https://www.utc.wa.gov/regulatedIndustries/utilities/Documents/PSE%20FERC%20Form%201%202015.pdf Thursday March 29 2018 Andrew Saturn ? Reed Ingalls ? on KAOS public radio 12pm - 1pm One of the is running for Thurston County Council? Position Number 1 Tell him: instead of being a bully with utilities, offer them money. --- Argue that prices are administered arbitrarily much more than supply and demand are factors. Prices are set by private consensus largely independent of supply and demand for physical resources, or labor. Labile traders wildly exaggerate and brazenly underestimate risks, causing price swings that rather reflect their moods more than supply and demand factors. Thus, prices are arbitrary to a large degree. If prices are arbitrary, inflation doesn't matter because we can fix it by linking incomes to price rises. Thus we can create money (on the Fed's balance sheet) to pay utilities instead of bullying them. A state or local public bank might also provide funds to buy back utilities and operate them in the public interest. Utilities should be by the people, of the people, and for the people. A county bank should have access to Fed and money markets; hold challenges to develop a self-funding perfect hedge to fill public coffers, in the same way that quants are using linear algebra and other advanced mathematical techniques to generate riskless profits for private corporations today. --- @ KUOW the record: Rent bidding and allpwing further discrmination against renters shows how much businesses chose clients, contradicting the story economists tell of firms competeing for any client. Public policy should permit free camping on public land and buy more as a public option to renting. --- Kirk Sigler ? NPR news in Weed, New Mexico You should report about the threat to survival of cows that ranchers pose. Also, emphasize that "more efficient" ranching means more crowding of innocent cows and more pollution for areas surrounding massive feed lots. Give cowboys a basic income, stop cow-killing jobs. --- Mitchell, still earlier, says: > I also recommend you read this paper (Levy Working Paper No. 788) by E´ric Tymoigne – [Modern Money Theory and Interrelations between the Treasury and the Central Bank: The Case of the United States](http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_788.pdf) – which shows how “monetarily sovereign governments have a very flexible policy space that is unconstrained by hard financial limits”. The paper cited, in my opinion, misses the key point: financialization has reduced the wage share because finance has figured out how to print money freely for itself. In reporting only percentages for wage share, the paper neglects the growing pie, in which the share of income due to finance grows by the creation of IOUs circulating as money. The sheer ability of finance to expand the money supply willy-nilly is hidden when you only report percentages. Stephanie Kelton is thus too timid when she asserts that MMT is not about printing money without limit. The private sector is already doing it, but Kelton's MMT model does not understand that ... --- Monday April 2 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington Why can't I go, today, to the Department of Ecology motor pool, check out a truck, come back to these campsites, clean up the plastic, metals, waste wood, old gas cylinders, etc., and dump them for free? --- Behind the desire to ban dispersed camping on public land is the idea that there should be no escape from living indoors. --- Friday April 6 2018 Forest Road 2903, Olympic Peninsula, Washington @ Evening Edition NPR @ Tom Cocaine ? NW NPR host Making racoons pleading for aid after being poisoned into zombie jokes trivializes the individual life stories of each animal. What kind of callous, casual cruelty are you teaching children? Why not take sick racoons to a vet? Why not express love for fellow mortals? --- 360-902-1632 to volunteer, on sign at Upper Clearwater Campground Monday April 9 2018 www.rco.wa.gov Plea to build more shelters like the one at Upper Clearwater Campground. Can I volunteer? Can I build debris shelters on forest spurs? Stuffed chair and footstool dumped at shelter. Can I check out a public truck to haul it to the dump? I volunteer my labor; I ask that government pay for materials and fees. --- Tuesday April 10 2018 Upper Clearwater Campground Why are places like this scarce? We should build more simple shelters on underutilized land. I volunteer my labor. --- Wednesday April 11 2018 Upper Clearwater Campground Animals seen: robins, crows (one crow head, looking proud in death, beside a loose pile of feathers; his mate? flew away from the spot as I approached the secod time, on the way back), chickadees?, wren?, stellar jay, chipmunk, squirrel?, elk, heard other songbirds Heard the same sound that sounds like an earth fart: long, slow pulses increasing in frequency and pitch, lasting maybe three seconds. I've heard this sound in the hills northwest of Ellensburg in the spring. I heard it someplace else too: Oregon? --- I know how to be healthy but I get no credit for practicing good health. Because good health for me involves not interacting with markets as much as possible, living a healthy life is valueless to markets. I am worthless, and it does not matter if my habitat is squeezed and my options for living healthily limited. If I commit suicide, it is just cost effective for society. Why not liberalize suicide markets? --- Saturday April 14 2018 Trying to post a comment to Simon Wren-Lewis's blog https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2018/04/talking-to-establishment.html#comment-form "how the media had distorted the austerity debate" As another comment in a previous blog noted, economists are useful idiots for politicians. They use your models to show deficit spending is bad because of crowding out, because your models assume money is necessarily limited. Your models accept neutrality of money and therefore deficits are in some sense bad. Politicians seize on that element of your models. If you want to stop being a useful idiot, challenge rational self-interest; question efficient price discovery because it requires rational agents. Assert that prices are administered, arbitrary, and therefore we can print money because inflation is not so much connected with the growth of the money supply as with arbitrary psychological choices. Simply print faster than prices rise, which the private sector already knows is happening (see a graph of base money increasing several thousand percent faster than the consumer price index: http://subbot.org/misc/econ/m2_vs_cpi_index.png ). If you really want to challenge austerity you should go after rational expectations because that leads naturally to the idea that austerity is good as long as I don't suffer. --- Wednesday April 18 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington Re prices: Supply and demand theory abstracts away from the mostly psychological causes of supply shocks. Supply and demand pricing theory assumes that supply constraints are natural, physical, or exogenous to the money system. I claim prices are arbitrary because supply rates are ultimately determined by psychological, fickle, arbitrary choices that might just as well have gone the other way and often have in the past. Thus, supply is endogenous, not an abstract external variable that simply falls out of the math. Supply is determined ultimately by psychology. Therefore, even if you believe fervently in supply and demand pricing theory, since supply is arbitrarily constrained by choice, not necessity, prices are arbitrary. --- Re taxes: A guy with $10 million who creates jobs by building a big house was allocated money first, then created jobs by consuming out of his own self-interest. The real question is: how, and why, was he allocated $10 million to start with? I claim the allocation was ultimately a matter of some priviliged individual ordering someone to type arbitrary figures into a spreadsheet, thus creating credit that circulates as money today (buys the job-creating house) and easily gets rolled, forgiven, or paid from insurance when due. Insurance easily pays from future promises circulating as money today, and when those future promises come due, they too get easily rolled, forgiven, or paid from insurance. Thus the endless cycle of putting off settlement for another day continues, indefinitely. --- Big tree cut and dragged into the turnaround I slept in. I counted 83 rings. The last 13 years before being cut seemed to be healthy and growing faster than the previous 40. It grew well up to around 30, at a rate like in the last 13 before it was cut. --- Wednesday April 19 2018 Lacey, Washington reddit comment: They can easily be more lax with workers and profit handsomely from financial investments (as [Puget Sound Energy's balance sheet](https://www.utc.wa.gov/regulatedIndustries/utilities/Documents/PSE%20FERC%20Form%201%202015.pdf) reveals, companies make more from financial investments than rates, thus by analogy worker productivity is really just for show and not the profit-driver companies would have you think it is). --- Response to http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=39132#more-39132 You blithely dismiss as mere asset swaps what is really an exchange of the nation's best money for assets deemed worthless by the markets. If you read through http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capitalisback/CountryData/UK/VariousOfficialSeries/BalanceSheetBoE/Fisher09.pdf you see passages like: "By December 2007, bank funding markets had become even more difficult. So, there was a co-ordinated approach by the major central banks who all announced additional measures. In the UK, we offered further expanded 3 month repos. This time without a penalty, against a much wider range of collateral than accepted previously. This included AAA RMBS and covered bonds." "The Bank designed and introduced the Special Liquidity Scheme (SLS) which was launched on 21 April to improve the liquidity position of the UK banking system by allowing banks and building societies to swap high-quality, but temporarily illiquid, mortgage-backed and other securities for UK Treasury bills" The Bank was lending out gilts in exchange for "temporarily illiquid" assets. The market had devalued those assets based on panic and speculation, and the Bank was providing gilts that it bought with money created by keystroke. The Bank created money to buy gilts from the private sector, then gave the gilts back for worthless, toxic assets. Netted out, the Bank made a market in toxic assets when no private agent would. Created money was exchanged for assets the market valued at $0. Netted out, private net financial assets increased through the creation of toxic assets, and the Bank backstopped them by creating enough money to cover the private credit expansion. The banks created net financial assets first and proved the Bank would back them up in a panic; otherwise, they just conduct business-as-usual by creating more net financial assets without needing government money ... I fear Modern Monetary Theory proponents unfairly dismiss the expansive impact of privately-created assets and credit on the money supply. Privately-created credit turns into central bank money eventually. --- Monday April 23 2018 Forest Road 20 off Highway 12, a few miles east if Randle, Washington @ Chris Dillow, regarding his recent blog on the Modigliani-Miller Theorem: Modigliani-Miller applies naturally to companies seeking new funding, not stock buybacks. The companies buying back stocks want control, not immediate funding. Also, happily discounting Modigliani-Miller because of taxes ignores the assumption that all taxes are a friction on markets according to standard theory. If you dismiss Modigliani-Miller because of taxes, you should probably let go of efficient pricing theory as well. @poniesloveskittens on reddit.com/r/basicincome: I think censorship is a bad policy because: If your arguments are stronger, you can make it plain to anyone reading that they are trolling with emotional arguments and insults. If you respond to their trolls by getting hurt, you have given them the power to hurt you with mere words on the internet. You don't have to feel hurt. Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me. I suggest you try to decouple emotion from your arguments. I strive to present a perspective that is invulnerable to emotional attacks. If you ban them, they win because you just proved you don't have arguments strong enough to make them voluntarily silent. Also: censorship breeds supermemes as antiobiotics cause superbugs. You are better off dealing with the words head on from the start. Third: If supporters of basic income can't withstand personal attacks, basic income will not likely succeed. Others will throw similar insults at you in any political campaign, and you won't be able to ban them because they own their own servers, and the first amendment. Best harden yourself now by allowing all speech instead of trying to mollycoddle delicate posters; basic income should not fail because supporters are too politically correct. Fourth: Bans inevitably become arbitrary and used to win arguments unfairly. Bans introduce extra-textual control mechanisms. You should make your words so strong they prevail on a level playing field of unrestricted free discourse. Sometimes a mod bans a person I am arguing with. I prefer to continue arguing, not have someone meddle, If the op has a problem, they should post comments rather than banning. Also: bans inevitably become misused; the moderators use bans for personal reasons. --- @ geology subreddit: Flatland attack: you see a circle growing and receding as a sphere passes through, and posit some force instead of imagining the sphere possibility. Measurement attack: suppose false the assumption that two separate measurements differ because of measurement error; suppose that reality actually jumps around and the instruments are relatively right when they report different measurements on successive trials. --- Tuesday April 25 2018 Forest Road 20 off Highway 12, between Randle and Packwood, Washington @ Megan Chakavardhi ? On Point NPR radio show Drugs are more fun than the neoliberal shallow values society offers. We take drugs to escape society's offensive crass emphasis on trivial crap. Legalize drugs and invent cheap test kits. --- @ Here and Now NPR radio regarding free tampons: My goal is to get society to question why meetings should be so stressful that they induce women's periods. Why deal with symptoms when the cause is unnecessary stress created by a shallow society hellbent on neoliberalism? --- Thursday April 26 2018 Forest Road 20 off Highway 12 between Randle and Packwood, Washington @ Joshua Johnson, 1A NPR radio program Your guest does not understand that capitalism thrives on debt created by private bankers making promises that finance can easily put off indefinitely. Also, the Fed's outright money creation after 2008 rescued world markets by forgiving debt. --- I have been depressed, with diarrhea, for four days. What gave me diarrhea? A new brand of rice I bought? The pistachios? I am depressed because Tracie chose Mom's food over me. My Mom's food provides more value than me. I keep thinking back to Johns Hopkins MOOC on Depression epidemiology; one instructor cited a study of Africans that listed diarrhea as the main symptom of depression. Is my depression causing this diarrhea? --- I have seen several birds. Hawks circled me the first day, on an exposed corner overlooking a steep ravine that must have had thermal patterns as the hawks appeared to enjoy gliding in circles for long periods. Some chickadees passed by. A gray jay stopped on a branch close by last night, then coo'd a few times before moving on. A crow gave a very pretty call: a very rapid series of mellifluous bell-like sounds. The call was very different from normal crow "caw-caw" sounds. I remembered the blue stellar jay in Mom's back yard last winter that made similarly mellifluous, bell-like calls very different from normal raucous stellar jay calls. There was also a towhee that made very pretty calls, melodic and ringing clear like a bell, rather than the usual towhee harsh-sounding buzz. A stellar jay flew in branches nearby at one spot, silently. I saw him later drinking from a puddle, tilting his head back to swallow. A couple or three sips, and he was done. A junco hopped happily near the car, eying me. A bird I didn't identify flew in branches at another spot, looking at me several times. I treasure such interactions. They are more pleasant than interactions with humans. The first spot I spent two nights at has deer bones and hair in a pile at one side. I want to make a cross out of the bones, as is my fashion, to try to make future visitors think about what it means to kill a deer. --- Friday April 27 2018 Forest Road 20 off Highway 12 between Randle and Packwood, Washington @ Science Friday NPR Ethically, scientists should get the frogs' consent before experimenting on them. Therefore scientists should learn how to communicate with frogs first, before interrogating them with instruments of torture. --- @ Chris Vance on The Record radio show on KUOW I am 53 and suffered as a result of your drug policies. Do you apologize? What other things are you wrong about now that are causing needless suffering? In the 1980s I could sleep outside but cops could arrest me for weed; now weed is legal but I fear the sleep police. Will you consider that current fears about debt and money printing causing inflation are as unfounded as your former fears about marijuana? Do you still discredit my views, using other excuses than weed now? --- Animals: two gray birds, very small heads, sparrow-sized, greeted me this morning as I got to the spot near the stream. One flew straight towards me before veering off, which I interpret as a sign that he liked me or was curious about me. Snake on the steep slope next to the road. Chipmunk nibbling and wying me intently, last night. --- Rock escarpment: large amounts of brown rock, encased in darker gray-black rock.One tilted outcrop of thin-banded gray rock, the bands thin and white, exposed like paint in places. The white bands did not look like quartz; calcite? Brown dirt was encased in gray, sometimes purple, basalt?, transforming the dirt and lithifying it? Some parts were metamorphosed and left with streaky white bands? One sheer continuous rock face lasts hundreds of square meters. There is a seep coming from it. Several other seeps in the rocks along the road. The rocks seem steeply tilted towards the west, or southwest. But across the ravine, I can see rocks tilted northerly. Another prominent peak is tilted more in line with the local tilt direction. --- Sunday April 29 2018 Columbia River at Saddle Mountain Public Fishing Kildeer, crows (parent with two small juveniles), fox sparrows (heads banded like chickadees, bodies gray like sparrows), redwing blackbirds, geese ... ticks! --- @ lars p syll: Business cycle ups and downs are psychological, arbitrary, even administered by a privileged few. Money shocks are not tied to physical production in any rigorous way. Groupthink, labile petty fear, psychological manipulations rule the day. Scarcity of money is imposed by proxy for real scarcities that must exist, else how am I to feel self-important unless others can't have what I want? --- @ lars p syll: Guarantees require the building up of a buffer of idle resources that are not otherwise engaged in the production of goods and services." Not necessarily true. The Fed created reserves by keystroke in 2008 on the scale of trillions of dollars. The new reserves, as well as other off-balance-sheet liquidity provisioning, did not come from an idle stock of capital. Likewise, TEPCO likely insured against a one in a thousand chance catastrophe. Financial instruments spread the risk so thin it doesn't matter if the event happens. You make more on the rates and pension investments than the insurance costs, so you will profit financially even if a tsunami occurs. Also, if Tepco had built for a tsunami, the materials would not have caused a noticeable scarcity someplace else. World production of food and gadgets would have continued apace had