Came across this via The Cedar Lounge, this situation with Greece is getting more and more ridiculous. Now, some German government politicians are calling on Greece to sell off some of it’s Islands to finance its debt.
Greece should consider selling some of its uninhabited islands to cut its debt, according to political allies of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Full story on the beeb.
About 30-40 mins after reading Andrew’s thought provoking piece on the Better Questions series in Seomra Sproi, I was watching Tuesday’sDaily Show. In it they make an amuzing point that the recent credit card reform act in the US does little more than make credit card companies and the state than enforces it little more ethical than the mob. As the former mob loan shark says “We might have broken your legs, maybe pushed back your nuckles. You might have fallen down the stairs, accidentally. But if you didn’t pay, we never took your house. We never took your house.” Anyway, it made me think of how so much of the left in recent years will talk about everything apart from ‘the economy’. Andrew’s post drew me back to a post by Chris Dillow over at Stumbling and Mumbling where he says “I blame the 80’s”. In Chris’s post he gives an anecdote about the Andrw Glyn, the late Oxford economist. Dr. Glyn, who despite dieing 2-3 months before I discovered his writings, is something of an inspiration to me. Or perhaps it would be better to say an aspiration.
Anyway here’s the anecdote
 I remembered an exchange at Oxford in the 80s between Andrew Glyn and a whiney London woman. Andrew had just given a talk outlining a Marxist view of Thatcherism. Whiney woman: “Yah, Andrew. I agree with your analysis, but don’t you think we have to build a radical feminist critique?” Andrew: “No.”
In America over the weekend it came out that
The prices of US goods and services, excluding food and fuel, fell last month for the first time since 1982…The closely watched “core†consumer price index fell 0.1 per cent in January, labour department figures showed on Friday, as prices for new cars and housing dropped from the previous month.
While this is hardly shocking. It does bang home the point that we are not experiencing inflationary pressures and that spending has not picked up sufficiently for government spending to be cut back.
Andrew Flood posted Ronit Lentin’s talk on “Biopower, Race and State in contemporary Ireland” recently. Since then a few people have either said to me face to face or online that they don’t get the concept. I’m not sure that I get it either, but maybe its like Irony – impossible to explain but you know it when you see it. And I’m pretty sure this is it:
Workers judged to be lonely and to have a chaotic home life could be barred from working with vulnerable people, even though there is no evidence that they pose a risk, according to guidelines from the Government’s new vetting agency… If a teaching assistant was believed to be “unable to sustain emotionally intimate relationships” and also had a “chaotic, unstable lifestyle” they could be barred from ever working with children. If a nurse was judged to suffer from “severe emotional loneliness” and believed to have “poor coping skills” their career could also be ended.
First, Part 3 from Ian Dury
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIMNXogXnvE]
Second, Part 4 from Maxim Pinkovskiy, Xavier Sala-i-Martin
We use a parametric method to estimate the income distribution for 191 countries between 1970 and 2006. We estimate the World Distribution of Income and estimate poverty rates, poverty counts and various measures of income inequality and welfare. Using the official $1/day line, we estimate that world poverty rates have fallen by 80% from 0.268 in 1970 to 0.054 in 2006. The corresponding total number of poor has fallen from 403 million in 1970 to 152 million in 2006. Our estimates of the global poverty count in 2006 are much smaller than found by other researchers. We also find similar reductions in poverty if we use other poverty lines. We find that various measures of global inequality have declined substantially and measures of global welfare increased by somewhere between 128% and 145%. We analyze poverty in various regions. Finally, we show that our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests involving functional forms, data sources for the largest countries, methods of interpolating and extrapolating missing data, and dealing with survey misreporting.
[Empahasis mine]
For those of you who have been trying to follow the Obama heathcare reform here’s a helpful flow chart. (A bigger version is here) First thing’s first. Obama is NOT introducing an NHS. He is not introducing a nationalised healthcare system. What he is doing is regulating existing private insurers, introducing insurance subsidies for people on low income and creating a ‘public option’ i.e. a publicly owned insurer.
From the Irish Economy blog:
It is worth taking a closer look at the Quarterly National Household Survey results from last week. The difference between the public and private sectors has attracted some comment but there is much more going on here. In particular, the major trend that stands out is the disastrous collapse in working class employment with growing differences between the position of those with third level education and those without. The need for serious commitments in enterprise and employment policy, education and training policy, and housing/ mortgage support is clear.
I meant to post a link to this back at the end of February when it went up. But I didn’t. Regardless, this article by Barry Eichengreen lays out Ireland’s problem clearer than anything else I’ve seen. Emerald Isle to Golden State
This isn’t important, but its interesting that Ireland is now along with Iceland the fucked countries to compare the rest of the world with. All that’s up for debate now is who is the third most fucked country in the recession. It doesn’t even need saying that that Ireland follows Iceland as the second most fucked. Paul Krugman writes:
Austria’s not as outrageously leveraged as Iceland, or even Ireland. But it may need a bank bailout that will seriously strain the country’s resources. So what I said at the event — that after those two, it’s probably the advanced country at most risk from the financial crisis — shouldn’t even be controversial.
Eichengreen and O’Rourke on ‘A Tale of Two Depressions‘
[T]he world is currently undergoing an economic shock every bit as big as the Great Depression shock of 1929-30. Looking just at the US leads one to overlook how alarming the current situation is even in comparison with 1929-30.
