"The New Debt Colonies"

This is an important long-read to help understand the modern era of finance capitalism and its methods.  Thanks Jerome Roos for the insight.

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/new-debt-colonies/

Governments are Not Households

http://www.modernmoneynetwork.org/?q=symposia/governments-are-not-households

The analogy of a government budget to a household budget is more political than factual. Here is some detailed discussion. For the permanent record, such as it is.

government austerity

thanks to Unsplash / Alessio MumboJumbo

Good video featuring Steve Keen myth-busting on this topic. Thanks @Renegade_Inc

https://renegadeinc.com/sunday-papers-mainstream-economists-live-in-a-parallel-universe/

Economic Megaregions - USA

This is kinda cool:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/us-commutes-reveal-new-economic-megaregions-map/

Thanks http://www.nationalgeographic.com/

Can banks create money out of nothing?

Another scholarly article on this fascinating topic:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521914001070

tl;dr - Yep.

image credit: Chase Bank, Danbury, CT 8/2014 by Mike Mozart of TheToyChannel and JeepersMedia on YouTube, via Flickr

Yanis Varoufakis on the fragility of democracy

https://www.ted.com/talks/yanis_varoufakis_capitalism_will_eat_democracy_unless_we_speak_up

Yanis articulates well many of the issues of the capture of democracy by capitalism and offers some suggestions for paths forward.

Better than anywhere else I've seen, he describes the cost to the worldwide economy of the mountain of unused capital aggregated via inequality.

can the government default?

Saving this for possible future reference:
http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2014/10/04/understanding-modern-money-guest-post/

Capitalism, Hijacked by Finance?

I stumbled on this 25 minute video recorded last year in South Africa. Clayton Christensen discusses how the cycle of innovation may have been interrupted, contributing to jobless recoveries.

In my opinion, add this analysis to those of Piketty's Capital in 21st Century and Brynjolfsson & McAfee's Second Machine Age when trying to understand the issues we face with employment and inequality.

I guess one overly-simplistic takeaway could be: you get what you measure, so be careful what you measure. More importantly, this suggests, as other analysis seems to as well, that capitalism has been hijacked by finance (and financiers, I suppose) resulting in sub-optimal outcomes, unless you're in finance. The role of capitalism in society is vitally important, and we need to find analysis and vocabulary to help us make policy and political decisions that make sure capitalism is generative, not extractive.