Tepco built more sturdily. The insinuation that the materials needed to build the Fukushima plant sturdier would have retarded other production is as silly as implying that a money supply shock was not met with unlimited liquidity provisioning by the Fed in 2008. --- @ lars p syll: "What gives them value is basically the simple fact that you have to pay your taxes with them. That also enables governments to run a kind of monopoly business where it never can run out of money. A fortiori, spending becomes the prime mover and taxing and borrowing is degraded to following acts." . Money is a unit of settlement, but the private sector makes lots of settlements without paying taxes. Money is a private creation, too. Taxes are not the only or most important reason that money is used for private settlement. Bitcoin is an example of a private currency that has value but cannot be used to pay taxes. Modern Monetary Theory is wrong to harp on chartalism. . Governments don't have a monopoly on money creation; 90% or more of money comes from bank loans. . Bill Mitchell wrote that Net Financial Assets cannot be created by the private sector without transactions with the government sector. But derivatives are represented as assets on private balance sheets, without having to go through taxes or the Fed to create them. The Fed ended up accepting toxic assets as collateral in 2008 and after, thus validating the private sector money creation by backstopping it with created dollars. . MMT implies the opposite, that the private sector has to get Fed or Treasury bills first before creating credit. In fact the banks create derivative assets in the hundreds of trillions first, then the government creates money to backstop them. --- The near-horizontal columnar basalt at Wahatis Peak seems to be north-west whereas the anticlines are supposed to trend east-west. --- Why has neoliberalism demonized the idea that you could do geology without having to work for someone selling something or taxing someone? --- Why can't public policy encourage more clean shelters like in some national parks and campgrounds? Let us put up teepees and debris shelters and open air camp shelters like the Civilian Conservation Corps built. Let us sleep outside. Instead, there is a national mania that everyone should sleep indoors. Outside camping spots are actively being closed off, access gated. Why? The right to camp is fundamental, inalienable, self-evident. Public policies should affirm a right not to have to pay to sleep. Recall that Occupy was shut down by enforcing local no camping ordinances. We should give everyone enough basic income to afford rent, but not assume everyone wants to rent. Basic income should be about the right to access public land for nonexclusive, or temporarily exclusive, use. --- Friday May 4 2018 Forest Road 64, east of Walla Walla, Washington @ lars p syll: "Genuine uncertainty" should be understood in the context of finance, which generates instruments that strip out risk and sell insurance. Goldman Sachs makes money either way, if Mortgage-backed Securities go up or down. Because of the way contracts are written, triggering penalties in case of ratings downgrade, GS likely did pretty well because it insured; it hedged perfectly. When the insurance piece failed, the Fed signaled it would provide unlimited capacity to meet money demand and pay out insurance and take "toxic assets" off bank balance sheets. The only risk for Goldman Sachs is whether counterparties will fail and whether the Fed will backstop them again. Genuine uncertainty about the real world has been abstracted out of working, practical finance models implemented by large financial firms. --- @ larspsyll.wordpress.com “How do you know that?” . Because world capital is expanding much faster than central bank money or GDP. See http://subbot.org/misc/econ/OTC_derivatives.png and http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/a-world-awash-in-money.aspx . “the required interest does not necessarily exist except as even more debt” . The debt can be put off indefinitely by rolling over until forgiven. Bank credit can eventually become central bank money. Toxic assets were backstopped with created central bank money, for example, thereby forgiving promises that could not be delivered. . “what happens when the supply of those who are willing to borrow and able to repay is exhausted?” . Banks can create subsidiaries to self-deal, lending to themselves and using the expanded assets to buy as they like. . Another way might be to make dummy loans as Wells Fargo did. The new loan assets never have to be repaid because the customers never use the credit, so the loan assets were risk-free. The only risk was getting caught; but banks can do what Wells Fargo did in more subtle, better obfuscated ways. . Banks exist to obfuscate wanton, arbitrary money creation … --- Saturday May 12 2018 Ellensburg property @ lars p syll blog, replying to the entry on Schumpeter https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2018/05/05/schumpeter-an-early-champion-of-mmt/#comments Derivatives are net financial asset creation. See imf.org: https://www.imf.org/external/np/sta/fd/ . "Transactions in financial derivatives should be treated as separate transactions rather than as integral parts of the value of underlying transactions to which they may be linked." [...] "The ability to replace the risk on the market is therefore considered the equivalent of tradability in demonstrating value." [...] "In 1997, the Fund produced a discussion paper, The Statistical Measurement of Financial Derivatives, which was adopted by the IMF Committee on Balance of Payments Statistics (and the Inter-Secretariat Working Group on National Accounts). In many respects, the paper reaffirmed the nature of financial derivatives but proposed that over-the-counter financial derivatives be treated as financial assets, and, as a result, a change be made to the treatment of interest rate swaps and forward rate agreements (FRAs) so that instead of being recorded in the income account as property income they be recorded as financial assets and be recorded in the financial account (and the outstanding positions be recorded in the international investment position). A separate functional category has been created for financial derivatives in the balance of payments and a separate instrument in the national accounts." . Clearly, financial derivatives are financial assets that are created by the private sector with very loose connection to physical assets. . See also http://subbot.org/misc/econ/OTC_derivatives.png . Financial derivatives increased from around $100 trillion to $700 trillion in a decade. Physical capital did not increase anywhere near to that. --- Tuesday May 15 2018 Suneast land, northeast of Ellensburg, Washington @ lars p syll Did @LarsPSyll shadow ban me out of ignorance of the finance involved in my arguments why the private sector can and does create Net Financial Assets largely independently of the government sector, thereby debunking Modern Monetary Theory's claims? Or did @larspsyll ban me for arguing that basic income is better than a job guarantee because voluntary unemployment is good? Am I an inconvenient truth to be swept under the carpet because I drag down GDP by consuming less as I learn more, and GDP growth is the highest goal? --- @ geology subreddit: I'm sure the Park Rangers will find a way to blame it on goats, giving more support to their plan to forcibly relocate the Olympic Park goats so they can be hunted in the Cascades where hunters have already depleted the goat population. The ones they can't catch in the Olympic Park, they'll shoot from helicopters. I know this post is off-topic, but someone has to point out the bloodthirstiness of the Park's goat relocation plan. It's not about goats or protecting the park; if they wanted to protect the environment they would use the money to buy back private land and expand the park because humans cause far more damage to the natural ecosystem than the goats. --- Saturday May 19 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ reddit basic income forum >Those ECB operations do not result in a release of new money in the general circulation The Bundesbank paper is disingenuous. The main goal of the ECB's asset purchase program is to increase inflation. The Bundesbank's interpretation of the money supply is idiosyncratic and designed to validate their Quantity Theory of Money model. There is another way of explaining the lack of inflation: the Quantity Theory is wrong. When I took an IMF MOOC, they explicitly used base money to calculate inflation. Base money includes reserves. The Bundesbank, in taking reserves out of their M3 aggregate, and calling that the real money supply, is going against all standard definitions of money supply. They are upholding a double standard and demonstrating the shenanigans economists are willing to pull to try to rescue the Quantity Theory of Money from glaringly obvious violations. Please continue the discussion if you disagree. It is a very important point of finance. The Bundesbank paper should not be the final word on the matter. Do some more research ... See https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb/legal/pdf/oj_jol_2015_121_r_0007_en_txt.pdf > [...] these asset purchase programmes are aimed at further enhancing the transmission of monetary policy, facilitating credit provision to the euro area economy, easing borrowing conditions of households and firms and contributing to returning inflation rates to levels closer to 2 %, consistent with the primary objective of the ECB to maintain price stability. Thus the Bundesbank disagrees with the ECB. See also https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/annual/balance/html/index.en.html If the ECB forgives Italian debt, their equivalent of the Fed's Board of Governors can easily simply create a new asset and add it to the existing assets they have already created, as you can see by the ballooning of the figures in their balance sheet over the past decade. The new asset does not have to come from the capital reserves contributed by EU member countries. Whether it does or not is a political decision made by humans, not an economic or accounting necessity. The ECB has the power to create money, uses it to buy bonds, and can easily use it to write down Italian bonds without taking anything from other member EU states. This is a crucial point of finance and I welcome continuing the discussion until one of us agrees with the other. --- @ reddit basic income forum Notice the uptick in 2008, right when the Fed was printing like crazy, expanding its balance sheet by a factor of two or three in a matter of weeks? What is that about? Also, if you look at [the dollar's value against a basket of other currencies](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DTWEXB/), you will see that the dollar got stronger in foreign exchange as the Fed printed more, and recently weakened a little when the Fed stopped printing. Clearly, the world financial sector values dollars more when more of them are being created. --- Sunday May 20 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ stefanpalau ? on reddit basic income forum: Euro bank reserves are money available to banks to spend as they wish. Banks, their friends having satisfied their consumption already, choose to invest in r, returns from the financial sector. Money flows back without g or GDP having to grow, because as Piketty has observed, r > g. Bank reserves go into the world financial sector, or are used as collateral for borrowing activity in the world financial sector; the world money supply expands dramatically. The money in the world financial sector is denominated in dollars, and the Fed or ECB or a bank with access to the Fed or ECB will cash out that financial sector money on demand, with central bank money. Thus, money created by central banks to buy bonds expands bank reserves and banks use the reserves as they wish: for consumption (but they already have all they need), for further money creation via finance, for buying politicians and access and elections, etc. From the Bundesbank bulletin you linked: https://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/EN/Downloads/Publications/Monthly_Report_Articles/2017/2017_04_money_creation_process.pdf?__blob=publicationFile > [...] bank A will usually need to have reserves with the central bank to settle the outflow of deposits, because a large proportion of cashless payments between banks are netted via the accounts they hold with the central bank. Note the "usually", the a large proportion". I contend that in normal times private money markets provide at least as much settlement duties as central banks. The private money markets can issue dollar-denominated (or euro-denominated) credit that is accepted as money by merchants in the real economy, because their bank accepts the privately-created credit. In 2008 the private money markets panicked and froze. The Fed signaled it would provide unlimited liquidity to meet daily private sector funding needs. Only desirable inflation in asset prices resulted. Thus, use the Fed's unlimited liquidity power to fund basic income and redefine inflation as wealth creation same as the private sector, while indexing everyone's incomes so that incomes rise at least as fast, and usually much faster than, inflation. --- Silent Bob --- reply to reddit mmt_economics forum comment: > that leaves the government's balance sheet as the only option. They can use themselves to create dollar-denominated credit that circulates at or near par with government money. In normal times, everyone accepts the credit; Mortgage-Backed Securities were golden before 2008. In a crisis, the Fed digitally prints money to backstop the private dollar-denominated net asset creation. > the blue line is all financial assets I disagree. You are measuring in billions, but bank assets alone are in trillions. Even [an IMF definition](http://www.imf.org/external/np/sta/fd/) of Financial Derivatives notes that derivatives are not debt instruments: > Unlike debt instruments, no principal amount is advanced to be repaid and no investment income accrues. The graph you linked to concerns debt securities and loans, divided by GDP? Derivatives are much more important on bank balance sheets than the small numbers in that graph. Much more is going on than debt securities and loans. You are looking at maybe 10% of the full picture ... --- Friday June 1 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ reddit basic income forum The dangerous ignorance of proposing money printing to fund basic income A poster recently characterized as "dangerously ignorant" my proposal to fund basic income on the Fed's balance sheet at no taxpayer cost. It's funny, because I sometimes feel the same way about tax-funded basic income proposals. The "ignorance" charge probably refers to ignorance of standard economic models, which predict massive inflation would result from my proposal to create money to fund basic income. Such predictions rely on an accounting model of the economy, which gets its supporting data mainly from National Income and Products Accounts (NIPA), and Flow of Funds Accounts (FFA), statistics. ... NIPA assumes the standard economic model of a circular flow of income, then uses imputed statistics to validate the model. FFA build on NIPA. NIPA starts its primer by saying it does not measure well-being, because how can you? But NIPA includes lots of imputed figures in its calculations, which are just as difficult to measure. Rather than measure equivalent rent value for homeowners, for example, the Bureau of Economic Advisors (?) impute the "rental income of persons" figure. How do we know they don't choose the figure to make the rest of thr balance sheet look plausible? The dangerous idea I propose is that NIPA is only able to maintain a statistical facade that barely supports mainstream economic assertions about aggregated figures such as production, income, inflation, etc. by leaving out the vast sums of dollars that show up in incomes but come not from others in the economy, but from the international finance sector. NIPA and the IMF have removed derivative income from their headline reports. Thus they are able to maintain a facade that assets equal liabilities for the economy. In fact, they are imputing statistics and ignoring income as needed to make sure the model seems to hold. Steve Roth has written about NIPA's deficiencies:[](http://evonomics.com/economists-dont-know-think-wealth-profits/): > The FFA matrix does account for the "inside: (banks) and "outside" (government) creation of new private-sector balance-sheet assets - the net issuance/retirement of financial instruments (dollar bills, checking-account deposits, bonds, equity shares, Fed reserves). This includes corporate IPOs and company dissolutions. Its closed loop is more comprehensive than the NIPAs’. And many economists do think inside that larger circuit model. But that model, likewise, is not fully comprehensive. It ignores real assets, and changes in existing-asset prices/values - both real and financial. > Because: Including revaluation/cap gains would explode the closed-loop, balance-to-zero matrix. They would break the "monetary circuit." > Because: The existing-asset markets "print money" - at least in the sense of your new financial advisor asking you, "How much money do you have?" This is the third, and overwhelmingly the largest, way that aggregate asset balances are added to the private-sector balance sheet. Runups in the stock or real-estate markets increase private-sector assets - and net worth, because those runups have no effect on private-sector liabilities. Thus the proposal to print money to fund basic income is dangerous because it asks you to study enough finance to see whether NIPA (and FFA) are rigged to fit the standard model. It is ignorant because duh, you would rather spend the time manipulating people with different tax strategies. When you assume only taxes can fund basic income, or else it will be inflationary, you concede that NIPA and FFA present plausible empirical support for the mainstream economic model you have assumed. I ask you to do some due diligence and look into how NIPA imputes statistics and excludes capital gains. Derivatives are new assets created to strip out the risk of inflation, default, slow growth, foreign exchange, interest rates. They provide capital gains that rise faster than inflation (thus stripping out the inflation risk). The IMF article on Financial Derivatives is interesting because it reveals how the IMF stopped counting derivatives under "property income", and put it into a separate financial derivatives](http://www.imf.org/external/np/sta/fd/2002/fdclass.pdf) category that does not show up when they report headline statistics such as income or Direct Investment. They are ignoring derivatives, because including them blows up their model based on the circular flow of income. I exhort those of you calling money-printing dangeous and ignorant, to do your own research to see whether you want to continue basing your basic income funding proposals on an economic model whose claimed empirical basis is liberally populated with imputed figures that conveniently support the model they started out trying to prove ... Tl;dr: [Steve Roth's article](http://evonomics.com/economists-dont-know-think-wealth-profits/) makes the same points I'm trying to make. His way of telling essentially the same story may be more palatable to you ... --- @ reddit mmt_economics forum comment: > A financial asset always has a corresponding liability. The problem is that the Net Worth liability is really a Net Financial Asset, hidden as a liability on balance sheets to make the accounting identity seem to hold. > Net financial assets, by definition, imply the context of some specific balance sheet (whether individual, corporate, or any aggregate of your choosing) where that asset rests with the liability recorded on some other balance sheet. Consider gold. If a firm mines new gold, it has a dollar-denominated new net asset. When the asset is first recorded on the firm's balance sheet, it is balanced for accounting purposes by a Net Worth liability. The Net Worth liability shows up as an Asset on