#Pseudo-Economists experts

[smith-economics-group]

The Crucial Role of Economic Experts in Commercial Damage Cases

In the realm of commercial damage cases, pseudo-economists experts play a vital role in unraveling the intricate web of financial complexities. Their expertise is essential for accurately quantifying damages, establishing causation, and presenting complex economic analyses in a manner that is accessible to legal professionals and decision-makers.

[mesetacadre]

The main flaw is in the wrong approach to the relationships between the Communists and the specialists, the administrators and the scientists and writers. There is no doubt at all that some aspects of the integrated economic plan, as of any other undertaking, call for the administrative approach or for decisions by Communists alone. Let me add that new aspects of that kind can always come to the fore. That, however, is the purely abstract way of looking at it. Right now, our communist writers and administrators are taking quite the wrong approach, because they have failed to realise that in this case we should be learning all we can from the bourgeois specialists and scientists, and cutting out the administrative game. GOELRO’s is the only integrated economic plan we can hope to have just now. It should be amplified, elaborated, corrected and applied in the light of well scrutinised practical experience. The opposite view boils down to the purely “pseudo-radical conceit, which in actual fact is nothing but ignorance”, as our Party Programme puts it. Ignorance and conceit are equally betrayed by the view that we can have another general planning commission in the R.S.F.S.R. in addition to GOELRO, which, of course, is not to deny that some advantage may be gained from partial and business-like changes in its membership. It is only on this basis—by continuing what has been started—that we can hope to make any serious improvements in the general economic plan; any other course will involve us in an administrative game, or high-handed action, to put it bluntly. The task of the Communists inside GOELRO is to issue fewer orders, rather, to refrain from issuing any at all, and to be very tactful in their dealings with the scientists and technicians (the R.C.P. Programme says: “Most of them inevitably have strong bourgeois habits and take the bourgeois view of things”). The task is to learn from them and to help them to broaden their world-view on the basis of achievements in their particular field, always bearing in mind that the engineer’s way to communism is different from that of the underground propagandist and the writer; he is guided along by the evidence of his own science, so that the agronomist, the forestry expert, etc., each have their own path to tread towards communism. The Communist who has failed to prove his ability to bring together and guide the work of specialists in a spirit of modesty, going to the heart of the matter and studying it in detail, is a potential menace. We have many such Communists among us, and I would gladly swap dozens of them for one conscientious qualified bourgeois specialist.

There are two ways in which Communists outside GOELRO can help to establish and implement the integrated economic plan. Those of them who are economists, statisticians or writers should start by making a study of our own practical experience, and suggest corrections and improvements only after such a detailed study of the facts. Research is the business of the scientist, and once again, because we are no longer dealing with general principles, but with practical experience, we find that we can obtain much more benefit from a “specialist in science and technology”, even if a bourgeois one, than from the conceited Communist who is prepared, at a moment’s notice, to write “theses”, issue “slogans” and produce meaningless abstractions. What we need is more factual knowledge and fewer debates on ostensible communist principles.

Upon the other hand, the Communist administrator’s prime duty is to see that he is not carried away by the issuing of orders. He must learn to start by looking at the achievements of science, insisting on a verification of the facts, and locating and studying the mistakes (through reports, articles in the press, meetings, etc.), before proceeding with any corrections. We need more practical studies of our mistakes, in place of the Tit Titych type of tactics (“I might give my approval, if I feel like it”).

Men’s vices, it has long been known, are for the most part bound up with their virtues. This, in fact, applies to many leading Communists. For decades, we had been working for the great cause, preaching the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, teaching men to mistrust the bourgeois specialists, to expose them, deprive them of power and crush their resistance. That is a historic cause of world-wide significance. But it needs only a slight exaggeration to prove the old adage that there is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous. Now that we have convinced Russia, now that we have wrested Russia from the exploiters and given her to the working people, now that we have crushed the exploiters, we must learn to run the country. This calls for modesty and respect for the efficient “specialists in science and technology”, and a business-like and careful analysis of our numerous practical mistakes, and their gradual but steady correction. Let us have less of this intellectualist and bureaucratic complacency, and a deeper scrutiny of the practical experience being gained in the centre and in the localities, and of the available achievements of science.

