There’s a lovely quote in the WSJ that encapsulates everything wrong with America in the last 50 odd years: Many of the investors, bankers and corporate chieftains who took over the Waldorf and Beverly Hilton this week have become desensitised to President Donald Trump’s whims. The stock market hitting new records, even if investors are […]
The Twilight of Neoliberalism
Stumbled upon this chart of US corporate profits vs. corporate taxes. The important part isn’t the taxes, it’s the profits. (Note that this is nominal and doesn’t include inflation adjustment, not that American inflation numbers mean anything anyway.) Now let’s look at another chart. This one of his how much profit companies that produce actual […]
Near the start of the war I noted that the real issue with petroleum shortages wasn’t gasoline, it was diesel, bunker fuel (ships) and jet fuel. Diesel is, despite what many say, feasible to get off of: even some of the massive machines used for mining are already being switched over, and China is moving […]
The core reason for America and Europe’s decline (and, in a way, Japan’s) was the belief by our elites that money was the only thing which mattered. Money is the ability command resources from anyone who will, or must, sell. People who need to sell their labor or starve—Marx’s famous “whip of hunger.” Countries who […]
This “issue” has flaired up again as Trump attacks Canada again. The short answer is that in the short term Canada is moderately dependent on the US and the long term it is hardly dependent on America at all. Right now we (Canada) have a lot of trade with the US. We buy mostly finished […]
It seems that EU leaders have realized that the US can squeeze them, not just with tariffs, but with natural gas supplies. It used to be that Europe got most of its natural gas from Russia, till the pipelines were blown up, probably by the US. Now they pay much more to get shipped LNG […]
I think this is worth posting in full. Once again Carney and Canada are moving faster than any of America’s vassals, which is fascinating because Canada is the most vulnerable to the US of all the vassals. But then, that’s why, plus some luck. Carney was the UK’s and Canada’s central banker. He did a […]
Carney gave an important speech yesterday, which you can read here. That lead to a lot of people praising him for his honesty in noting that the rules-based order was accepted by developed nations because they benefited from it, even though everyone knew it was bullshit: if you weren’t in the club, the rules didn’t […]
There’s a lot of confusion about the end of the American empire, and the fall of neoliberalism. Many people think the US will just be in “second place” and it’ll be OK. No. The problem is the nature of America’s decline. Since 1980 the US economy has been progressively financialized. Profits are all that matters, […]
Which is saying something, because worthless has been in charge of the West for generations. There are no leaders in charge of any major Western country who aren’t functionally morons. Europe is run by utter idiots who want war with Russia, refuse to acknowledge that Ukraine is losing, are actively speeding up their loss of […]