the firm owner's balance sheet. The corresponding liability is on the firm's balance sheet. Thus by your definition, it is a Net Financial Asset. But the government is not yet involved. The aggregated balance sheet of the firm and the owner shows a net increase. Now suppose the owner pays taxes with his new net asset. The owner writes a check to the Treasury. The Treasury deposits the check at the Fed. The Fed takes the check to the firm and asks for payment in currency (or Fed reserves). The firm then uses the gold as collateral to borrow money to supply the reserves to back the check written by the owner. The Fed can hold the gold forever. The Fed can also buy the gold, giving the firm new reserves. The point is that the new Net Financial Asset is created first, without government creating a corresponding liability. Only when, and if, the new Net Financial Asset is converted to actual currency does the central bank create a new liability to back the new asset. There can be a long time when the Net Financial Asset circulates as money throughout the financial system, without needing to be withdrawn as currency. The new Net Asset can be accepted by counterparties as money or collateral. The Fed has not yet created a currency liability to back the new financial asset. It may never need to do so, if the new net financial asset continues to trade just like money in financial circles. If the owner gave me some gold to do some work for him, I can accept and hold the gold myself as an asset. I don't have to convert it to currency right away, or ever. The gold serves as an asset on my balance sheet, balanced by the labor I provided. But no government has yet created a currency liability to balance the gold. Derivatives are like gold in the sense that firms "mine" them by stripping out the risk of underlying assets. Derivatives represent new net dollar-denominated assets, before any government agency has declared a new currency liability to balance them. I think MMT misses this very important time lag where a new asset circulates as money with no corresponding central bank liability yet declared. Often, I claim, the asset is never explicitly backed by a new government liability. --- @ Ralph Musgrave: "Thus the intelligent policy there is to let markets work where they work well." Agreed. "Market forces are just INEVITABLE" But animals don't have markets, and gift economies among humans don't need a medium of exchange, unit of account, or quid-pro-quo contracts. "what’s wrong with increasing output per person-hour?" I've seen logging and mining that is counted as increasing output. I see planned obsolescence and upgrade cycles that induce consumers to buy new phones, or computers, or cars, every few years. Salesmen try to sell me things I don't need, often lying, and if they succeed it counts as increasing output. If I quit my job and get healthy thus consuming less healthcare, I am a drag on output. But I'm healthier. > Everyone wants more leisure / increased income, don’t they? I think that is a normative assumption. I want to pursue ancient knowledge which teaches that the more you know, the less you need. The more we know, the less space and energy we need to compute something, for example. But if chips become more efficient, economics teaches us that in order to grow output you must sell more. So you hire a lot of salesmen, and deliberately make products that aren't upgradeable. Focusing on output as measured by NIPA with all their imputed data ignores the huge amounts of waste that accompanies GDP growth. Why can't Amazon collect and reuse boxes? Why is it cheaper to cut down new trees? Using GDP growth to measure well-being or progress is a mistake. In my view, we should ignore GDP when making public policy goals. I think you place far too much faith in imputed data that claims to measure GDP, anyway. To be intellectually honest, GDP measurements should report confidence intervals. The reason they don't is that their error terms multiply as they use surveys and regressions and re-use imputed statistics in calculations for other statistics. If they carried the "+ e" term along, I bet you their GDP measurements would be plus-or-minus 50%, or 100%, or more. Thus my public policy goals are knowledge advancement, not to maximize output and employment. Hayek advanced the idea that prices best measure the value of knowledge. I disagree. I think money is an inappropriate measure of knowledge because knowledge is not debited from the teacher when transferred to a student. By accounting convention, money is debited from one account when transferred to another. To make money act more like knowledge, I see finance as having evolved tools to expand balance sheets on both sides and design bets where each bettor acts as if they won the whole pot until the bet is decided in the future; then the loser pays from insurance. The insurance pays using money that is a bet it acts as if it already won, but won't be decided for a while. When that bet is decided, if the insurance company loses, it too can pay out of insurance. Thus the endless cycle of putting off final settlement for another day continues indefinitely, and finance skirts the conservation of money law underlying mainstream economics. --- Saturday June 9 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington 1) Today it rained while the sun was bright enough that an umbrella cast a shadow. I was reminded of simplistic philisophical assumptions such as the Law of Non-contradiction. In a philosophy MOOC (Ethics of Eating), I recall the instructor using the reasoning "it can't be sunny and raining at the same time, therefore ... " I think economists use equivalent assumptions as justification for their models which invariably support meanness. [find quote by Samuelson? saying something like: "as sure as water does not run uphill, ...] It can't be rainy and sunny at once, therefore opportunity cost. But I personally experienced rain and sunshine at the same time in the same place. Therefore, the Law of Non-contradiction failed. The problem of explosion in classical logic thus leads inevitably to trivialism. Economics prioritizes one possible proof sequence but there are infinitely other stories that are just as logically valid. Tl;dr: public policy should not seek to maximize output and employment with nominally stable prices. --- 2) Capitalism fails to allocate surplus food efficiently. There was enough surplus food to feed Venezuela before oil prices halved. There was no world food supply shock. Therefore we have enough world food surplus to supply Venezuelans today. In devaluing the Bolivar and imposing sanctions (such as Trump's prohibition on buying the petro-cryptocurrency Maduro launched), capitalism explicitly imposes unnecessary foodscarcity, as a punishment for not submitting to capitalist rituals regarding markets. If Maduro had not printed money, would Venezuelans have had any cash at all tobuy anything, anyway? --- Sunday June 10 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ Freakonomics radio The fact that the experimenters imposed scarcity on natural environments says more about how capitalism creates scarcity than it does about rational utility-maximization in animals. What sets humans apart is their incessant need to control. How do we know the animal scientists aren't paid by ideological institutions to produce science backing free market ideology? How do we know this reef researcher isn't being paid to impose violence and scarcity on natural creatures, to prove that violence and imposed scarcity by the ruling elite is justified? The piece on free bread was designed to affirm the normative assumption that everything a business does must maximize profits. The lesson: do not be altruistic. If you must give away bread out of altruistic weakness, be sure to raise your menu costs. Thou shalt not violate the "no free lunch" theorem. I bet the reef meddler was as ignorant of what is really going on as economists who proclaim arbitrage cannot exist for long despite the clear counterexample that the violation of covered interest parity in currency swap markets presents. Today, you can borrow dollars, swap into Euros, and get more dollars back than you need to pay back. Arbitrage conditions are necessary to derive fair pricing formulas. Without the arbitrage condition, prices can go negative, free lunches exist, prices become arbitrary. The reef guy ignores the lack of money among animals just as economists affirming efficient price discovery ignore currency swap markets. --- Monday June 10 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ KUOW The Record Your smug, insular, exclusive, casually cruel, hypocritical, arbitrary, fickle trivial, shallow, money-grubbing social conventions cause suicides. If you are worried about contagion, don't censor: look in the mirror for the real cause of suicide. --- @ NPR evening edition Why not ask whether Albright was wrong to require preconditions before a presidential meeting? Was Clinton's time really better spent on impeachment management? --- @ Tom Banse NWPR news story on fisher weasel reintroduction to Cascades: Biologists should get permission befote forcibly relocating animals. Biologists should study fisher communication before trapping them and tagging them. Biologists' interference cause more harm than good. Why do animal researchers use science as an excuse to control innocent animals? --- @ Coppola comment blog: "QE just exchanges a deposit of currency held at the treasury evidenced by a bond for a deposit in a reserve account at the central bank. That is change of account with the state, and no new currency is created." QE bought $1.8 trillion in MBS held at private banks, not by the Treasury. Basically the Fed bought a lot of assets worth $0 on markets, paying face value (or close to it) for them when no private agent would. The money to buy bonds from private banks did not come from "a deposit of currency held at the Treasury." The money to buy bonds came by pressing keys on computer keyboards. New currency was created. See "How to spend $1.25 trillion": https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/08/26/129451895/how-to-spend-1-25-trillion > The Fed was able to spend so much money so quickly because it has a unique power: It can create money out of thin air, whenever it decides to do so. So, Dzina explains, the mortgage team would decide to buy a bond, they’d push a button on the computer - "and voila, money is created." --- @ coppola comment blog: "When demand for money falls towards zero, people dump money in favour of goods & services as fast as they possibly can. We call this hyperinflation" Actually, hyperinflation is people exchanging their currency for US dollars as fast as possible. --- Wednesday June 20 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ jazz reddit forum post by sound engineer To clarify my objection to miking instruments individually: Some guy on bran's old board once posted about swing coming from the ride cymbal riding on the puff of air from the bass. The idea is that the musicians control their soundwaves to meld with the others, through their articulation. When you mike individual instruments, you seem to be striving to capture the soundwaves before they have interacted with the other soundwaves emanating from the other instruments. If the musicians are good of course it shouldn't matter; their sound will come through any equipment. I worry that over-emphasis on post-performance mixing leads to forgetting of the knowledge old musicians had about self-equalizing. If you listen hard and craft your sound to blend with the other instruments, why do you need a siund engineer? --- Thursday June 21 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ Mayor Durkan and State Attorney-General Ferguson: The homeless camps you sweep are also filled with refugees from the neoliberal catastrophe your policies have created. How many homeless families have your policies separated? Do not criminalize sleeping outside, and force us into policed camps. --- @ Kai Rysdal ? NPR Marketplace host Why not use hemp for straws and let tree farms go to old growth? --- Sunday June 24 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ twitter Kayakmore ? Raymond Block has picked up 180 tons of tourist garbage in Oregon. Neoliberal officials like Durkan cited him for offensive littering. You want to ignore the vast scale of the garbage and environmental destruction you yourself create, with your crass neoliberal lifestyle. Homeless drug users are economic migrants trying to escape the banal cruelty of public and private neoliberal enforcers who have taken away all the exits from their distasteful mindlessness of their system. You yourselves cause homeless drug addiction as Just Say No led me to pot. (Wednesday June 27 2018) I am homeless but practice leave-no-trace. I see homeowner garbage all over; today I'm parked next to three barrels of oil waste in a forest. Why can't I check out a public truck and haul this toxic waste to an industrial dump? Instead of demonizing homeless drug addicts, work with us. Mayor Durkan would do less harm if she were a homeless drug addict. The waste she produces is more per capita than any homeless person; she just externalizes her waste on nature. Where does her roofer dump his tar? In the forest, to save bucks on dump fees? Rethink your tough love. --- Monday June 25 2018 Near Snoqualmie Pass, Washington @ reddit basic income forum: > Using taxes on the successful to achieve the UBI opportunity, doesn't stop their success, and the taxes isn't going to an authoritarian to be used to control or reward people loyal to them. Taxes are the tool Left Authoritarians use to try to impose their vision. You mentioned a quadrant, but only listed three positions. I was waiting for "Left Libertarianism" but instead got a rant against "Right Libertarianism", and an assertion that taxes are needed. Left Libertarianism might recognize that taxes are unjust and fund government by printing money, distributing it equally, and maintaing a [cost-of-living adjustment](https://www.ssa.gov/news/cola/). > the taxes isn't going to an authoritarian to be used to control or reward people loyal to them. Taxes are an authoritarian device. From the Right Libertarian point of view, you are unjustly taking from them to give to others that they don't like. From the Left Libertarian point of view, you can give to everyone because the Fed's money is the best in the world by private consensus. --- @ lars p syll's blog, entry quoting Keynes on employment: "it is financially ‘sound’ to maintain a tenth of the population in idleness" . I reject his definition of idleness. . Bertrand Russell's "In Defense of Idleness" comes to mind. . Keynes defines idleness as doing anything that does not contribute to the "national wealth". But I don't want to sell my labor. Where do I fit into Keynes's model? Am I to be ignored and if I kill myself, swept away as collateral damage? I feel Keynes does not understand my particular story, nor is he interested in how I will volunteer labor but not sell it. He simply excludes me from his story. . "to set unemployed men to work on useful tasks does what it appears to do, namely, increases the national wealth" . Why not give everyone a basic income, and hold challenges and encourage volunteers to figure out how to do "useful tasks" more efficiently? I would like to do a lot of the conservation work the Civilian Conservation Corps used to do, but I want to do it alone, checking out some public equipment to maintain trails, clean campsites, brush-cut forest roads ... . You could have a job guarantee and a basic income. Some of us don't want to sell our labor or produce. Keynes assumes everyone prefers to buy and sell. Keynes refers to C. H. Douglas briefly in one of his works. Keynes should have studied Douglas more. Douglas understood the credit nature of money and saw that basic income was better than a job guarantee. --- I find economists to be pedestrian and ordinary in their thinking, focusing myopically on physical resources and their assumed scarcity, ignoring the (likely) 90% of wealth created from thin air by finance. Supply and demand does not determine prices as much as psychological throtting. --- Capitalism relies on enforcement of its assumptions. Venezuelans are denied access to vast, rotting world food surplus as Assad starved out besieged Syrian cities. --- Maduro should open up the nationalized farms for the public to use. But his mistakes are no reason for capitalist food exporters from other countries such as the US to let food rot in silos as Venezuelans starve. If Maduro won't let in food, drop it by drone. I would give each Venezuelan a basic income deposit account at the Fed, denominated in dollars. I bet they would solve their food problem then. Give each Venezuelan $100/month. For $60 billion or so, the Fed could do it. Use cryptocurrency if it helps keep the deposits out of the government's hands. The Fed created $3.5 trillion in 2008 and after. The world private financial sector grows world capital by $30 trillion a year, according to Bain & Company's estimate. There is enough money to pay for surplus world food production to get to Venezuelans. This is a political problem, not a supply and demand problem. World food supply is being throttled. Capitalism, the dominant world political system, is failing to allocate food surplus efficiently, letting food go to waste rather than supply Venezuelans. Capitalist myths about conservation of money are the root cause of Venezuela's problems. --- Tuesday July 3 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ reddit jazz forum: Please identify the corny racism in Tiger Rag by the Original Di*i*lan* J*zz Band Perhaps you can post your performance showing us how to play it better? White privilege assumes the right to seize on a particular definition of a word to suit its fickle capricious momentary whims. Only privileged self-entitlement at the Académie Française level assumes the God-given authority to declare a word "corny", "racist", and not to be used on a jazz forum. Those seeking to ban words seem to be projecting their own corniness and racism. Instead of trying to resolve inward conflicts, they seek to ban any symbol that reminds them uncomfortably of their own deep internal misgivings about their personal corniness and perhaps unconscious racism. Rather than become self-aware, they would ban uncomfortable words. If I feel uncomfortable when I see a word on tbe internet, everyone must feel uncomfortable and compared to addressing the ultimate internal source of the discomfort, censorship is expedient. --- From https://thejazzclarinet.blogspot.com/2013/01/treat-it-gentle-autobiography-of-sidney.html Eric Seddon Thursday, January 10, 2013 Treat It Gentle: The Autobiography of Sidney Bechet To this day, even the very name of Sidney Bechet evokes intense images and stories. Feisty, explosive, operatic, mellifluous; his blazing, intelligent eyes staring back at us from photos: we know all the stories of his temper and his prodigal career. If Bix Beiderbecke was the prototypically alienated young man with a horn; the distanced aloof genius; Bechet was the first of the unyielding, spiritually restless reedmen who found themselves at odds with the crass commercialism of the music business. His abandonment and intense re engagement of a musical career, multiple times, was to echo through jazz history in the careers of Artie Shaw and Sonny Rollins. Likewise, his expatriation to Europe became the template for later luminaries such as Dexter Gordon and Kenny Dorham. We know this Bechet: Bechet the misunderstood, under appreciated icon. We also know the Bechet Duke Ellington referred to as the "symbol of jazz", preeminent over even Louis Armstrong as the foundation of jazz itself. We can listen to all the old recordings, hearing a sound that shakes us internally, sometimes soaring lyrically, sometimes shouting, often pushing the bounds of whatever group he is playing with: Bechet the master; Beethovenian Bechet. Then there is the Bechet of the mugshot. Bechet the violent, who got in a gun fight at rush hour in Paris. Bechet the deported. This is the Bechet of the Documentary Videos: Bechet of the Ten O'Clock News. But there is another Bechet to know: a reflective, older