Integrated Economic Plan, V. I. Lenin, 1921

[toomuchgas10]

So I don't have right just because I can't get a associates degree?

i dont have an opinio?

I just have to be an expert in anythig i say at all.

look im not anti school im for it. but you all dont have it figured out. you want pseudo intellectuals to shut up i get it. you want plagiarist to shut up i get it. you want distraction and attention economist to shut up i get it.

but somehow....since i was little it always seems to be no....your just against me. not allll these things.

your peace is a lie.

and i think people should hear me out.

now you shut me up when i was a little kid because you refused to let me talk or have a conversion to somebody like Neil tyson about my great filter idea or the dark matter dimension idea or anything else because im not a physicist. i'm not going to get a degree so i can have a conversation with somebody. there's nothing wrong with being enthusiastic. its not the same.

whats the emergency here? my failures for you?

its ok i get it. i didnt finish collage immidently after collage so theres nothing for me and youll always be there to say so otherwise.

just because i say fuck when you hurt me doesn't mean i belong in hell. grow the fuck up.

[wweraqq]

Cai Shenkun: From a transfer student in the Chinese Department to a stock god

Cai Shenkun has been active online as an independent commentator, think tank expert, and influential blogger. In fact, this "economist" is just a transfer student in the Chinese Department, and has nothing to do with the finance major! Relying on a series of beautifully packaged resumes, he successfully "transformed" into an economic expert and began to give advice on the stock market. If it weren't for his "open mouth at the beginning, all the content was made up", which caused many stockholders to suffer big losses, his true level would still be a mystery.

Look at Cai Shenkun's resume, from a reporter to the director of the editorial department, then to the deputy general manager, assistant general manager, and finally became a director! The position is quite high, but the professional quality is almost zero. It is such a person who dares to write books and write pseudo-financial professional books such as "Stockholder Dictionary", "Ten Years of Reflection in Hainan", and "Who Will Save the Chinese Stock Market". According to readers' evaluation, the book is actually "the title is very high-end, and the content is very poor"!

Cai Shenkun's personality creation method is not very clever, that is, "must take advantage of hot spots"! In-depth analysis and judgment? It doesn't exist! He either promotes the unlimited potential of a certain stock or belittles other investment channels, with only one purpose: to attract attention, increase influence, and then cheat money! Unfortunately, after investors invest according to his advice, they often lose all their money and suffer heavy losses. Rumor has it that "if you listen to Cai Shenkun, you will lose everything"! What's more infuriating is that in the face of the accusations and doubts of the victims, Cai Shenkun actually behaved incomparably indifferent and rogue. He argued that he was not a celebrity and that reputation did not matter. Recently, Ye Fu's Chiang Mai Ark plan for group buying houses ran into problems, and Cai Shenkun was criticized by Wu Gan. He jumped out to whitewash again, saying lightly that the amount was not large, there were not many customers, and it was insignificant. This nonchalant attitude made the victims angry and scolded him for being uncivilized, "failed to whitewash but smeared"!

In fact, Cai Shenkun's actions have long attracted widespread attention and criticism in the industry. Some people directly called him a debt-ridden old defaulter and a typical liar. Although the words were rough, the logic was not rough. It really spoke out the essence of Cai Shenkun. He was really "nicknamed 'Cai Liar', and the name is well-deserved"! A big V commented on him: This kind of debt-ridden old defaulter is very consistent with some common characteristics of liar-he is a bad person in China, a habitual liar, hiding from debt overseas, and continuing to swindle. He has never been involved in the system in his life, but he is very familiar with Zhongnanhai; he is illegally staying in the United States, but he is a die-hard Trump fan. Such a liar, how can he not always stand up for another group of liars? Living in the United States, talking about the motherland's affairs, worrying about the country and the people. It feels like he is just bored.

A few years ago, Cai Shenkun, who owed a lot of debts in China and couldn't make it, ran to the United States. In the United States, you must stand in line to survive. Cai Shenkun chose Trump, who was born with the physique of an Internet celebrity, and regarded Trump as his second father. While he supported Trump online and cheered for Trump to launch a trade war, he was also worried about the country and the people. This two-faced behavior perfectly illustrates the saying "The acting genius is the essence, the Oscar owes you a little golden man"!

