Category: Economics
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Secrets of the Temple.1: More Than A Doorstop
The operations of the Federal Reserve board are notoriously shrouded in mystery. Technocratic decisions on monetary policy that supposedly need to be protected from the fickle pressures of politics are carried out by an appointed board of governors who like to operate behind closed doors. William Grieder set out to demystify this institution in the…
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Debt.4: What’s good for General Motors and what’s good for America
Sometimes the mark of a good book is how it crops back up in your mind a few months or years or even many years after you first read it. I wrote 3 posts about the book Debt by David Graeber back in February & March. There have been several occasions since then when the…
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To the victor go the spoils…
The record producer Joe Boyd visited a studio in a former eastern block country shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The engineers there proudly showed off what they thought was a state of the art newly acquired reverb unit they had acquired from some western engineers who visited their studio. When Boyd asked…
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Debt.3: South Dakota
Ever wonder why you get so many credit card offers from banks in South Dakota? You know, those loud envelopes with low introductory APR’s that turn around and clobber you with 25% interest rates a few months later? Rates that bury folks in debt, just like the arid storms that buried much of South Dakota…
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Debt.2
“We’re used to assuming that capitalism and markets are the same thing, but as the great French historian Fernand Braudel (at left in this post) pointed out, in many ways they could equally be conceived as opposites. While markets are ways of exchanging goods through the medium of money…capitalism is first and foremost the art…
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Debt.1
Last week I finished a book I really liked called Debt by David Graeber, (Melville Press.) The author is an anthropologist and an activist who has been involved with the “anti-globalization” movement in general, and the Industrial Workers of the World and Occupy Wall Street in particular. He used to teach at Yale but moved…
johnhdavis / inundation records 