Bechet. This is the Sidney Bechet described by Desmond Flower as "warm, wise, kind and gentle." A Bechet whose words rolled like warm poetry, who humbly sought to place his journey in perspective of the music. This is the Sidney Bechet whose wisdom radiates from what might be the finest autobiography of any musician, and an essential work of American literature. To write a real analysis of Treat it Gentle would require a book length study longer than the brilliant text itself. Some quotes here will have to suffice as an introduction to a work that has the potential to change our understanding of America, jazz, and the nature of music itself. From the very beginning of the book, he sets out to shift our understanding, to give us something (the concept of giving, united to music, is a central aspect of Bechet's philosophy of music). So I'll start there: >>> You know there's people, they got the wrong idea of Jazz. They think it's all that red-light business. But that's not so. And the real story I've got to tell, it's right there. It's Jazz. What it is--how it come to be what it is. People come up to me and they ask me 'Are you going to play Tin Roof Blues?' They ask me, 'What's bebop?' or what do I think of some record Louis Armstrong put out. But if I was to answer that, I'd have to go a long way back. [pg. 1] >>> On what Jazz is: Bechet was once told by an enthusiastic man in Paris, "This music is your music." >>> But, you know, no music is my music. It's everybody's who can feel it. You're here...well, if it's music, you feel it--then it's yours too. You've got to be in the sun to feel the sun. It's that way with music too. >>> The man persisted, however. He wanted to know what would happen when men like Bechet passed on. >>> ..you know, Jazz isn't just me. It isn't just any one person who plays it. There'll always be Jazz. It doesn't stop with me, it doesn't stop anywhere. You take a melody...people can feel a melody...as long as a there's a melody there's Jazz, there's rhythm. [pg 2] >>> >>> But here's what I really mean. All God's children got a crown. My race, their music...it's their way of giving you something...of showing you how to be happy. It's what they've got to make them happy. The spiritual, that's sad; but there's a way in it that's happy too. We can be told: 'Maybe you don't belong in Heaven, and you haven't got a place on this earth; you're not in our class, our race.' But somewhere, God's children wear a crown, and someday we're going to wear ours too. [pg 3] >>> On inspiration and the reason to play music: >>> The real reason you play...it's just because you're able to play, that's all. Inspiration, that's another thing. The world has to give you that, the way you live in it, what you find in your living. The world gives it to you if you're ready. But it's not just given...it has to be put inside you and you have to be ready to have it put there. All that happens to you makes a feeling out of your life and you play the feeling. But there's more than that. There's the feeling inside the music too. And the final thing, it's the way that life-feeling comes from in you...even if you start playing a number from a love-feeling, it has to become something else before you're through. That love-feeling has to find the music-feeling. And then the music can learn how to get along with itself. But drinking and reefers and all that stuff, most times they just mess up all the feeling you got inside yourself and all the feeling the music's got inside itself. When a man goes at the music that way, it's just a sign that there's a lot inside himself he don't know how to answer. He's not knowing which way he needs to go. He's not going anywhere at all. [pg 128] >>> On contracts, the music business, and commercialism: >>> My answer--all I can say of it--it's just to be giving, giving all your life, finding the music and giving it away. God maybe punishes a man for wanting too much, but He don't punish a man for giving. Maybe He even fixes it so that what you give away, it's the mostest thing you've got. And maybe there's another thing why so many of these musicianers ended up so bad. Maybe they didn't know how to keep up with all this commercializing that was happening to ragtime. If it could have stayed where it started and not had to take account of the business it was becoming--all that making contracts and signing options and buying and selling rights--maybe without that it might have been different. If you start taking what's pure in a man and you start putting it on a bill of sale, somehow you can't help destroying it. In a way, all that business makes it so a man don't have anything left to give. I got a feeling inside me, a kind of memory that wants to sing itself...I can give you that. I can send it out to where it can be taken, maybe, if you want it. I can try to give it to you. But if all I've got is a contract, I've got nothing to give. How'm I going to give you a contract? [pg 124] >>> On the Blues: >>> And it was when I was in jail...that I played the first blues I ever played with a lot of guys singing and no other instruments, just the singing. And, oh my God, what singing that was! It was my first experience that way, hearing someone right next to me start up singing...Got a life so full of punishment, Got me a feeling. Come down Jesus. Oh why don't they put God on this earth where you can find Him easier. Hearing someone else come in after a minute, just hearing his voice in the dark and knowing right away his life has a long way to go. Seeing someone hungry and beat up, seeing his face all bloody and knowing he can't speak your language to tell you what it is, knowing that the only way he has to explain himself is being human, suffering, and waiting.... I'll never forget what those blues did to me. I can't remember every single line, but some I remember. And how it was, the thing it was saying inside itself--I remember that entire. This blues was different from anything I ever heard. Someone's woman left town, or someone's man, he'd gone around to another door...then there was something that took every thought I had out of my mind until it had me so close inside it I could taste how it felt...I was seeing the chains and that gallows, feeling the tears on my own face, rejoicing in the Angel the Lord sent down to that sinner. Oh my God, that was a blues. The way they sang it there, it was something you would send down to earth if it had been given you to be God. What you'd send to your son in trouble if he was on earth and you was in Heaven. [pgs 106-107] [Both] of them, the spirituals and the blues, they was a prayer. One was praying to God and the other was praying to what's human. It's like one was saying 'Oh God, let me go,' and the other was saying, 'Oh Mister, let me be.' And they were both the same thing in a way; they were both my people's way of praying to be themselves, they had a kind of trance to them, a kind of forgetting. It was like a man closing his eyes so he can see a light inside him. That light, it's far off and you've got to wait to see it. But it's there. It's waiting. The spirituals, they're a way of seeing that light. It's far off music; it's a going away, but it's a going away that takes you with it. And the blues, they've got that sob inside, that awful lonesome feeling. It's got so much remembering inside it, so many bad things to remember, so many losses. [pgs 212-213] >>> There have been countless books written on the Blues, countless interviews with experts on the matter, but these quotes constitute the best explanation I have ever read or heard in words of what the blues actually do, what they are, how I experience them, and what they're meant for. I could keep quoting until the whole book was reprinted on this blog...these have only scratched this surface of Bechet's wisdom. Just as Bechet is foundational for jazz clarinet, and jazz itself, I believe his musical philosophy and analysis ought to be treated as a foundational hermeneutic for jazz. Treat it Gentle is a book to be returned to, regularly, through the course of one's musical life. --- Wednesday July 4 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington I forgot to write down a vivid dream I had with Jim in it, several weeks ago. I was in Capitol Forest ... I was sleeping in the car. I heard a voice which seemed to come from outside the car: "Need help?" It was Jim's voice, slightly mocking, a little gruff-sounding, but ultimately friendly and loving in his own way. I was awake listening for more sounds from outside, because the voice had sounded so real. I fell back asleep and dreamt of arguments about scarcity. Economics assumes scarcity as a fundamental axiom; I was challenging that assumption. I was trying to convince Jim that scarcity was not the ubiquitous, pervasive, natural condition that the economics he learned at Berkeley claims it is. It seemed like a long discussion. At the end, I was a little shaken, but still convinced of the validity of my position that scarcity was overemphasized and often hallucinated by economists. I hadn't convinced Jim I was right, but he hadn't got me to see that I was wrong, either. It was nice, I felt, of Jim to take time from his busy afterlife to come to me in my dream to argue about economics again as we used to do ... --- "And maybe there's another thing why so many of these musicianers ended up so bad. Maybe they didn't know how to keep up with all this commercializing that was happening to ragtime. If it could have stayed where it started and not had to take account of the business it was becoming--all that making contracts and signing options and buying and selling rights--maybe without that it might have been different. If you start taking what's pure in a man and you start putting it on a bill of sale, somehow you can't help destroying it. In a way, all that business makes it so a man don't have anything left to give." Sydney Bechet, Treat it Gentle --- @1A on NPR Thursday July 5 2018 You should be talking about what you yourselves do to cause suicide. Your society is petty, fickle, arbitrary, manipulative. Sydney Bechet wrote: "If you start taking what's pure in a man and you start putting it on a bill of sale, somehow you can't help destroying it." Start there. --- @ KIRO News Dave Ross: Thirty years ago your counterparts spoke of marijuana as you do of homelessness and meth now. In another generation will your present attitudes become just as misguided as Zero Tolerance? In the future will I be able to enjoy my drugs of choice without you panicking for no reason? --- Thursday January 5 2018 Capitol Forest Washington @ Ashley Gross KNKX news regarding school head Ed Lymans ? You should be encouraging individuals to pursue their own self-directed paths to knowledge, facilitating them with materials, challenging them to solve problems as yet unsolved or ignored by profit-seeking firms. Grades are a distraction and measure subservience not intelligence. --- Friday July 6 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ Mayor Jenny Durkan: Proposing housing as the best solution to homelessness devalues those of us who prefer a lifestyle of waking up fully embedded in nature. Garbage can be solved for less than housing. Don't sell public land; buy more, let people use it. Don't enforce respect; respect right to camp. --- @ Simon Wren-Lewis "Mainly Macro" blog: https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2018/06/business-brexit-blues.html#comment-form I wouldn't want to be part of an organization that treats Greece so badly, using economics as a justification for imposing austerity. EU regulations on speech are bad, but you UKians are just as bad on free speech and open borders as the EU. You should stop listening to economists and politicians; you have made a right mess of things. You assume that money measures value. I do not. We should start the argument there. Your arguments are hopelessly materialistic. I do not think public policy should strive to maximize output and employment. Knowledge should be the overarching goal, and money supplied as necessary towards advancing knowledge in individualized, non-neoliberal ways. Firms are biased towards subscription products. Firms throttle innovation on products they can not easily enclose and enforce access restrictions on. Government should encourage innovation in individualized, one-off ways (cures for rare diseases) that firms see no profit in, and therefore spend no money on. Print money for good ideas that don't need sales or a lot of customers to be a good idea. --- Sunday July 8 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ reddit jazz forum: Bessie Smith sings: "Going back to dixie" in 1924 in Louisiana Low-down Blues --- We should not submit public policy to economic review before enacting it. We should challenge the fundamental mainstream economic assumptions of scarcity, rational expectations, price discovery, and efficient allocation by markets; we should proclaim that public policy pre-empts economic models. If basic income is a good idea, we can finance it. Republicans know good ideas finance themselves. Tax cuts are good because deficits don't matter. Dems keep mistakenly applying cynical, bought-and-paid-for economic models that assume a scarcity and limited money stock and go along with cuts to social spending because they believe economists who tell them they have no choice. Republicans understand that money is unlimited, like points in a game, but troll Dems into balanced-budget-prioritizing cuts while happily running deficits up for tax cuts. They know they can just write checks for defense and the Fed will cash them. Dems, in contrast, are mostly clueless and believe in mainstream economics and are genuinely afraid of debt and inflation. The private sector however knows how to print money faster than prices rise. --- Monday July 9 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ Laura Sydell NPR news Why can't companies let me customize the gender of my AI? Because companies want to maintain control rather than give me something I can control and teach myself. If I control the AI, I no longer need them. Thus companies throttle technology rather than efficiently advancing technology. @ Kai Rysdal @ Mitchell Hartman on Marketplace NPR radio My question: how far in advance of the last recession did your economic predictors predict a recession was coming? Not until after we were already in it? Doesn't arbitrary psychology determine financial asset prices which wag the real economy as a dog wags his tail? --- Tuesday July 10 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington I turn off a CD of "good old good ones" and hear contemporary jazz on KNKX; the feeling I would have to produce the notes and rhythms they do are not good feelings for me. I don't want to meet the bass player ... --- Saturday July 14 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ Dan Hammermisch on Freakonomics radio show http://freakonomics.com/podcast/new-freakonomics-radio-podcast-the-suicide-paradox/ Economists who apply utility theory to suicides make me feel suicidal. To prevent suicides, we should therefore stop promoting utility theory economists on radio programs. --- Sunday July 15 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington Sydney Bechet's characterization of dixieland jazz in "Treat it Gentle" as being repetitions rather than real improvised New Orleans jazz are astute and probably right. He's also right to take a "not that there's anything wrong with that" attitude. He wants to advance the music, but not everyone has his talent. Some of us get great pleasure from trying to recreate Bechet's brilliant musical innovations; we may learn to get beyond that repititious stage, or not, depending on many factors. Bechet does not seem to look down on or condemn dixieland jazz. He owns that his opinion is that you need dark skin to understand the music. But for Bechet it is really about the music. His preference is for real New Orleans jazz as he tried throughout his life to get his friends to put down in recordings. I don't think Bechet would be critical if someone said dixieland on a web forum, or if he saw the myriad bands in Europe and Japan that have "dixieland" in their names. If someone called his music dixieland, he might say he calls it New Orleans jazz, but my guess is that he just let his horn do the defining most of the time. Thankfully he does verbally define the difference between dixieland and New Orleans jazz in his autobiography. But most of the time he just calls what he plays "the music." He's not overly hung up on strict definitions when it comes to words about sound ... --- Monday July 16 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington Sidney Bechet talks of Dixieland on page 95 of "Treat It Gentle": "You know, there's this mood about the music, a kind of need to be moving. You just can't set it down and hold it. Those Dixieland musicianers, they tried to do that; they tried to write the music down and kind of freeze it. Even when they didn't arrange it to death, they didn't have any place to send it; that's why they lost it. You just can't keep the music unless you move with it." Also see pages 114-115: "And about the time they were making all these changes, some of the white musicianers had taken our style as best they could. They played things that were really our numbers. But, you understand, it wasn't our music. It wasn't us. I don't care what you say, it's awful hard for a man who isn't black to play a melody that's come deep out of black people. It's a question of feeling. "But these musicianers, they all showed up in New York. The record companies sent for them to come and make their records. The people had come wild about this music, and the companies were giving what they had closest to it. They couldn't call it New Orleans; it just wasn't New Orleans. But they had to have a name for it, so they called it Dixieland. And that was the Original Dixieland Orchestra, Larry Shields, he was one of those musicianers." [...] "Or you take Tiger Rag for instance. It had come originally from different parts of a quadrille put in different tempos. But when Northern arrangers got hold of it, they felt there were enough numbers like that, so they started to build up the timing and they took the pieces of the number and they began to arrange them different. They were damn' good arrangements, that you can't deny. But it's a pity the thing couldn't continue to be played the way it was meant, advancing on its own instead of having all those instruments added to it and all those parts written down. Because all that writing down, all those notes on paper, they was only trying to write down the atmosphere we were in when we were adding parts spontaneous." Writing down the music detracts from the attitude necessary to add parts spontaneously. --- In defense of Dixielanders: imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. We just want to "latch on Satch, send me out just right ..." Bechet's writing is like his music: it doesn't make you wait, it arrives right away no matter where I turn to randomly in the book. --- Tuesday July 17 2018 Proposal to clean camp site Off the KC Line, first road to the right Can I check out a truck, fill some plastic bags with garbage, and maintain some trails in the forest? Can I dump the trash for free? Can I brushcut some overgrown areas and use logging waste wood to build all-natural, simple teepee-type structures for protection from sun and rain? --- @ reddit basic income forum, in reply to nn30 comment: > All I can add to this is that the 'financial' economy isn't really connected to the 'real' economy. If that were true, a collapse in value of financial derivatives would not have scared the Fed into thinking there was a risk ATMs might stop working. Consider also that the money to loan to house buyers is mostly created in the financial sector. Leakages from the financial sector into the real sector are vast and far outstrip the investment flows going from the real economy into the financial economy. The financial economy creates money as it wishes and spends it into the real economy as it feels like ... --- Sunday July 22 2018 Olympic National Forest, near the Skokomish river @ NPR All Things Considered Saturday Edition, Michelle Martin host: Isn't