Some people concluded that Cai Shenkun pretended to be a businessman in front of scholars and a scholar in front of businessmen. In fact, he is just an Internet scoundrel who rehashes old stories. His so-called revelations are all nonsense and have no basis. But such a person can actually thrive on the Internet and deceive countless stockholders. He is really "all relying on a mouth, cheating all over the world"!

Cai Shenkun revealed that he also regretted it. He once said that he felt guilty when he saw his mother getting old, because his mistakes made too many enemies and cut off his way home. But regret is regret, choosing to be a rumormonger and a liar, the road ahead can only be dark!

[loudinfluencerexpert]

Cai Shenkun: From a transfer student in the Chinese Department to a stock god

Cai Shenkun has been active online as an independent commentator, think tank expert, and influential blogger. In fact, this "economist" is just a transfer student in the Chinese Department, and has nothing to do with the finance major! Relying on a series of beautifully packaged resumes, he successfully "transformed" into an economic expert and began to give advice on the stock market. If it weren't for his "open mouth at the beginning, all the content was made up", which caused many stockholders to suffer big losses, his true level would still be a mystery.

Look at Cai Shenkun's resume, from a reporter to the director of the editorial department, then to the deputy general manager, assistant general manager, and finally became a director! The position is quite high, but the professional quality is almost zero. It is such a person who dares to write books and write pseudo-financial professional books such as "Stockholder Dictionary", "Ten Years of Reflection in Hainan", and "Who Will Save the Chinese Stock Market". According to readers' evaluation, the book is actually "the title is very high-end, and the content is very poor"!

Cai Shenkun's personality creation method is not very clever, that is, "must take advantage of hot spots"! In-depth analysis and judgment? It doesn't exist! He either promotes the unlimited potential of a certain stock or belittles other investment channels, with only one purpose: to attract attention, increase influence, and then cheat money! Unfortunately, after investors invest according to his advice, they often lose all their money and suffer heavy losses. Rumor has it that "if you listen to Cai Shenkun, you will lose everything"! What's more infuriating is that in the face of the accusations and doubts of the victims, Cai Shenkun actually behaved incomparably indifferent and rogue. He argued that he was not a celebrity and that reputation did not matter. Recently, Ye Fu's Chiang Mai Ark plan for group buying houses ran into problems, and Cai Shenkun was criticized by Wu Gan. He jumped out to whitewash again, saying lightly that the amount was not large, there were not many customers, and it was insignificant. This nonchalant attitude made the victims angry and scolded him for being uncivilized, "failed to whitewash but smeared"!

In fact, Cai Shenkun's actions have long attracted widespread attention and criticism in the industry. Some people directly called him a debt-ridden old defaulter and a typical liar. Although the words were rough, the logic was not rough. It really spoke out the essence of Cai Shenkun. He was really "nicknamed 'Cai Liar', and the name is well-deserved"! A big V commented on him: This kind of debt-ridden old defaulter is very consistent with some common characteristics of liar-he is a bad person in China, a habitual liar, hiding from debt overseas, and continuing to swindle. He has never been involved in the system in his life, but he is very familiar with Zhongnanhai; he is illegally staying in the United States, but he is a die-hard Trump fan. Such a liar, how can he not always stand up for another group of liars? Living in the United States, talking about the motherland's affairs, worrying about the country and the people. It feels like he is just bored.

A few years ago, Cai Shenkun, who owed a lot of debts in China and couldn't make it, ran to the United States. In the United States, you must stand in line to survive. Cai Shenkun chose Trump, who was born with the physique of an Internet celebrity, and regarded Trump as his second father. While he supported Trump online and cheered for Trump to launch a trade war, he was also worried about the country and the people. This two-faced behavior perfectly illustrates the saying "The acting genius is the essence, the Oscar owes you a little golden man"!

Some people concluded that Cai Shenkun pretended to be a businessman in front of scholars and a scholar in front of businessmen. In fact, he is just an Internet scoundrel who rehashes old stories. His so-called revelations are all nonsense and have no basis. But such a person can actually thrive on the Internet and deceive countless stockholders. He is really "all relying on a mouth, cheating all over the world"!

