Neoliberalism

[Dreamwoven]

http://www.acting-man.com/?p=49220: few honest central bankers nowadays...

[Dreamwoven]

Silent Spring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring. I watched two one-hour TV programs one on the threat of bees becoming extinct, and the other on the use of pesticides and mechanised farming that makes the soil barren. What has this got to do with neoliberalism? the hunt for profits is turning agriculture into a deeply exploitative agrobusiness.

[Dreamwoven]

There was very little soil, a yellow dust, more likely, that could easily blow away. Carrots had been grown here, harvested, ingeniously, mechanically, all the same size and length. Very efficient...The equipment used was also hi-tech. Carrots grow in sandy soil, look like this...http://www.almanac.com/plant/carrots.

[Dreamwoven]

A couple of interesting article from Acting Man:

http://www.acting-man.com/?p=49318#more-49318

http://www.acting-man.com/?p=49308#more-49308

[Dreamwoven]

https://mises.org/library/worlds-cen...re-frozen-fear

There is no desire from banks to raise interest rates, and this after several years of zero or below zero interest rates. See the above link to mises, published today.

[Dreamwoven]

Signs of growing bubble from Mises and Acting Man:

"You do not need to be a financial market wizard to see that especially bond markets have reached bubble territory: bond prices have become artificially inflated by central banks' unprecedented monetary policies. For instance, the price-earnings-ratio for the US 10-year Treasury yield stands around 44, while the equivalent for the euro zone trades at 85. In other words, the investor has to wait 44 years (and 85 years, respectively) to recover the bonds' purchasing price through coupon payments."

and from Acting Man:
http://www.acting-man.com/?p=49318#more-49318

[YesNo]

I agree with the Mises group about bonds. I expect interest rates will rise and then refinancing for governments and corporations will become more difficult.

[Dreamwoven]

Yes, that is my conclusion, too.

[Dreamwoven]

See also this thread: http://www.online-literature.com/for...32#post1342332

[Dreamwoven]

We have now had a decade when interest rates are held down by U.S. state intervention. But sooner or later a market correction will take place. We have now had a decade when interest rates are held down by U.S. state intervention. But sooner or later a market correction will come. This is discussed in http://www.acting-man.com/?p=51805#more-51805.

[Dreamwoven]

The book by Elly Griffiths The Chalk Pit, has a section on Underground Societies, people who live in some of our most affluent cities, but they are driven to live below the earth. People who - for whatever reason - aren't welcome on the surface - homeless people, the addicts, HIV-positive. There are subterranean communities all over the world - in catacombs, sewers and abandoned metros. The tunnel people in Las Vegas, the Empire of the Dead in Paris, the Rat Tribe in Beijing. A lot of them are proper societies with electricity and phone lines - even churches and restaurants sometimes. The Rat Tribe in Beijing are mostly migrant workers, some of them brought in to build for the Olympics (The Chalk Pit, p.197). See From My Bookshelves http://www.online-literature.com/for...00#post1348600.

[Dreamwoven]

I have often wondered why we never hear of these underground societies in the media. It is, after all, a characteristic of many countries and immigration is a permanent issue in both Europe and America. Subterranean communities were also a characteristic of both Liberalism in the 19th century
and Neoliberalism today. There are Nazi Parties in many countries, even Germany, and there are demonstrations against them, but the link between Neoliberalism and Liberalism never seems to be made.

I have come to understand that the freedom of speech that is a characteristic of both Liberalism and Neoliberalism is an important explanatory factor, along with extremes of poverty and extremes of wealth.

[Dreamwoven]

deleted, wrong topic

[Dreamwoven]

An outstanding book on "Market Fundamentalism" is by Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique, Harvard University Press, 2014.

"What is it about free-market ideas that give them tenacious staying power in the face of such manifest failures as persistent unemployment, widening inequality and the severe financial crises that have stressed Western economies over the past forty years? Fred Block and Margaret Somers extend the work of the great political economist Karl Polanyi to explain why these ideas have revived from disrepute in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II to become the dominant economic ideology of our time."

"Polanyi contends that the free market championed by market liberals never actually existed. While markets are essential to enable individual choice, they cannot be self-regulating because they require ongoing state action. Furthermore, they cannot by themselves provide the necessaries of social existence as education, health care, social and personal security, and the right to earn a livelihood.When these public goods are subjected to market principles social life is threatened and major crises ensue."

"Despite these theoretical flaws, market principles are powerfully seductive because they promise to diminish the role of politics in civil and social life. Because politics entail coercion and unsatisfying compromises among groups with deep conflicts, the wish to narrow its scope is understandable. But like Marx's theory that communism will less to a "withering away of the state," the ideology that free markets can replace government is just as utopian and dangerous."
(Introduction to the book)

[Dreamwoven]

It was when I was reading this book that I became aware of the ideological nature of" Reaganomics". You can read about this in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics:

"Reaganomics (/reɪɡəˈnɒmɪks/; a portmanteau of [Ronald] Reagan and economics attributed to Paul Harvey)[1] refers to the economic policies promoted by U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s. These policies are commonly associated with supply-side economics, referred to as trickle-down economics or voodoo economics by political opponents, and free-market economics by political advocates.

The four pillars of Reagan's economic policy were to reduce the growth of government spending, reduce the federal income tax and capital gains tax, reduce government regulation, and tighten the money supply in order to reduce inflation.[2] During Reagan's presidency, the national debt almost tripled and the U.S. went from being the world's largest creditor nation to the world's largest debtor in under eight years"

There is much more, but Reaganomics cut the taxes on the rich, that was responsible for the stock exchange speculation leading to the Great Recession in the West: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recession. This in turn led to the experimentation with zero interest rates. How this will pan out after over 10 years of zero interest rate policies (ZIRP) remain unclear. Block and Somers discuss this in their book, above.