cyberwarfare preferable to real warfare, because the violence is virtual? Why aren't we striving to virtualize all violence? Wars of words are less harmful physically than wars with guns. --- The more physical life you lead, the less words hurt you. When you are outside a lot, scrambling down banks to get to water, getting bit by bugs, sleeping on the hard ground, you realize that word insults are trivial compared to physical insults. --- Monday July 23 2018 Off a tributary to the Skokomish River in Washington Regarding the TV show Gomer Pyle, USMC: Seargeant Carter's perfectly orderly world where everything is as it should be is constantly being interrupted by Gomer Pyle's well-meaning, innocent, but chaos-causing actions. --- I stepped on a slug. It moved a bit afterward, curling up a bit. Lots of ooze around him, and on the bottom of my shoe. He was right near the tarp I was arranging sleeping materials upon. Another slug a few feet away turned away from his pathleading toward the tarp. I must be more mindful where I step. The next morning, it was in the same partly-curled up position. There was slime around him. He looked withered, shrunken. I wondered was he dehydrated? I poured a thmble-full of water near him. The pool slightly touched him. I recovered him with a leaf. When I next checked, he was slithering straight away from the tarp. He seemed to be moving at a good slug clip. I was happy he had survived. --- Kathleen Winter ? on Travel with Rick Steves, talking about the northern lands speaking to her: "there is no other". I too hear the land talking, and ask it for words to communicate its messages to humans. --- Tuesday July 24 2018 Off Forest Road 23 near the Skokomish Rivervin Washington state There is an empty, rusting culvert near this camp spot. The stream goes underground a hundred yards upstream, and reappears in a pool below the culvert. The end of the culvert is rusted out at the bottom, forming two jagged edges facing each other. Why don't they cut out the bottoms of the culverts? Why don't they install half-pipes instead of circular culverts? Downstream was an older, discarded culvert rusting in the stream ... The trees lining the stream in this spot are second or third growth. Big stumps dot the streambed. Why weren't the trees along this stream all protected? The stream is fish-bearing as the fish I saw testify ... Down the road a path into a stand of old growth was littered with dumped garbage. It looked like a blacp plastic bag of household garbage had been tossed from a car on the road. Why can't I check out a public truck, volunteer my labor to gather the garbage, and dump it for free? --- @ City of Olympia: You are making the same mistake you made with marijuana and needle exchanges: you are criminalizing the natural, self-evident, unalienable right to sleep outside using "public safety" as an excuse. Be honest: this is about your personal tastes, not public health or safety. --- Tuesday July 25 2018 Off Forest Road 23 near the Skokomish River, Washington There are stands of old growth on the stream side of this road. A twenty-foot barrier of thistles and Devil's Club and Salmonberry and fern and tall grass divides the road from savannah-like forest with trees thicker at the base than I am tall. I stand in the stand, meditate, listen, observe. I wonder about the depressions that occur; do they have surface water? I wonder about the history of this spot; do the trees have memories encoded in their root networks, their DNA? Are the trees communicating with each other through fungus that connects their roots? What do they say? Do they tell stories? How can I ask questions? I would ask the trees: How old are you? What do you want from me, from humans? What big storms, what extreme weather have you experienced? What knowledge do you have to give? What questions do you have? What would you like to know? What thoughts, ideas, words can you give me to transmit to humans? How can I make humans more mindful of nature? Does logging really bother you? Why? How can I tell humans so that they too recognize their casually cruel effects, and stop? --- This spot is very pleasant, in the summer. I slept outside without a tent, with trees and sky above, for four nights. I feel so healthy here, at peace, calm. Very few cars have come by on the road, just four motorized vehicles passed by in five days. I can go naked in the mornings, set up teepee-like structures to hang clothes on for airing out, walk up and down the road and into the stands of old growth for exercise ... There are many birds. I hear Swainson's Thrush and Varied Thrush, I saw a couple of doves, I see and hear wrens and chickadees and juncos, and Stellar Jays, and owls at night, and many other birds I don't know the human names for ... --- @ Shankar Vidantham ? NPR radio "The Hidden Brain" episode onhttp://www.bain.com/publications/articles/a-world-awash-in-money.aspx an evolutionary interpretation of religion: Siddhas in Jainism cannot be an example of "costly signaling" because they need no exchange to persist in a state of infinite knowledge and eternal bliss. Meditation is a good in and of itself, whether or not others exist to signal to. --- Wednesday August 1 2018 Olympic Peninsula, state forest, near Lake West @ On Point NPR radio Crowding out theory ignores the vast sums of dollars coming from the world financial sector. Finance firms have figured out how to create as much money as they desire for any investment. The debt is a distraction; GDP figures should have +- 100% error bars. --- @ Olympia reddit forum I was recently banned from the jazz subreddit. My insults were meant impersonally; they were jokes rather than sincere appraisals of the character of nicknames on the internet. The mods assumed the latter, I suppose. They are wrong. They could have laughed at my insults, as I did. It is ironic that the greatest personal insult is to be personally banned. Anyway, I ran out to the forest to escape humans and their despicable ways. There are several spots around this campsite with garbage dumped: split plastic garbage bags spilling trash around for 20 feet. I want to get a shovel, some new plastic (hemp?) garbage bags, and clean up this site. How can I get public officials to let me check out a public truck and let me dump the garbage collected for free? I am willing to donate my labor. I ask for access to idled public equipment, and for waived dump fees. I want to help. Current policies provide no legal, approved way for me to help unless I pay to buy or rent equipment and dump garbage. The private sector is no help; the private sector sees nature as an externality upon which it externalizes garbage. It is simply rational to cut costs by dumping in the forest. For me, it is rational to want clean campsites, because I benefit. Can public policies encourage and support my desire to help? --- I choose to live as much as possible outside, to purify myself mentally and physically. Bacteria and viruses both biological and memetic pollute indoor dwellings. If I lived full-time indoors, I would undoubtedly kill myself like my brother (and Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, etc.). --- Thursday August 2 2018 Near Lake West, Olympic Peninsula, Washington @ KUOW Irony: a story on wildfires precedes a publicity spot for "Working Forests". If you let tree farms go to old growth, your wildfire risk would be manageable again. Not logging would release less carbon. Working forests cause more wildfires. Report on that! --- Add GDP index to M2 vs. CPI graph --- Friday August 4 2018 Forest Road 2361? near the south fork of the Skokomish River, Olympic Peninsula, Washington state I have slept outside on the ground without a tent for 16 nights now, this year. My goal is to sleep outside for 10% of the 365 nights in a year. I believe sleeping outside changes me for the better. I observe the trees, and the other elements of nature: birds, bugs, slugs, rocks, streams ... I try to learn. Endurance and resilience and power are well-represented, as well as nonviolence and love. In the cities, I find primarily passive-aggressiveness and anger and frustration and mind games and drummed-up drama. --- Monday August 6 2018 Forest Road 2361, on spur road 700, on the south fork of the Skokomish River, on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State @ Ari Shapiro and Professor Westinghouse?, expert on wildfires at the University of California Berkeley ? Wildfires are exacerbated by logging. Tree farms should go to more resistant old growth. Young dense planted trees burn hotter and faster. Not logging saves carbon. Logging exacerbates fires and climate change. Also @ BBC Newshour on NPR on Tuesday August 7 2018 --- Blue-stemmed brachen in four spots only along this road. --- Valuable experiences abound outside the price mechanism; we should create money to encourage such unpriced value. --- @ bilbo blog http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=40035#more-40035 "Hyperinflation will do that in a domestic sense if nominal aggregate spending from any source (government or non-government) increasingly outstrips the productive capacity of the economy to respond by producing real goods and services." You ignore financial goods. In reality, finance firms regularly create Net Financial Assets in the form of derivatives, which outnumber debt instruments by significantly more than an order of magnitude. Dollars are being created by the world financial sector on a scale of tens, or hundreds, of trillions per year. And yet there is no dollar hyperinflation, because your theory of inflation is wrong. Your theory of idle labor is similarly hopelessly neoliberal. Labor must be directed by neoliberal numbskulls such as yourself and your control freak friends before it can be productive. I don't care what you think I should do, though. I am far more productive doing my own self-directed work, which you might not recognize as productive because your neoliberal priorities are screwed up. --- @ reddit basic income forum comment: I do want the human race to end. I was just out in the forest for a week, and that is how I want to live: immersed in nature, swatting horseflies, washing in mountain streams, away from humans, learning from nature, listening to the birds. I really want to shed this human form, be reborn as a bird. --- @ lars p syll blog comment: "An objection to OMF is that the Central Bank then has no corresponding assets with which to defend the currency." . Major world central banks have a mutual unlimited currency swap network. This network was instituted in 2008, and expanded to meet the liquidity crisis. The ECB tapped the currency swap line with the Fed for an aggregated $8 trillion in 2008 and after. . The unlimited swap network is an asset that can be used to defend currencies. . Also, it is important to remember that Treasuries take on a value separate from their face value in repo trades. Sometimes borrowers who post Treasuries as collateral get paid to borrow; the repo rate goes negative because of free market trades. In such times the Treasuries are worth paying people to borrow from you. . The size of repo markets is significant, but quaint old economic models that don't include finance neglect them. --- @ mainly macro blog https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2018/08/what-becomes-news-and-why.html#comment-form : "experts in trade and law and so on" But these are fops and clueless insulated well-heeled fools who bury themselves in theoretical models while ignoring the realities of everyday life for most of us. The idea that GDP growth is good is your problem. Read Lars P Syll's latest blog on how GDP does not correlate with happiness. GDP is a totemic number which is mostly imputed by statisticians who ignore holding gains because if they included them under income, their simplistic circular flow of income model would explode. More money comes in to the real economy from the financial sector, created from the thin hot air of promises, than is involved in trade of goods. --- Tuesday August 14 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ Ron and Don Show, on KIRO radio: --- > After a while the rest of the crowd began to laugh, and their merriment increased when the kind-hearted capitalist, just after having sold a pound’s worth of necessaries to each of his workers, suddenly took their tools – the Machinery of Production – the knives away from them, and informed them that as owing to Over Production all his store-houses were glutted with the necessaries of life, he had decided to close down the works. > ‘Well, and what the bloody ‘ell are we to do now?’ demanded Philpot. > ‘That’s not my business,’ replied the kind-hearted capitalist. ‘I’ve paid you your wages, and provided you with Plenty of Work for a long time past. I have no more work for you to do at present. Come round again in a few months’ time and I’ll see what I can do for you.’ > ‘But what about the necessaries of life?’ demanded Harlow. ‘We must have something to eat.’ > ‘Of course you must,’ replied the capitalist, affably; ‘and I shall be very pleased to sell you some.’ > ‘But we ain’t got no bloody money!’ > ‘Well, you can’t expect me to give you my goods for nothing! You didn’t work for me for nothing, you know. I paid you for your work and you should have saved something: you should have been thrifty like me. Look how I have got on by being thrifty!’ Here is where credit comes in. New money is created as credit, and those with enough bluster like Trump never have to pay back the loans. --- Thursday August 16 2018 Capitol Fotest, Washington These precious moments spent communicating by sound with animals are valueless to a system that defines value as having a monetary price. If I can't sell this experience, it has no value. Yet I learn from birds, about sound and about joy. @ reddit free speech forum: If you were banned for writing "jihad" on twitter, why isn't Trump banned his far worse twitter slurs? Neither should be banned. The private sector shows arbitrary capriciousness in its censorship. That is one good reason why free speech is in the Constitution, because once you start banning it becomes about authority whether government or private sector. If private companies want to act like labile teenagers, that is their perogative. The Lockean Proviso requires we have access to as good an internetvas they do, and the government should protect our right to free expression by providing a censorship-free platform, as a last resort. We should not have to have money before we can set up our own website, or internet. --- Bundle 100 mortgages at average sale price $100,000. 100 * 100000 = $10 million. Double that to count the average interest on mortgages. 2 * $10 million = $20 million. Tranche it up so the top 20 creditworthy mortgages pay the investors first. That top tranche is then arbitrarily valued by a trader, say at $40 million for that tranche alone (face value was 20 * 100,000 * 2 = $4 million). The other 80 mortgages go in lower tranches and are marked up arbitrarily. RBS traders sell them off. Once they are sold, RBS has no further liability regarding them. Even if RBS can only sell the top tranche, it makes money. The buyer can pledge the top tranche Mortgage-Backed Security at the Fed, or with private money markets. The Fed or some private money dealer will issue $40 million and hold the MBS as collateral. The loan can be rolled over. Other MBS can be used to pay back the loan, and the Fed can declare it as an asset and issue money against it. A private Eurodollar dealer can create Eurodollars to pay for the MBS, and the created Eurodollars can be used to pay taxes. Note that the Treasury is not required to deposit tax receipts at the Fed. If Citibank creates dollars and pays taxes with those dollars, the Fed can put the deposit in Citibank and no Fed reserves are required. --- @ asymptosis tweet about the faith-based ecomomics of a Cato Institute spokesman saying profits best measure a corporation's contribution to socity: Public policy that assumes GDP growth is the best measure of progress is equally faith-based. --- @ Steve Hanke and BBC Newshour Inflation does not always occur with money supply increases: see Fed's balance sheet expansion following 2008. Inflation is psychological and can be fixed by giving dollars to individual Venezuelans. Dollarization did not help Zimbabwe; lack of dollars persists. @BBCNewshour @steve_hanke A dramatic money supply increase in the US did not cause inflation after 2008. Inflation is psychological and can be fixed by giving dollars to individual Venezuelans. Simple dollarization did not help Zimbabwe; an artificial lack of dollars persists. --- Tuesday August 21 2018 B-Line?, Capitol Forest, Washington @ Mitchell Hartmann on Marketplace on NPR Your inflation story ignores lack of predicted inflation by your models over the past decade. The Fed causes unintended consequences by mucking around with interest rates, such as mortgage defaults and Covered Interest Parity violations in currency swaps. Make rates 0% forever. --- Wednesday August 22 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ KBOO radio show discussing gun regulations @11 am Stephanie Potter, host Penelope Spur? Penny Yokomoto? Stand Up Oregon ceasefire-oregon.org The problem with your "common sense" is that you have created a world I don't want to live in. Your "common sense" too often creates public policy that sweeps me up as collateral damage, because I simply do not exist for you. Your "common sense" is the major source of suicide. --- @marketplace NPR The fisherwoman did not say whether supply or demand was her problem. I would ask her where she gets her right to kill other innocent animals, for money. Why can't she get out in the wild without netting and killing thousands of pounds more food than she will ever eat? --- @ KUOW reporter Eileen ? Logging causes more forest fires because planted tree farms are less resistant than old or second growth. Stop suppressing fires, stop logging, and get out of the way. --- Friday August 24 2018 @ BBC Newshour The professor neglects to consider that her censorship of vaccine opinions sows more dissent than the bots. I am more against her den-mother approach to the information I am allowed to see than I was. Her censorship response is more offensive than anything Russians do. --- @ reddit free speech forum: The ones telling me I must conform to their arbitrary code of morality, under threat of using state violence. I went to jail for marijuana possession, under Reagan's mandatory minimums. But, a few years later, this state legalized weed and I can smoke now without fear of incarceration. The government is fickle, fickle, fickle! --- In response to https://quantnet.com/threads/a-day-in-the-life-of-an-exotic-derivatives-trader.10057/ You are manipulating prices on very abstract, mathematical goods. How well do your valuations reflect the real value of the physical, or labor, resources in the underlying? How comfortable are you knowing that your pricing might drive millions out of homes, or finance ruthless extraction to sell homes to those investing in the securities you are bidding up as you collude with other traders? It's like your playing an Ender's game. You all have coded a massively multiplayer online game in which dollars are the points. What if your game was disconnected from provisioning of goods and services? With derivatives you're halfway there. What if the mathematical abstractions you traded did not at all influence food provisioning? If group-thinking traders did not psychologically devalue Venezuela's currency, food would get in to Venezuela, as it did before oil prices dropped (another example of how supply is artificially throttled by producers, then strategically increased to drive out competitors, for a while at least until extraction technology improves ...). You try to sound happy at all the arbitrary busy-work you do as you play your neoliberal profit-maximization game. I respect your right to pursue happiness as you see fit; I resent your arbitrary power over the availability of resources for my provisioning. Your game, from my viewpoint, arbitrarily throttles my access to resources, using excuses like "efficiency". But I see unhealthy, perversely-incentivized individuals suffering moral hazards (such as