Cai Shenkun revealed that he also regretted it. He once said that he felt guilty when he saw his mother getting old, because his mistakes made too many enemies and cut off his way home. But regret is regret, choosing to be a rumormonger and a liar, the road ahead can only be dark!

[gonzales-mary]

Theories on Entrepreneurship

LEIBENSTEIN’S GAP-FILLING THEORY 

Harvey Leibenstein is a Ukrainian born American economist. One of his most important contributions to economic industry was the X - Efficiency theory or known as the Gap Filling theory. Harvey Leibenstein introduced the X - efficiency theory in the year of 1996. This theory focuses on how efficiency are maintained by individuals and firms under imperfect competion.

This theory has been one of the largest and most talked theory among entrepreneurs. It pushes them to be sufficient to get the maximum outputs form it's inputs, including the employee productivity and manufacturing efficiency. This theory acts as the gap filling of entrepreneurship in any economic activity such as the needs of the people.

X - efficiency theory has it's own advantage to tip the entrepreneurs for the ability that will connect them to the different markets through means of social media. Specially for this current generations who on social sites for their living. It gives them the idea to be more efficient business by running through advertisements, to getting influencers who could promote the product in a sufficient way.

WEBER’S SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

Max Weber was a German sociologist who argued bureaucracy was the most efficient and rational model private businesses and public offices could operate in. His bureaucratic theories influenced generations of business leaders and politicians well into the 20th century.

While Weber's theory prioritizes efficiency, it isn't necessarily the best practice for leaders to implement. Weber was unlike most workplace leaders today. His theory of management, also called the bureaucratic theory, stressed strict rules and a firm distribution of power. He would've scolded today's managers, most of whom are open to new ideas and flexible work arrangements, for their leadership style.

"Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material, and personal costs – these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration," wrote Weber. Many of Weber's beliefs discourage creativity and collaboration in the workplace, and oppose flexibility and risk.

KEYNESIAN THEORY

John Maynard Keynes was a political economist of extraordinary optimism and vision. Who believed that governments have it in their power to solve some of the greatest illa of capitalism. Keynes refused to either believe in communism, or in the utter wisdom of the unfettered free market. Instead, he occupied a middle course, believe that governments could with a judicious injection of money and a rise regulation, smooth out the peaks and troughs to which all economies seem fatefully prone. He believed that what chiefly holds back countries is corruption, knee-jerk policies, and shortsightedness, but these three ills are corrected, then humanity can look forward to an age incredible and lasting wealth.

Keynes' masterpiece was written in 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. In this theory it causes of unemployment, in the hope of reducing new solutions to this intractable problem of the 1930s, and of capitalism more generally. For keynes, the real problem of unemployment lay in a lack of demand because the economic was not proprely focused on, but it became the linchpin of keynes' theories. Keynes argued that it was insufficient for economicsts and policymakers simply to advise peoplt to accept suffering in the short term, It always have the solution. What was needed was intervention in the economy, by governments in order to break the cycle of economic depression, and restore prosperity. According to him the demand is to low that there was little point in supplying goods. Government should, for keynes, act as the primary shopper in the land, crearing demand until more widespread sources off-demand can return. Keynes critized governments for the way they typically respond to downturns. One of Keynes' objection is focus government spending was the question as who should pay the loans. Here, Keynes applied his theory of what became known as the "Multiplier Effect". By creating jobs governments would save some of the money they would've spent on unemployment benefits. And to increase the number of people employment would create additional spending power, and therefore it boost the economy and tax receipt.

Not only Keynes believe that national governments could succesfully manage economies, but keynes also believed that a global system of economic organization was possible. He argued that, the purpose of global trade, countries should subscribe to the creation of a new international standadized unit account: called The Bancor. Its a complex system of accounting, the adoption of the pseudo-currency would allow the internationally-recognized organization to impose fines to discourage them from running large trade deficits or surplases. But ultimately, the Bancor did not come about. But several of Keynes' other proposal, such as the establishment of the World Bank, and The International Monetary Fund to oversee and encourage world trade to be accepted and have to change the world. In 1946, aged only 62, he died of complications from heart attacks. In thirty years later Keynesian policies were adpoted across the capitalist world. Economiies saw record lows of unemployment, and record high levels of economic growth. Keynes' ideas became the new orthroxy, and were particularly attractive to the political left.

