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Zachary D. Carter
@zachdcarter
Economy and Society Initiative
Author, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes: bit.ly/3rOMWBE
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This was all just flat-out wrong, and it dominated economic thought in Washington D.C. for years. We lost a decade of economic growth to this madness, and damaged democracy itself around the world. What a waste.
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"The problem is real. The solution will be painful. There is no easy way out .... Every modest sacrifice we refuse to make today only forces far greater sacrifices of hope and opportunity upon the next generation .... The reckoning will be sure and the devastation severe."
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But the most astonishing thing is just how confident the writers are that they've identified the most serious problem facing the American public. The entire report is constantly admonishing *everyone* for failing to do what *everyone* knows is just critically essential.
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Even the more modest warnings were just wrong: "Rising debt will also hamstring the government, depriving it of the resources needed to respond to future crises and invest in other priorities."
Nope, the government spent *trillions* to combat the COVID-19 crash.
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The report makes several pretty concrete predictions about what will happen if the U.S. doesn't dramatically reduce its deficit, and not a single one of them ever came to pass. Interest on U.S. government debt didn't hit $1 trillion in 2020. We didn't have a "debt crisis."
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Every now and then I revisit the report of the 2010 National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (aka Simpson-Bowles), and am struck by how shoddy the whole thing is.
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There are plenty of things I worry about going forward, but it is extremely hard to argue with the big picture success here.
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… despite a sharper and deeper downturn and a war that redefined the entire global energy market
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The post-COVID crash economy beats the post-2008 economy and it’s not close
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WOW: U.S. employers added a whopping 517,000 jobs in January. The unemployment rate fell to 3.4%, the lowest since 1969.
Data: bls.gov/news.release/e
Full coverage: nytimes.com/live/2023/02/0
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Look this piece is really fantastic but this cannot be allowed to stand. Borders was the archetype, Barnes and Noble the imitation. We can know this because Borders had its own Borders Cafe, while B&N subcontracted all that out to Starbucks.
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snow > rain
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we’re democratizing fraud, on behalf of the unbanked
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our idea is fraud, but as a currency
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Wow. Celsius used investor/customer funds to prop up the price of its own CEL token, helping employees including CEO Alex Mashinsky sell, according to the Examiner.
Mashinsky cashed out $68.7mn.
Employees said what they were doing was “very ponzi like”.
cases.stretto.com/public/x191/11
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bad things
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“She would have to remain in Philadelphia the rest of her life, a horrible fate.” — E.B. White
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Disgraceful
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Fly @Eagles Fly! We’re going Green and White in honor of the Eagles NFC Championship Victory.
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“US law enforcement killed at least 1,176 people in 2022, making it the deadliest year on record for police violence.”
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The initial press release Memphis Police posted read that Tyre Nichols “complained of having a shortness of breath”
The video shows police punching him several times, kicking in the head and chest multiple times, pepper spraying him
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Every day, a new front opens in the war between my inbox and newsletters that I did not sign up for.
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Seriously, how is he not on the list? 🔶⚔️🔷
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read image description
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Here are the 15 finalists for the 2023 Naismith Men's Defensive Player of the Year6
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There aren’t simple, easy right answers to the big questions about central bank accountability. But there are many simple, easy wrong answers.
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Yellen is basically placing the Fed outside the bounds of democracy here, while subjugating her own elected administration to the Fed.
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This is incredibly revealing. Yellen again refuses to say that its illegal to issue. She claims they are not obligated to accept, but provides no legal argument that they are not obligated to accept it. She implies that it would be up to the Fed whether the Treasury defaulted. twitter.com/aduehren/statu…
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In my view the coin offers the sturdiest legal support, to the extent the court cares about the law, and also the opportunity for the narrowest adverse ruling, to the extent that the court does not care about the law.
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Every option for dealing with the debt ceiling could end in a standoff with an unpredictable Supreme Court. That’s bad, but there’s nothing unique about the coin there. If the Court wants to side with the Freedom
Caucus, it will side with the Freedom Caucus.
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This would be compelling if we weren’t forced to choose between government by financial-crisis-ransom, the coin, or other weirder and more complex gimmicks. But that’s where we are. And of those options the coin is the simplest and cleanest solution.
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Have to say I think the Barro piece is basically a very long way to dodge the important questions here. Of course the Fed doesn’t want to mint the coin. Nobody wakes up in the morning hoping House Republicans will take the global economy hostage.
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Outstanding @jbarro here on the shambolic, no-win situation that the mint the platinum coin strategy would create for the Fed.
joshbarro.com/p/so-why-not-t
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(The correct answer to this kind of thing is always The Replacements, but I love that Steve Earle song.)
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They should mint the coin, and also mint a separate one to give to the st louis fed on condition of finishing getting all of the serieses onto FRED
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Who wore it better?
The Replacements — Unsatisfied (1984)
open.spotify.com/track/4QuYdbaC
Steve Earle — I Ain’t Ever Satisfied (1987)
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Kihei is playing the best basketball of his career this year, but I demand that everyone recall that he was the clutch shooter for Virginia down the stretch in the 2019 Sweet 16 game against Oregon. Never gets credit for it because his Purdue heroics overshadow that entire year.
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Nobody else should ever wear the number 0 at Virginia.
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Kihei Clark is among the nation’s toughest defenders. He’s smart, he studies his assignment, and if you show the ball during a hand change, he’ll take it from you. Clark plays low, gets up underneath you, and pressures the ball from the opening tap.
@ClarkKihei is a killer.
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Shocking / not-shocking that we are still doing government by threat of national self-harm 12 years later. This stuff was unthinkable for most of my lifetime.
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Having the Treasury sell "premium" high-interest bonds would avoid the debt ceiling, but trying to set up a new Treasury market on short notice seems like a bad idea compared to just using a $1T coin to get around debt ceiling accounting w/ little impact on real markets/spending.
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As far as I'm aware,I'm the first person to have noticed this declassified memo. It explains that December 3rd 1973, out of fears of an approaching debt ceiling,Arthur Burns agreed to Paul Volcker's request to continue to hold matured treasury securities
federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy
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This piece is a year an a half old, because we have been doing this dance for 12 years now. The coin is not dangerous, flirting with a U.S. debt default is dangerous.
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Happy Tuesday, the Trillion Dollar Platinum Coin is not inflationary:
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