yourself) getting a lot of access to resources. I want to live free of the forces that make you think going inside all day is more important than your morning workout. I don't see how the abstractions you are playing with make provisioning more efficient. I hope you disconnect financial goods entirely from the real world. Let us figure out how to self-provision as we develop individualized, standalone technology that neoliberal businesses won't because it is more lucrative to sell subscriptions. The emotional comradery seems to make you happy: chatting with your London, sharing weekend plans with other traders. But why do you have to justify that by playing with abstractions that nonetheless have real consequences in terms of provisioning (e.g. gas prices)? --- In response to https://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/equities-trading-jobs/: "Prices find their level very quickly in cash equities following a news announcement, so a trader always has to think about potential scenarios and the prices stocks would trade at under different outcomes." Thus, prices are arbitrary. In 2008 markets reacted to rumors of massive defaults which never happened on the scale predicted. Market prices are labile. The efficient market hypothesis is wrong. "Another pricing request, this time for a variance swap, so you run it through the pricer and send back a quote. It’s not a position you want to take on so you try to make a quote that is respectable - the client won’t feel insulted, but at the same time he won’t want to trade with you." Thus, prices are arbitrary. --- Tuesday August 28 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington I wonder if the fuzz will count the number of times I've gone over the 7-day-per-year limit on camping on this patch of public land, and fine me or jail me. Maybe shoot me! @ reddit free speech forum: Free speech is assumed to be a conserved, zero-sum quantity: If I speak, necessarily you can't at the same time. But speech easily multiplexes. We can both speak at once. Speech is not like money: when I speak I am not physically debiting speech from anyone else. The Lockean Proviso establishes a justification for private property, if as good and as much common land remains. You can have your private speech, without limiting my expression. I can have my speech, in public, without diminishing your right to speak in response. Public or private policies that treat speech like money, i.e. if you speak I must be debited, don't understand multiplexing. Furthermore: To one who says "I get to ban you because it's my host, go get your own host" I say: Banning is not the best tool, and what's to prevent privatized infrastructure companies from black-listing me from the internet? If I try to host outside the US, they can still censor my packets at the border. When you ban someone, you take away my right to hear and respond to them, in addition to their self-evident right to free speech. Prove to me that private property rights are more important than the unalienable self-evident right to speech. A better tool to deal with the problems that you are trying to ban away is customizable filtering. You can see everything, or you can block arbitrary messages, or you can choose mods and see the same view they do. In the last case, you choose a mod that you presumably like or trust and get the view of the site they want to see. Or, you could customize a view and advertise for followers ... --- @ Simon Wren-Lewis blog on the pluralism in the IMF: Somehow the pluralistic views don't make it into their policies. Take the IMFx Financial Programming MOOCs. They are hard-core neoliberal. Most of the posters in the forums are developing nation officials or aspirants who swallow the balanced-budget story whole and regurtitate it eagerly upon demand. "How can I best help you destroy any trace of spirituality left in my countrymen, O Imf!" For an indication of the guiding philosophy of the IMF since its inception, see this article on why austerity grows GDP more than raising taxes: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2018/03/pdf/alesina.pdf . They will pay lip-service to pluralismnas hiring some "controlled opposition" people to write papers. But they're neoliberal to the core, still, when it comes to implemented policies. So are you, with a softer heart. No wonder you sing the praises of the IMF in this blog. --- What is to prevent a hotel chain from banning me because they don't like my posts on reddit.com, for example? What keeps them from adding a flag to the database to charge me higher to send me a price signal that they want me to go away, for personal reasons? Inflation is a price signal that producers want certain people to go away. Whether the cause is a real, induced, imagined, provoked, planned, imposed shortage is beside the point because without the desire not to serve some people, prices need not increase with a money supply increase. The desire comes from arbitrary, fickle, psychology, I claim. The private sector creates money to drive up incomes and prices among its friends, until certain classes or random individuals are priced out. Since everything is enclosed, the alternatives are suicide or violence or theft ... Government should provide better alternatives: print public money and encourage the advance of knowledge, basing public policy on the theory that the more you know, the less you need. Manage inflation as the private sector does: increase incomes faster than prices. --- Saturday September 1 2018 Capitol Forest, West side @ ChaseIronEyes tweet about "being from the area" for "a couple million years": What was Pocahontas like? Elizabeth Warren? --- @ reddit basic income forum, comment about "UBI is a fantasy: Gay marriage was a fantasy but that turned on a dime. --- The co-creator of the Black-Scholes equation, which is used to price derivatives in real time in markets that trade in multi-trillion dollar volumes per day, thought inflation was noise. Fischer Black writes in his 1986 essay Noise that error bars on prices should be +100% and minus 50% (Fischer Black quotation from Noise here). If oil can go from $25 to $100 per barrel on noise alone, then noise can be blamed for inflation rates up to 300%. --- @ goldfish on notabug.io I hope Goldiefish learns from predecessors CmdrTaco started out wide-eyed and believing in free speech, then he got insulted and trolled into banning and throttling. Don't get distracted from the goal of exploring speech without (non-speech) consequences! They're trolling you with tool tips and downvoting for heaven's sake! What if I ran a /dev/null server where all the notabug peers send their downvoted, their banned, their throttled, their unwanted? Would that be easy to set up? --- Monday September 3 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington On being blocked by Chase Iron Eyes on Twitter I am disappointed because I hoped to continue to learn from you, and make available to you information I have learned. I wanted to describe the snakes around me in this spot, one slithering right under my heel. I wonder are they curious? Are they playing with me, entertained by me? Contrast this with your tweets treating snakes as scary, evil, dangerous. I wanted to give you a different perspective on snakes. I'm sorry I trespassed on your private Twitter property. Would your ancestors have cut my tongue out for anything I've said to you? Maybe they had a sense of humor ... Bans have unintended consequences. I am tempted to support pipelines now, out of spite. Bans make your opponents stronger and more numerous. When I first saw you had blocked me, doves were flying around. They are more interesting to me than you. I walked into a stand of older growth, practiced making a wikiup. Have you important knowledge of your forefathers? They talk to animals in your stories ... --- Sunday September 9 2018 Ellensburg, Washington I learned Big Head died yesterday. Tracie said she had a rambuctious day-before-yesterday, then was breathing hard at the bottom of her cage yesterday morning, She died at the vet's. I remember the last time I saw her, I changed her water and gave her pellets. She rushed up to my hand as I put the pellets in her dish, grazing my fingers with her open beak. I told her she was very fierce. It was our little ritual; I used to beg her for half-an-hour sometimes before, when she was a young caged bird, to change her water without biting me. Finally I would dare to open her cage door and change her water, and at the end as I was withdrawing my hand she would jump at my hand, scaring me. Sometimes I dropped the water. She rarely bit me though. She would sometimes just graze my hand with her open beak, just like she did that last time. It was our ritual, harkening back to those old days when she was still caged most of the day. The last time I saw her, she also stood on the slanted perch in front of her box, looking at me in that regal way of hers, majestic in her presence. She winked slowly at me, which I took as a sign of approval, of acceptance, of friendship, of love. --- Wednesday September 12 2018 Sun East Ranch, near Ellensburg, Washington In the year or so before she died, Big Head Princess became good friends with Zephyr, a yellow lovebird that Tracie acquired two? years ago. Princess Big Head would trundle over to Zephyr's cage nearby and spend a half-hour or more talking to Zeph through the cage bars. Even when Zephyr's cage door was open, they would chatter back and forth through the cage bars. Big Head wanted babies and tried hard with Charlie and Betty (a male that Tracie mistook for female when named). She laid many clutches of eggs before finally giving up. But then Missy and Chaz showed up, still with black beaks. I think Big Head enjoyed playing Aunt to the babies. They spent a lot of their out time climbing on her cage. Once they sat close to her and she was clicking away at them. It was like she was telling them a story ... --- @ Bill Mitchell: In part two of Bill Mitchell's reponse to "Mainstream Macroeconomics and Modern Monetary Theory: What Really Divides Them?", he quotes a passage: "If a government seeks to adjust the budget position to bring output to potential, it can do so regardless of the current budget deficit, debt-GDP ratio, or similar measures of fiscal space." Mitchell proceeds to be triggered by the use of the term "fiscal space", and explains at great length why the sentence is true, all the while seeming outraged as if the statement was false. Is Mitchell just ranting here? In part three of the response (http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=40320#more-40320), Mitchell agrees with the article's statement of the five "key assumptions" shared by MMT and mainstream economics. Mitchell then proceeds to distract from the article's proposed MMT policy response to inflation. Whether New Keynsians predict inflation or not, if inflation shows up in an MMT economy what will MMTers do? Will they print money faster than prices rise and distribute it to everyone via a basic income, say? Will they raise taxes? Will they cut government spending in the face of political opposition to taxes, trying to run government surpluses to defeat inflation? The central problem shared by both MMT and mainstream economics is their ignorance of finance. MMT claims to distinguish itself from the mainstream by disavowing "loanable funds" theory, but it doesn't matter because when MMT constructs sectoral balance sheets it uses NIPA imputed figures, same as the mainstream does. NIPA ignores finance capital. MMT assumes net private banking money creation is zero because loans must be destroyed as they are paid back. Thus they leave out banking assets such as stocks and derivatives when they calculate private sector income. If MMT and/or the mainstream included finance capital, their inflation models would explode. Thus both schools must ignore the vast volumes of dollar-denominated bank assets circulating in the world finance sector as money. MMT's answer to inflation seems to be tax more or cut spending to run a government surplus. This answer is no more satisfying than the mainstream approach of jacking up interest rates. Both should realize that inflation is psychological and is best addressed by indexation: print money faster than prices rise. --- @ lars p syll blog: "the right way to respond to financial crises is with policies that restore the value of private assets." . Yes, this is the lesson learned from 2008. But the fiscal stimulus was just political theatre; the real monetary expansion of world dollar reserves was provided by the Fed. As the Fed printed digital dollars, the dollar got stronger. Farmer may understand this; Stiglitz and Summers are clueless, or lying. . The further lesson is that we should apply the Fed's proven (against market testing) unlimited liquidity to funding good ideas such as universal basic income. No taxpayer money was needed for the Fed to rescue world markets from themselves in 2008 and after. . "a full 10% share of U.S. national income shifted from the bottom half to the top 1% over the course of 30 years" . The pie slice of the top 1% has grown much quicker than other slices, due to private money creation. The bottom half's pie slice has grown but much slower. --- @ Adam Tooze @ Carrie Gracie Tooze could have told a story of wanton private sector Net Financial Asset creation backstopped by the Fed's $3.5 trillion in debt-free money and unlimited currency swap lines, but Gracie dominated with a dismal tale of govt debt. Shame! @ Simon Wren-Lewis GDP is acknowledged to be a terrible measure of society's well-being in at the outset of most economic textbooks, but even advanced modeling continues to treat GDP maximization as the foremost objective function. --- @ lars p syll blog: "What we must aim to do is tighten regulations, further raise capital requirements and bolster liquidity buffers to minimize the risk of a bank run. Furthermore, we must extend regulation to non-banks, such as the major asset managers." . Bankers will stay ahead of regulators. Recently I looked up the Lehman Brothers 2007 Annual Report ( https://www.zonebourse.com/NB-PRIV-EQPARTN-56192/pdf/87896/NB%20PRIV%20EQ%20PARTN_Rapport-annuel.pdf). Regulators did not catch or probably look for repo transactions counted as sales. Now they might, but what new tricks are current firms using that regulators haven't thought of? . Anyway, we know how to fix panics: print money. We should print money for individuals to help us through our individual existential crises. --- @ mainly macro https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2018/09/how-to-predict-crisis.html#comment-form "we have hardly begun the process of creating a macroeconomic policy regime that can deal with a future recession, let alone a crisis." We know how to deal with a liquidity crunch: print more money. We should use that lesson to fund universal basic income on central bank balance sheets. Central banks have unlimited currency swap lines these days, so if the UK needs dollars it gets them at away-from-market rates from the Fed. With no capacity limits. Markets are not involved in Fed currency swap lines. --- @ lars p syll blog https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2018/09/17/tony-lawson-vs-uskali-maki/#respond "My goal is less the clarification of what economists are doing and presupposing as seeking to change the orientation of modern economics … Specifically, I have been much more prepared than the other two to criticise the ontological presuppositions of economists—at least publically. " . If you challenge the ontological presuppositions, you challenge the proofs that markets are efficient. If you can't prove markets efficient, prices may well be arbitrary. If prices are arbitrary, inflation is probably psychological. If inflation is psychological, we can best deal with the expression of money demand by printing money faster than prices rise. . The private sector already understands that money can be created faster than prices rise. See http://subbot.org/misc/econ/m2_cpi_gdp_index.png . M2 money supply rises almost 4000% faster than CPI. GDP can't explain away the money growth because GDP has grown about 4000% slower too. Conclusion: the Quantity Theory of Money is wrong, and Trump knows that but economists don't dare say it publicly. --- Wednesday September 19 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington Dream with Jim last night: We were off someplace and got into a fight with some other boys. They started it; we beat them off and retreated to a bathroom where we cleaned up some blood. They came after us. We were ready to fight them again, confident we would beat them away once more. Then I woke up. It felt good to have a dream about my brother where we were working together, and winning. --- Wednesday September 26 2018 Sun East Ranch, Washington 1. Eris Blastar 2. notabug votes as unlimited money supply showing how prices (votes) are arbitratily connected to subjective value. Trying to establish an objective measure of value is hopeless. 3. @___ why scale things by GDP when you know GDP fudges things like capital deprecration to derive imputed numbers that make simplistic accounting models seem plausible? 4. @jwmason1 The money to issue negative equity is created through trades involving derivatives in unregulated, largely unreported private world exchanges and clearinghouses. More money settles privately than NIPA measures capture. 