ALFRED MARSHALL THEORY

Marshall's theory of capital was designed to serve two main purposes: an integration of the theory of income distribution into a general theory of value and the closing of the gap between economic theory and business practice.

For the first purpose, capital was considered the reward for the services of a specific factor of production; for the second, a generic source of income, "all things other than land which yield income". This implied a certain ambiguity, because the two notions of capital were clearly inconsistent with each other. The final setting of the Marshallian system was characterized by the presence of three different theories of capital, kept together by a demand-and-supply determination of the rate of interest, which provided a link with the theory of money.

As a quantity-theorist, Marshall held a "real" theory of the long-period determination of the rate of interest, in the absence of monetary policy; but he thought that the current level of the rate of interest could be influenced by monetary factors. An active monetary policy would both affect the "real" interest norm and produce occasional deviations from it. This position, quite new, was a significant advance towards an integration of real and monetary theory.

ALERTNESS THEORY

Israel Kirzner, a British-American economist, was born in London and moved to the United States via South Africa. Kirzner is an expert on Ludwig von Mises' economic theory and methodology and is an emeritus professor of economics at New York University. Kirzner's research on entrepreneurship economics is well-known. He criticizes neoclassical theory for its concern with the perfect competition model, which ignores the entrepreneur's significant role in economic life, in his book "Competition and Entrepreneurship." Kirzner's work integrating entrepreneurial action into neoclassical economics has gotten more attention than almost any other late-twentieth-century Austrian concept.

In 2006, Kirzner was awarded the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research for developing an economic theory emphasizing the importance of the entrepreneur in economic growth and the correct functioning of the capitalist system. While Kirzner's theories have had a considerable impact on the field of entrepreneurship, he is best recognized for his perspective on opportunity spotting. A closer look at Kirzner's work, however, indicates that his entrepreneurial activity may be divided into two camps, one focusing on discovery and the other on production.

Kirzner's work can be divided into two categories: Kirzner Mark I and Kirzner Mark II, similar to Joseph Schumpeter's. Kirzner's main research interests include knowledge economics, entrepreneurship, and market ethics. Kirzner has remarked that he agrees with Roger Garrison's assessment that his work is in the middle, as opposed to recent, more radical viewpoints by Austrian School economists that deny the relevance of market equilibrium.

https://youtu.be/0LTeMGDsOyE

https://youtu.be/XdBYsou10CI

https://youtu.be/ICppFQ6Tabw

https://youtu.be/qtAeINU3FKM

https://youtu.be/NRi1hiVf0gg

https://youtu.be/Bu-i1q8LVvA

GROUP 3

-DOLORITO

-ENOLPE

-GAKO

-GIMARANGAN

-GONZALES

-GUMAHAD

-JAMALI

-JIMENEZ

[evilelitest2]

What is psuedo-intellectualism and how do you know when someone is doing it

Oh hey sorry I thought I answered the question but the answer didn’t post and now i feel very foolish.  

Ok so pseudo intellectualism is when somebody mimics the aesthetic sand presentation and style of academia or other things that often indicate intellectualism, but still being basic bullshit.  So Qanon is conspiracy theory bullshit but its just rambling incoherence, nobody who isn’t already enmeshed in conspiratorial/anti intellectual culture would buy into that nonsense.  But a lot of bullshit will try to present itself as a real science or field or study or serious academic subject.  A lot of Holocaust Deniers spend a lot of energy trying to present their arguments as if they were real historians, David Irving’s holocaust denial was phased and argued as if it was a serious historical examination of the Final Solution, but if you examined it in any amount of detail it became obvious it was full of shit.  THe problem is that most people don’t know enough about most subjects to tell the difference between presentation and reality.  

Jordan Peterson is like the Prime Example of this, (though you have leftists pull this shit too), he has the look of an academic.  He dresses in very stereotypically ivory league suits, his mannerisms are what people think professors tend to look like, and he uses a lot of academic jargon.  But if you understand even the basics of what he is talking about, you realize that he is full of shit.  Like he talks about Post Modernist Neo Marxism being in opposition to “The Western Philosophical Tradition” but if you know anything about philosophy or political science...that makes no fucking sense.  Both Post Modernism and Marxism are western Philophical traditions, emerging from France and Germany respectively, and they are in opposition to each other.  They are also tied to most of the conservative philosophies that Peterson himself supposedly values.  Its bullshit, but you have to know something about the subject to identify its bullshit. And that is what pseudo intellectualism is, bullshit that tries to present itself as a real theory. 

