Chapo Trap House

What Will Become of the Dirtbag Left? by Jia Tolentino

The Young Karl Marx

Matt Bruenig and PPP on CAP's Medicare Extra for All

Thoughts on the Medicare Extra Proposal by Matt Bruenig

Dean Baker single-payer skeptic

Single Payer? by Dean Baker

Enlightenment and the capitalist crisis

ENLIGHTENMENT & THE CAPITALIST CRISIS by Chris Dillow

If this is right, liberal centrists are doing what Tom Paine accused Edmund Burke of: they are pitying the plumage of liberal values but forgetting the dying bird of the prosperity that fostered them.

Hillary Clinton on how single payer will never ever happen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGDKCy0bWGY

Mason on Varoufakis and Europe

Austerity by Design by J.W. Mason

Baker on bond vigilantes

The Bond Vigilantes Are Dead! Even With Soaring Budget Deficits Interest Rates Are Stable

21 February 2018

In the last six months, Republicans gave up being a party that pretends to care about budget deficits as they happily pushed through large tax cuts (roughly 0.7 percent of GDP over the next decade) and big increases in spending (roughly 0.7 percent of GDP over the next two years). The deficit picture looks much worse today than it did a year ago. 

While the few remaining deficit hawks at the Washington Post and the Peter Peterson–funded organizations are screaming, the question serious people should be asking is: why don't the markets don't share their concerns? In particular, the bond market, where the "bond vigilantes" live, should be going nuts with much larger deficits now being projected for as far as the eye can see. 

It is true that rates have gone up. At just under 2.9 percent, the interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds is almost half a percentage point higher than it was a year ago. But a 2.9 percent rate is still very low by any reasonable standard. After all, it was over 3.0 percent at the end of 2013 and it was over 5.0 percent in the late 1990s as the deficits were turning to surpluses. 

The current 2.9 percent rate is also well below what the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had projected just a couple of years ago when it expected deficits to stay on their prior no tax cut path. In January of 2016, CBO projected that the interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds would be 3.7 percent by now. This means that even with the recent run-up, long-term interests are still 0.8 percentage points below what CBO had projected without any major increases in the budget deficit. 

This might suggest that the concerns that deficits would send interest rates through the roof have little basis in reality. After all, long-term interest rates are driven by expectations, and unless investors in the bond market have hugely different expectations about the size of deficits than folks in Washington, they apparently don't believe that the larger deficits we are now looking at are that big a deal.

Baker on growth estimates

Trump's 3 Percent GDP Growth: Is It Crazy? by Dean Baker

Dayen on Buffett: monopoly investing

Special Investigation: The Dirty Secret Behind Warren Buffett’s Billions by David Dayen

Midwest deplorable - Uncle Tupelo - Whiskey Bottle

early 90s Midwest

Midwest deplorable - Uncle Tupelo - No Depression

Oh fear the hearts of men are failing 

These our latter days we know 

The great depression now is spreadin'

God's word declared it would be so

low unemployment experiment: Bernstein and Baker

The new asymmetric risk by Jared Bernstein

The Great Fiscal Experiment: Let's See How Low the Unemployment Rate Can Go by Dean Baker

Trump and Duy forecasts

forecasts

Tyler Cowen so wrong

Tyler Cowen 10 percent unemployment 2011

pensions and Karl Polanyi

Yes, Pensions Are Collapsing, And Progressives Can’t Remain in Denial BY DOUG HENWOOD AND LIZA FEATHERSTONE

The Man from Red Vienna by Robert Kuttner

The Dead Enders

THE DEAD ENDERS

Candidates Who Signed Up to Battle Donald Trump Must Get Past the Democratic Party First

by Ryan Grim and Lee Fang

within context of stagnating wages

What Steve Bannon gets right about Democrats — and wrong about Trump by Ezra Klein

establishment economics

Guest Contribution: “Trump’s Tax Cut Will Worsen the US Current Account Deficit” by Jeffrey Frankel

MLK's forgotten socialist history

The Forgotten Socialist History of Martin Luther King Jr.

King was an outspoken democratic socialist who believed that a multiracial working-class movement was required to overcome the failings of capitalism.

BY MATTHEW MILES GOODRICH