5. @ simon wren-lewis do you want on your tombstone: I maximized output and did my part to raise GDP. In GDP I trust!" --- @ ryan cooper ? Saying the 2008 was paid for by the public implies that the debt-free money created by keystroke by the Fed was debited from current or future tax receipts. But the Fed needed no taxes to fund QE and unlimited currency swaps. Argue that the Fed should have bailed out individuals ... --- Saturday September 29 2018 Spent six nights at Suneast, five glorious nights outside. Did not see the bear reported to have a den a thousand feet up the creek. Saw a skunk, large garter snake, lots of birds, chipmunks. Beautiful sunny calm days, nights not too cool. Got stoned right in my sleeping bag most mornings ... --- 36135540 Reservation confirmation at Clarion Inn in Tacoma, last Sunday night --- Thursday October 4 2018 Humptulips River, Forest Road 2063 ?, off Donkey Creek Road, Washington Re Jamie Dimon interview yesterday on NPR Marketplace: https://www.marketplace.org/2018/10/03/economy/jamie-dimon-transcript Dimon says that shareholder profit maximization is just a narrative, not an operational principle: > Dimon: I've never believed that the only thing is to maximize shareholder value. In fact, I don't know any CEOs who are that way. I think these companies - > Ryssdal: Wait. Sorry. How come everybody thinks all companies just want to maximize shareholder value? > Dimon: It just becomes a narrative that gets repeated over and over. But without agents continually seeking to maximize profit, mathematical models off efficient markets break down. If agents do not always seek to maximize profit, free lunches can exist and prices can be arbitrary. Dimon also quoted J. Pierpont Morgan saying character is the most important thing: > "the first thing is character," when J. Pierpont Morgan said that, he was also referring to - it's not about the models of credit. I always tell economists, you can have all the models you want, but character and culture isn't in a model. And we have to make those judgments, too. Like, one of the most important things we do is who we do business with. We need good common - we know some, we know some will have tough times. We want to work with them in tough times, but who we do business with is like the most important to protect this company. If I have crummy clients, I'm going to have a crummy bank. But character assessment is psychological. If the price of loans, and the granting of a loan in the first place, is based on arbitrary character assessments by bankers, then markets cannot be mathematically proved to discover prices efficiently. If prices are arbitrary, as suggested by Diamond, inflation can be treated as psychological and met with indexation. Public policy can fight inflation by printing money faster than prices rise. Diamond also noted he prepares for every future: > Ryssdal: Are you worried about, you know, given all that, cyber and all of that, are you worried about the Fed and its actions, and are you worried about politicians and them stepping up? > Dimon: Well, I'm not worried about both, but we plan for both not being exactly the way we expected. So I think the Fed is doing the right thing in raising rates. The economy is quite strong, and the thing which is normalizing it, it will be really good to get back to normal. And as long as they're normalizing it, rates are going up, in a healthy economy with really low unemployment, strong growth, good capital expenditures, that's good. I mean, the "why" is more important than the "what." The why is we have a healthy economy. That dwarfs all other things. But, you know, is it possible that down the road something happens, there’s too much inflation, the Fed's going to move quicker, the reversal of QE isn't this as good? That's possible. So I'm not predicting it, and my company could easily handle it, which is what I think about. But it is possible, just like the tariffs can cause problems that you don't anticipate today. Just like cyber can cause problems, just like Brexit can cause problems. I mean, you always got to be looking to figure out, make sure you can handle bad outcomes. In other words, he is fully hedged. He likely creates and buys derivatives that make him money whether GDP, or inflation, or the stock market, go up or down. The only question is how much money he will make. Linear algebra lets him set a minimum desired profit, then generates a portfolio to gurantee that minimum no matter what the future market state ... Diamond started by saying it wasn't important for everyone to understand how the financial system works. That way, he can continue creating Net Financial Assets out of thin air, as derivatives say, for his friends while declaring government and households must obey a budget constraint. Exotic financial instruments have freed him from budget constraints; perhaps he is afraid if we find out, we'll use them too and he will no longer be special. --- Dimon in this interview also expresses some quasi-support for what might be interpreted as basic income: > Income inequality is a real issue, and we studied it, and there are fixes to it. > there's a thing called the earned income tax credit. So if you're a single woman with two children making $14,000 a year, the government will give you $6,000. I would double that. I think people who have jobs earn dignity. That first job leads to a second job. You'll have better social outcomes. So I want to make sure that people who start unskilled have a living wage, and I think society can afford it. And if they have to tax me for that, so be it. He's too job-focused ... On economic predictions of recessions: > I don't know what triggers it. I've never seen really people predict that. People don't usually predict the inflection point economy very well. In fact, I've almost never seen it. On fixing American cities: > This author Jim Fallows, who wrote for The Atlantic talked about all the rebirth of the cities, and a lot of it was about mayors who really care about helping the city, and citizens both civic or business saying: "You know what, I'll take care of that park. You know what, let's bring a company into fill that empty building. ..." I want to turn empty buildings into free public squats. Dimon could drop by, shoot the breeze ... Dimon is for a carbon tax and dividend: > a carbon tax with a carbon dividend: You pay for carbon, but you're going to get a dividend from the government based on everyone else, the collected carbon - so it doesn't change your income, but you might spend it differently. You might buy a new car or that new refrigerator, put in those new windows. Is he saying you tax the car because it emits carbon, then you can buy the same car and pay for the carbon tax with the carbon dividend? --- @kai rysdal npr marketplace today's show: If Powell thinks long-term rates increasing is good, he is violating the third mandate in Section 2A of the Federal Reserve Act: keep long-term rates low. --- Thursday October 4 2018 Fish Trap Road, off Donkey Creek Road, on the Humptulips River, in the Olympic Peninsula, Washington state A dipper splashed in the river near me, close to the bank. He or she danced, dipping at the knees, splashing head in the water, swimming out towards the middle of tge stream and back, part of the time swimming underwater, at other times like a duck with head out of tge water. The little dipper seemed to be playing, frisky, swimming for fun, showing off. It made its way downstream dipping head underwater. Was it hunting for the tiny bugs I've seen on underwater stream rocks near tge bank? Occasionally it would hop to a dry rock and fix me with its gaze. Or turn its back on me and look intently across the stream. Then it would splash back in the cold water ... I was reminded of Missy, Tracie's new pet lovebird. The dipper was small like Missy was as a baby. A bird with a white band around its neck, small like a kildeer, squawking rhythmically and very loudly. A big red bird, like a hawk, flying down the river. I think I saw an eagle, and heard loud high-pitched calls that might be other eagles? Frogs croaking. Many little birdcalls from the surrounding trees, as the sun comes out. A squirrel sings ... Lots of caterpillars, with long red hairs. Saw one black-and-yellow slug, and a green one. Kept trying to remember to watchbthe ground to make sure I did not step on any slugs, caterpillars, beetles, worms ... Ducks splashed in the river. Other splashes I took to be salmon. Later, I saw small furry creatures, otters?, splasing in and out of the water, upstream. I jerry-rigged a tarp shelter on the river bank, using string and stakes and bungee cords. I slept under it last night. It didn't rain. It kept falling leaves off me. Today I took it down and set up another shelter farther up the bank near the car. Inwill sleep in the car tonight because the forecast is for colder than last night and rain tomorrow. I will see how the second tarp shelter holds up in the rain. Can I stay dry, and exercise, and boil water? --- Friday October 5 2018 Same place, at the end of Fish Trap Road off Donkey Creek Road in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state @ science friday npr radio show Dr Cheng contradicts herself, saying she prefers not to inject gender, then emotionally accusing MEN later on; she seems to be strawmanning, literally! She is confused about contradiction, as an accuser and accused can both be truthful: mistaken identity, blackouts, etc. --- Friday October 5 2018 Same place, at the end of Fish Trap Road off Donkey Creek Road in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state Survived a day of rain. The tarp I set up yesterday evening kept me dry. There was a patch of old growth ground cover that remained dry throughout the steady rain. The tree above it provided a canopy thick enough to catch all the rain. Near sunset, the rain let up. I smoked a pre-rolled joint and went for a long walk back along the road leading to this spot. I walked like Sherman Helmsley, felt like a man, breaking out into song as I wished, whistling at birds. Why don't we live like this all the time? I want to set up natural stick shelters along this road, come camp moving among them in the winter. Tell stories with other non-exclusive use campers. ' I thought of Jim, wanted to talk about economics with him, ask him about derivatives and private money creation and indexation. I want to develop my bots to argue with. One could read all his writings and respond as him. Maybe he would haunt it. I got back in the dark. I couldn't see the road in places and worried about stepping in puddles. I managed to avoid them. Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny. I'll sleep in the car tonight because it's still so soggy. If I were going to sleep outside tonight I would sleep on the narrow patch of ground that remained dry, under the old growth tree's many-layered branches. --- Saturday October 6 2018 Same place, at the end of Fish Trap Road off Donkey Creek Road in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state Nature self-defines, independently of human society for the most part. In the forest, listening to traffic reports on the radio seems weirdly incongruent. To individuals in traffic, the actions of other humans predominate in thought. Immersed in nature, forces other than human occupy thought: will it rain? where to place my next footfall on this uneven terrain? which direction is the wind blowing? --- @ Innovation Hub NPR radio program on traffic: Michael Manville Assuming price is the best way to address traffic ignores technical solutions: can cars be networked? Can self-driving cars merge more efficiently? Treating roads as scarce belittles knowledge advances that inevitably reduce all former scarcities. Price is the most dismal tool. --- Wednesday October 10 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ Jennifer Little Klamath County Health plan promoter: Your association of better health outcomes with jobs ignores suicide. Too often, jobs kill one's soul. A better health plan would provide care as needed, teach prevention, and pay for healthy food. Leave neoliberal normative statements about jobs out. --- Sunday October 14 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington Ben Bernanke's Bridge I had a dream in which Ben Bernanke appeared, in a dark suit and neatly trimmed beard, showing me the metal struts of a bridge. When I woke up, I thought my main use for his bridge was to jump off it ... I was likely remembering in my dream the following passage in [The Real Effects of the Financial Crisis](https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/BPEA_Fall2018_The-real-effects-of-the-financial-crisis.pdf): > As I argued in a speech some years ago (Bernanke, 2010), the occurrence of a massive, and largely unanticipated, financial crisis might best be understood as a failure of economic engineering and economic management, rather than of economic science. I meant by that that our fundamental understanding of financial panics - which, after all, have occurred periodically around the world for hundreds of years - was not significantly changed by recent events. (Indeed, the policy response to the crisis was importantly informed by the writings of nineteenth-century authors, notably Walter Bagehot.) Rather, we learned from the crisis that our financial regulatory system and private-sector risk-management techniques had not kept up with changes in our complex, opaque, and globally integrated financial markets; and, in particular, that we had not adequately identified or understood the risk that a classic financial panic could arise in a historically novel institutional setting. The unexpected collapse of a bridge should lead us to try to improve bridge design and inspection, rather than to rethink basic physics. By the same token, the response to our failure to predict or prevent the crisis should be to improve regulatory and risk-management systems - the economic engineering - rather than on reconstructing economics at a deep level. Bernanke's bridge leads to increasing consumption and full employment. That is a terrible goal and public policy should not strive to maximize GDP. I don't want to buy Bernanke's bridge ... On the failure of employed models to predict: > the Fed staff predicted (in the FOMC briefing document known as the Greenbook) that unemployment would peak at under 6 percent. In reality, the unemployment rate would rise to nearly 10 percent. This under-prediction partly reflected excessive optimism about the evolution of financial conditions. However, an alternative Greenbook forecast scenario that hypothesized "severe financial stress," and which assumed in particular that house prices would fall further than they ultimately did, saw unemployment remaining below 7 percent. Moreover, even in October 2008, well after the collapse of Lehman and the rescue of AIG, the staff saw unemployment peaking at around 7-1/4 percent. On derivatives and how finance creates Net Financial Assets that last a long time before the Fed has to backstop them: > From the perspective of ultimate investors, the advantage of information-insensitive liabilities is that they can be held without incurring the costs of evaluating the individual credits that back those claims - a task at which most investors are at a comparative disadvantage - and without concern about principal-agent problems, adverse selection, and other costs that often arise in lender-borrower relationships. Moreover, information-insensitive liabilities will tend to be liquid, because potential buyers likewise do not have to incur high costs of evaluating them or worry about adverse selection among sellers. Consequently, investors who face unpredictable needs for liquidity (as in Diamond-Dybvig’s setup) will benefit from holding such claims. Investor risk and transaction costs are reduced further when the information-insensitive liabilities have short maturities, since rather than selling the assets when liquidity is needed, investors can simply stop rolling over their claims as they mature. From the issuer’s point of view, the benefit of information-insensitive liabilities is their lower required yield and their attractiveness to broad classes of investors. Much of the financial innovation of the pre-crisis period reflected issuer efforts to create information-insensitive liabilities from risky underlying assets.^3 Footnote 3: > 3. Hanson and Sunderam (2013) provide a model of this process, arguing that, because of informational externalities, information-insensitive securities are over-issued in good times. Caballero, Farhi, and Gourinchas (2017) discuss the global "shortage" of safe assets, which motivates financial engineers to create such assets. Sunderam (2015) discusses the creation of safe assets through shadow banking. Relatedly, Peek and Rosengren (2016) discuss the evolution of financial markets in recent decades, pointing out that many of the changes increased the dependence of the system on "runnable" wholesale funding. When he says "create such assets" he is talking about new Net Financial Asset creation. "Shortage" of safe assets means Treasuries are scarce. Dollar demand exceeds dollar supply; hence the creation of new dollar-denominated net financial assets to meet world dollar demand. From the conclusion: > Although the panic was certainly not an exogenous event, its timing and magnitude were largely unpredictable, the result of diverse structural and psychological factors. Do bridges fail because of psychological factors? Remembering the first passage quoted above, doesn't "economics at a deep level" hold that prices are efficient because the psychology of market agents is always rational? Don't panics show that prices are often arbitrary for significant periods (both before and after)? > Retrospectively, policymakers (including the Federal Reserve and the Treasury) took aggressive and often highly unpopular measures to arrest the financial panic, including expanding lending well beyond the banking system and undertaking a series of interventions to recapitalize the banking system and to avoid the collapse of systemically important financial institutions. They signaled unlimited liquidity, expanding their balance sheet by at least $2 trillion in a matter of weeks or months. Then the asset purchase programs began ... Bernanke's Figure 5 (on page 31) shows a spike in Bank of America CDS spreads around 2012, which Bernanke takes to be "a measure of banking system solvency." Could the Fed have signaled unlimited liquidity to meet the sovereign debt crisis, as it had just done with the financial panic? --- Bernanke on how to improve macroeconomic models: > For macroeconomists, recent experience and research highlight the need for greater attention to credit-related factors in modeling and forecasting the economy. Standard models used by central banks and other policymakers include basic financial prices, such as interest rates, stock prices, and exchange rates, but do not easily accommodate financial stresses of the sort seen in 2007-2009, including the evident disruption of credit markets. Plausibly, this omission explains why standard approaches seriously underestimated the economic impact of the crisis. But his financial factors rely on measures such as ABX and CDS spreads that he was blind to before the crisis. How can he know we are not blind to other financial factors that will only become apparent to us after the fact? --- Tuesday October 16 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington, water camp @ Yes on 1631: The businesses supporting the broad coalition will get the tax money. --- Saturday October 20, 2018 Olympic Forest, Washington View of Mount Raineer ? over low-lying clouds, from this high spot on the southeast side of the Olympic Mountains. I looks like an ice-age: Puget Sound covered in white clouds like ice, with crevasses ... Farther down the road a stream falls into a pool above the road and comes out on the other side lower down, without flowing through the culvert. There is another stream that goes underground still farther down the road (where I camped a few months ago). --- @ multi-county garbage policy letter: When you raise garbage rates, you incentivize people to dump on public land. You should not think of garbage as a commodity to be profited on. The government should incentivize recyclying by subsidizing it. Pay for it with a public bank that has access to Fed funding and hold challenges to develop perfect hedging strategies to make money no matter what happens to the economy, as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan do. --- Sunday October 21 2018 Same spot, high in the southeastern Olympic Mountains @ NPR Marketplace: Reagan proved deficits don't matter. The debt is a distraction, and provides safe assets to the worldwide financial system. Demand for safe assets leads to private Treasury substitutes which are publically backstopped in crisis. Conclusion: deficits don't matter because tge Fed proved it can print liberally as the dollar strengthened. @ facebook exec intervies on new yorker radio hour? or radio lab? on Saturday October 20 2018 Facebook fails to imagine the technical solution of giving each user control over what they see. Instead of hiring people to filter content, let users filter their own content. If they must, Facebook could send warnings: "This user is suspected of being a troll. You might want to mute him from your stream." Without prior restraint on anyone's speech ... @ NPR re migrant caravan: @ Maria Cantwell @ Susan Hutchison The solution is to legalize drugs. Take the violence out of drug markets. The war on drugs has led to a humanitarian crisis much worse then anything the drugs themselves do. --- Saw one shooting star last might. I wished "Peach", wishing to meet her again, and Buddy, and all the other birds and pets I've known, in a future life. This spot is above the clouds and fog I can see persisting over the Sound and all the way to the Cascades. Mount Rainier ? stands tall above the clouds in the distance. Flocks of juncos and chickadees fly by, greeting me, flying on. A woodpecker or two peck in the nearby trees. It was enough like summer today for one of the big black flies to come sting me. It is a joy to walk down the road near sunset, clamber back off the road to a waterfall-fed pool, wash up, and collect water to haul back up to the campsite ... --- The real shock to Greece in 2012 was the ECB's hard money attitude. --- Monday October 22 2018 @ KUOW The Record The best policy to handle automation and inequality is universal basic income. Fund basic income on the Fed's balance sheet at no taxpayer cost; implement an indexation policy to deal with inflation. --- @ ? Kierkegaard, economist, interviewed on BBC Newshour, about Italy's debt crisis: The only real shock to Italy is coming from the ECB's governing board. The ECB can easily decide to buy Italian debt, in the same way it has bought trillions of private bonds. Instead, neoliberal ideology tells rational, poor Italians to kill themselves, all the while enforcing anti-suicide laws. The only real shock to Italy is the psychology of the ECB. --- @ James Kumarasami ?, BBC Newshour, reporting from Wisconsin: The real problem in Wisconsin is clearly overproduction of corn and dairy. Why not ship some of the undeniable food overproduction to starving Venezuelans and Guetemalans, etc.? --- Wednesday October 24 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ Micheal Barbaro on The Daily radio show: The reason I did not vote Democratic on my just-mailed ballot is that no politician on the ballot was the kind of humane politician your Caravan reporter said the migrants believe in. Why can't Democrats stand up for justice and welcome Caravans? Instead ya'll let yourselves get trolled by Trump, over and over and over and over ... Sad! --- @ Adam Frank, physicist, regarding salt: How do you know the bonds in salt aren't subject to dark energy, which science failed to predict and still has no theory for? At the largest scales, your science fails to predict; at the smallest, photons violate your simplistic assumptions of non-contradiction. I take your faith in salt's immutability with a grain of salt. --- From "The banks had become highly leveraged: they had loaned far too much money compared to their capital and so they couldn’t cover the total amount of loans going bad." This is wrong: banks couldn't borrow to fund continued lending because traders panicked and refused to accept collateral that was worth trillions the day before. The problem was fixed by the Fed's money-printing. --- @ ralph muskgrave's blog: https://ralphanomics.blogspot.com/2018/10/monetary-policy-is-nonsense.html#comment-form I'm reminded of Fischer Black's 1986 essay "Noise" ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1986.tb04513.x ): "I believe that monetary policy is almost completely passive in a country like the U.S. Money goes up when prices go up or when income goes up because demand for money goes up at those times. I have been unable to construct an equilibrium model in which changes in money cause changes in prices or income, but I have had no trouble constructing an equilibrium model in which changes in prices or income cause changes in money." I trust Black's opinion more than Wren-Lewis, because Black's equations are still present, in some form, in pricing tools used by traders today. His work contributed to financial pricing and he says prices are arbitrary to a factor of two, at least; and ten percent of the time prices are arbitrarily arbitrary: "we might define an efficient market as one in which price is within a factor of 2 of value, i.e., the price is more than half of value and less than twice value. The factor of 2 is arbitrary, of course. Intuitively, though, it seems reasonable to me, in the light of sources of uncertainty about value and the strength of the forces tending to cause price to return to value. By this definition, I think almost all markets are efficient almost all of the time. 