate income off his shares, a tactic that could lose him some of the upside if share prices rise substantially. Since he started trading in September, he is down about 5% but has done better than the market.
… “The problem I have with the buy-and-hold strategy is that it’s a bull-market strategy,” say Matthew Tuttle, a financial adviser in Stamford, Conn. “In the bust, you give all of your profits back.” Mr. Tuttle has recently taken a more active approach to trading. While short-term investors are likely to face higher tax bills — since short-term gains are taxed at higher rates than long-term gains — he notes that some people who incurred big losses last year will be able to carry those losses forward to offset taxes in future years.

…The uncertain environment has prompted David Dilley of Bonita Springs, Fla., to trade more frequently. The 76-year-old retiree believes there has been a “sea change” in economic philosophy … So, while he had considered himself a longtime buy-and-hold investor, he’s now trading Canadian oil trusts in his E*Trade account several times a week. Mr. Dilley didn’t provide exact numbers but says he’s beating the broader market averages so far this year.

…Sue Cirillo of Pelham Manor, N.Y., used to hold on to household names such as Apple. But last fall, she sold some of her longtime holdings, moved to cash and started trading. “The difference between now and then is that when I’ve made money, I take it off the table and look for the next opportunity,” says the 47-year-old music producer. “Before, I was more focused on companies that I felt were going to be profitable.” Now, she pays attention to daily market swings, subscribes to online advice services such as Mr. Parness’s for trading ideas, and has recently learned to short stocks.

…Mark Swenson of southern New Hampshire says he typically trades with exchange-traded funds, instead of buying individual stocks. The 40-year-old says he started trading for the first time last October, in part to generate additional income in case his work as a plumber dried up. Although he says he got “slaughtered” when he first started trading, he says that he has since made up much of that initial loss and that it’s easier for him to trade than do nothing.

“I could no longer stomach it — watching my money disappear,” he says. “For right now, it’s a traders’ market. Until I get the sense that the market is on the rise, I generally don’t plan on doing any buying and holding — not for the long term.”

…Linda Smith of Denver fired her broker, saying it was a waste of money to pay her adviser 1.5% in annual fees for picking mutual funds she believed she could pick herself. “No one on this planet knows better what to do with my finances than me,” says the 53-year-old. For the year, she figures her portfolio is up about 5%, including the interest from her CDs. “Nobody can time the market 100% correctly 100% of the time,” she says. “However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get lucky now and then.”

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