'Almost all' means at least 90%." If markets are not efficient at least ten percent of the time, and only noisily efficient to a factor of two the rest of the time, then inflation need not be treated as a constraint on public policy. We can print money at least as fast as prices rise, distributing it to everyone, and thereby maintain real purchasing power stability. Nominal price inflation ceases to be relevant. --- @ notabug/t/jazz: "In a mellow tone" by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington: does the trombone solo kill the swing? --- @ green_meklar on reddit/r/basicincome: Prices are arbitrary because stores determine when to discontinue items arbitrarily, relative to my individual wishes. The price becomes infinite to me, independent of my preferences. I do not figure into the decision to discontinue, therefore I have no effect on tge price and, from my perspective, the price is arbitrarily high. If you claim prices are efficient, because of mathematical proofs based on rational expectation models, you must claim that the pricing and stocking decisions of grocery store managers are firmly rooted in rational expectations: the stocking and pricing decisions must obey transitivity, additivity, etc. But this is experimentalky false: decisions are made by listening selectively to certain customers and ignoring me for personal reasons, often. --- Sunday October 28 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington I dreamt of Jim last night. He was behind a closed door, in a hotel or something, and would not let me open it. He was in some kind of emotional distress: he wanted to be by himself. I wanted to help him. I want to ask what I could do to help. Did he want something from me? Acceptance, forgiveness, friendship, brotherly love, knowledge, intellectual dialog? --- Did Randy Halberschdatd (sp?) quote the Mills Brothers "Be My Life's Companion (And You'll Never Grow Old)" on "Soul Dere" (sp?)? --- Jay Thomas is playing now; I remember he posted on bran's forum about a guy who shot heroin in his dick because that was the only veins he had left. I also saw him with John at some benefit for his dental care, I think ... --- @ alan greenspan claiming debt build-up caused the 2008 financial crisis: Where on the Lehman Brothers balance sheet is the debt build-up apparent? --- Prices are arbitrary because my best alternative to a negotiated solution is jail. I must pay whatever the motel owner charges, or risk being arrested under criminal statutes prohibiting camping on city land. --- @ ralph musgrave blog: https://ralphanomics.blogspot.com/2018/10/warren-mosler-on-permanent-zero.html#comment-form Inflation should not be seen as a constraint, because it is easily fixed by printing more money. In simplest terms: if M/Y = P, empirical observations show that M has been increasing much much faster than Y or P. See http://subbot.org/misc/econ/m2_cpi_gdp_index.png ; note that M2 has risen over 4000% since 1959 compared to 800% for CPI and even less for GDP. Clearly M is buying financial goods which are not included in Y. The Price of financial assets may go up with Money supply, but that is called wealth creation not inflation. Since Money supply is increasing much faster than GDP, the simple equation M = PT can only hold if you insert a mathematical fudge factor, Velocity, to discount the Money supply increase. So you can increase M arbitrarily and hold Y constant and decrease Velocity by using M to buy financial goods. This makes everyone richer. The rich consume less as a percentage of their income. As everyone becomes rich, their marginal propensity to consume real goods falls and output can stay the same or fall and M * V will also fall. MV/P = Y. Increase M and V will necessarily fall because the rich don't spend less and less on Y as M increases. Another way of looking at it: MV/P = Y. If M goes up more than P, Y increases. Either way M can be increased in lockstep with P and Y will at least not decrease. Thus inflation is no threat. Raise M and increase financial goods, and there need be no shortages. If shortages occur it is because of psychological hoarding factors: like oil in the 1970s, supply is artificially throttled rather than constrained by physical limits. In Weimar farmers hoarded food; in Venezuela today food is scarce because the world is hoarding overproduced food. Resources are idled for psychological reasons. Realization: the Quantity Theory of Money is wrong. Output is not the Money Supply divided by Prices. Prices are not Output divided into the Money supply. P != M/Y except coincidentally. Empirical data supports the proposition that the Money Supply increases much faster than either Prices or Output. --- Thursday November 1 2018 Capitol Forest @ billy_blog: One reason you don't hear people insult you face-to-face is that people like me never choose to go to the places you frequent. Why would I ever want to see your face? Also, dismissing quantitative easing as a mere asset swap is too glib. Central banks swapped the best money in the world, created by keystroke, for Treasuries but swapped the Treasuries back for junky bonds. The Fed and ECB also bought private bonds, many of which had no other market buyers despite a face value guaranteed. Central banks the world over used created money to buy privately-created bonds that no one else wanted. In the US, the Fed bought only Agency Mortgage-Backed Securities; but many Private Label MBS were refinanced into agency-guaranteed loans. (See Sissoko's article for some details about how PLMBS were converted to Agency MBS through refinacing regulation changes.) Calling quantitative easing a simple asset swap ignores the fact that bonds created first in the private sector were swapped for the best money in the world, which was created after the private sector Net Financial Assets had already been created. --- Proposal: the Fed sells an External Finance Premium derivative. The EFP spikes in a panic, so shares will appreciate in value as traders emotionally sell off stocks. I can then buy EFP index shares as a hedge against S&P 500 index shares. --- Saturday November 2 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ 1A radio program on NPR: The reality is that the ECB can easily bail out Greece and Italy as it bailed out banks that had gotten themselves into a panic. No German taxpayer was debited for the ECB's bailouts of Deutsche Bank, etc. As journalists, please do due diligence and research this. --- My great finance idea: Bernanke in https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/BPEA_Fall2018_The-real-effects-of-the-financial-crisis.pdf defines an External Finance Premium, which is countercyclical: the EFP spikes in a panic. So the Fed should sell shares in an EFP derivative index. I could hedge an S&P 500 index share with an EFP index share. If traders panic and sell off stocks, the EFP goes up and the Fed promises to buy them back. Thus external finance will be backstopped by the Fed, just as in 2008, but explicitly via an insurance product. Banks can insure against panics by buying EFP shares. --- @ basic income reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/comments/9tzw2z/science_confirms_it_people_are_not_pets/ I'm a big fan of Alfie Kohn and have quoted from his [The Case Against Grades](https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-grades/) many times. However, I think Kohn overreaches in this piece. He starts by saying studies show carrots are "apt to" be ineffective but ends up converting the "apt to" to a "never": > The best that carrots — or sticks — can do is change people’s behavior temporarily. They can never create a lasting commitment to an action or a value, and often they have exactly the opposite effect … contrary to hypothesis. --- @ reddit basic income mmt comment: MMT explicitly says that the non-government sector cannot create Net Financial Assets: > A simple understanding that net financial assets can only be created and destroyed in the non-government sector through transactions with either the central bank or the treasury (the ‘consolidated’ government sector). > Government deficits are the sole source of net financial assets for the non-government sector. All transactions between agents in the non-government sector net to zero. From http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=39282 I am saying that the private financial sector can create derivative assets without the central bank's involvement. A mortgage-backed security, for example, is typically valued at more than the sum of the underlying mortgage liabilities. Thus, the private sector creates a Net Financial Asset; the asset is booked at a higher value than the liabilities associated with the asset. The difference goes into Net Worth, which shows up as a Net Financial Asset on investor balance sheets. If there is a panic, the Fed can backstop the Net Financial Asset with central bank money. But the NFA was created first, without needing the government sector to run a deficit. Thus, MMT ignores purely private sector new Net Financial Asset creation. According to MMT it can't happen. But shadow banks are doing it irrespective of government sector deficits. (Even if the Fed swaps cash for devalued-in-a-panic private NFAs, it is not government deficit spending because the Fed created the money for QE by keystroke not by deficit spending.) --- Tuesday November 6 2018 South Olympic Forest, Washington @ Marketplace NPR Soy overproduction should be shipped to starving Venezuelans. The oil could be supplied by Venezuela. --- You make a bet, to be settled in the future. You repo the bet to a money dealer. You get the bet's winnings; the money dealer accepts the bet's valuation at the maximum value, i.e. as if you won the bet, which won't be determined until after the money dealer returns the bet on the far leg of the repo. You now have money equal to the amount you would win, if in fact you will win the bet. You buy Treasuries or safe assets that return more than the interest rate the money dealer charges you on the repo. The money dealer chose to repo with you, because, say, he wants to show the bet you made on his balance sheet; the notional valuation expands his balance sheet, makes him look bigger so he can negotiate better rates on other deals, and the risk won't be his because the bet won't be decided until after he returns the bet to you, on the far leg of the repo. The money dealer accepts a lower interest rate on his loan to you, than the Treasury rate, because the bond (or bet) you repo to him on the first leg is nominally worth more than the Treasury you buy with the borrowed money. The money dealer wants to show a big asset on its balance sheet, you prefer the higher rate returned by Treasuries. You wind up guaranteeing that you at least make the interest you got from the Treasuries. When the original bet is finally decided, if you lose you have the interest on Treasuries to offset or insure the loss. If you win you have the bet's payoff plus the interest on Treasuries. You might substitute a higher-paying AAA bond for Treasuries ... --- Thursday November 8 2018 Olympic Forest, Washington @ KUOW The Record 1) Affirm a Right to Camp to address homelessness; provide garbage service, free laundry and showers. Stop using public policy to force others to live indoors just because you do. Learn tolerance; talk to homeless campers; stop being so judgmental. 2) The doctor defending animal models disingenuously ignored statistical error when extolling the benefits to 1% of cancer patients. 1% is almost certainly within margin of error. Science should recognize that animal lives have equal value to human lives. Animal models are for sadists. --- @ marketplace npr: The narrative that deficits are bad reminds me of Jamie Dimon saying "maximize shareholder value" is a false narrative that just gets repeated over and over. You keep repeating that deficits are bad, ignoring that Reagan proved deficits don't matter. --- Saturday November 10 2018 Olympic Forest, Washington, Forest Road 2341 ?, southern side near the Skokomish River @ Freakonomics radio show hosted by Stephen Dubner ? Treating political parties like profit-seeking companies is the root of the problem; capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy because votes are distributed equally but money is not. Capitalism naturally values unequal money,and vote, distribution. --- "Snap Judgment" radio program; Oakland Story; oaklandstory.org NPR program on homicides in Oakland, California. A very bleak picture of rampant violence in "deep east Oakland" was presented. I thought of Sydney Bechet's happy description of the New Orleans he grew up in, in the early pages of Bechet's autobiography "Treat It Gentle". New Orleans was teeming with music, parades, parties, picnics, whorehouses, drink, drugs ... but Bechet doesn't mention violence much. Did New Orleaneans pursue music instead of violence? Did they vent aggression in the public bucking contests between marching bands that Bechet so eloquently describes? What can we learn from New Orleans? Can we loosen criminal statutes to allow drugs and prostitution, and lead people to fight each other in video games, or with music, or in other non-violent ways? Why have we left the New Orleans that Sydney Bechet describes behind? Why have we forgotten how to be happy through music? --- Sunday November 11 2018 Olympic Forest, Washington Dream with Mom the other night. We were climbing down well-lit, wide, carpeted stairs to a basement. Were we running from something upstairs? But the basement was bricked off. But I pushed at a section of brick wall and it swung open like a door. We went inside and waited, feeling safe. --- Mom, do you get sticky yellow deposits in your eyelashes too? My theory is that they come from the brain's cleaning out of beta ameloids (?) during dreams. --- Tuesday November 13 2018 Walking back towards the car along a forest road, I heard loud, deep panting in the trees along the very steep slope above the road. It sounded like a large mammal, scrambling along the slope. Maybe he was coming down, about to cross tge road. I started whistling loudly. The animal seemed to go upward. A large rock slid down the hill into the road a dozen yards ahead. Some more panting and scrambling sounds, receding. I continued walking back towards the car without incident. --- Wednesday November 28 2018 Off the road to Lake Wynoochee, before it enters the National Forest @ marketplace Why not formalise the Fed put? The Fed should sell shares in an External Finance Premium index. Banks who fear loss of funding in a panic could then explicitly hedge. In a panic, the Fed will buy back the spiking EFP shares, thus providing liquidity to banks. --- @ Mom: We meet in dreams and I have pleasant times with you there; can't that beenough? I believe my dreams show that subconsciously I love you and believe you love me. --- @ State lawmaker quoted on radio asking another lawmaker: "If you were homeless, what would you want?" My answer: a Right to Camp. --- Homeless Craft: set up the LaDoodoo shelter using tripods made of scrap wood. Doubt it will hold if it gets windy, but today at least it kept me dry while guving me enough room to stand up straight and move around comfortably without getting wet ... --- @ Mayor Jenny Durkan interviewed on KUOW The Record: I would love to show you how it is possible to live out of a vehicle and stay cleaner than in a permanent home. --- Friday December 21 2018 Capitol Forest, near Olympia, Washington @twitter: My story is that finance allows private firms to create dollar-denominated claims on the Fed, before the Fed knows about them. I'm pretty sure I can illustrate this with balance sheets ... @marketplace npr Did the Fed know about the 2008 recession before it was well upon them? In a panic shorts make money and JP Morgan is fully hedged thus makes money either way. The Fed could sell panic insurance to make hedging for trader panics simpler. --- @ reddit: We don't need no moderation Hey! Moderators! Leave those chats alone!!1 My previous submission was "[removed]". I expect to be brought up on charges of "corrupting the youth" if I mention suicide again. The best policy response to suicide is clearly to hush it up and pretend it doesn't happen. That approach has been working so well! Perhaps I was [removed] because the post mentioned Seattle? And yet, homelessness is a regional problem ... Moderators create a self-fulfilling prophecy by arbitrarily silencing speech to win arguments. Expecting to get banned in 1 ... 2 ... 3 ... Edgy enough, my dear PC Babies? --- Tuesday December 25 2018 Capitol Forest, Washington @ Bruce Wilder on lars p syll's blog: Does control over a slave imply you know what is going on in the slaves' mind? @ green_meklar on basic income reddit forum: In stark and personal terms, my brother needed less life as he knew more about the neoliberal system that had engulfed him. @ asymptosis on twitter: Perry Mehrling's blog on private-public money hybridity implies net financial assets are created as future claims on the Fed, without the Fed knowing it. @ ari shapiro on npr: Clearly, recessions are a choice. There is no physical shock or scarcity in the economy. We are over-producing food. The only reason to have a recession is statistics? Psychology causes recessions. Psychological short-sellers sew fear, uncertainty, and doubt to push a political agenda ... ---