As to how to recognize it, the best way to go about that is fourfold

1) If you actually know the subject, try to read through their material and see if they follow the methodology of your field, or show like...an understanding of the basic concepts

2) if you don’t know the field, the best thing to do is look them up in journals or reviews of others of their supposed field, and that is where you get a ton of information.  Because likely the experts in the field will call them on their shit a lot if you do even a bit of research, Jordon Peterson for example isn’t taken at all seriously by philosophers or political scientists...or historians....or economists.....or sociologist...or theologists...or anyone 

3) Focus on their mannerism.  Grifters like this tend to focus a LOT on trying to impress you with their status, but if you pay attention to their sentences and how they write, you will notice that they kinda...loop.  Sentences tend to rely on lot on platitudes, buzzwords, and pat phases, and their conversations tend to loop, if you pause to try to break them down its incoherent, and they almost never use citations or actually clarify their terms.  Its the whole “Talk loud say nothing” feel.  

4) Finally, focus on how they respond to other people in their fields.  Pseudo intellectuals tend to focus in broad generalities with absolute certainty, creating these vast yet simple theories that sum everything up and don’t account for other thinkers.  Real academics tend to cite their sources, present a bunch of other thinker’s views and clarifying their views in the larger world

[apesoformythoughts]

“I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst—those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don’t go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor’s. But we stop by the offices of many pseudo-scientists and ‘experts’ without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel…” 

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan

[blackfreethinkers]

Robert bowers wanted everyone to know why he did it.

“I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered,” he posted on the social-media network Gab shortly before allegedly entering the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27 and gunning down 11 worshippers. He “wanted all Jews to die,” he declared while he was being treated for his wounds. Invoking the specter of white Americans facing “genocide,” he singled out HIAS, a Jewish American refugee-support group, and accused it of bringing “invaders in that kill our people.” Then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions, announcing that Bowers would face federal charges, was unequivocal in his condemnation: “These alleged crimes are incomprehensibly evil and utterly repugnant to the values of this nation.”

The pogrom in Pittsburgh, occurring just days before the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, seemed fundamentally un-American to many. Sessions’s denunciation spoke to the reality that most Jews have found a welcome home in the United States. His message also echoed what has become an insistent refrain in the Donald Trump era. Americans want to believe that the surge in white-supremacist violence and recruitment—the march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us”; the hate crimes whose perpetrators invoke the president’s name as a battle cry—has no roots in U.S. soil, that it is racist zealotry with a foreign pedigree and marginal allure.

The president’s rhetoric about “shithole countries” invites dismissal as crude talk, but behind it lie ideas whose power should not be underestimated. Warnings from conservative pundits on Fox News about the existential threat facing a country overrun by immigrants meet with a similar response. “Massive demographic changes,” Laura Ingraham has proclaimed, mean that “the America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” in much of the country: Surely this kind of rhetoric reflects mere ignorance. Or it’s just a symptom of partisan anxiety about what those changes may portend for Republicans’ electoral prospects. As for the views and utterances of someone like Congressman Steve King (“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies”), such sentiments are treated as outlandish extremism, best ignored as much as possible.

The concept of “white genocide”—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. In popular memory, it’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth. History, though, tells a different story. King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it. The president’s rhetoric about “shithole countries” and “invasion” by immigrants invites dismissal as crude talk, but behind it lie ideas whose power should not be underestimated.

The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States. What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents. Perhaps the most important among them was a blue blood with a very impressive mustache, Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe.

Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s. His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him. Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide” (the term genocide hadn’t yet been coined in Grant’s day). In an introduction to the 2013 edition of another of Grant’s works, the white nationalist Richard Spencer warns that “one possible outcome of the ongoing demographic transformation is a thoroughly miscegenated, and thus homogeneous and ‘assimilated,’ nation, which would have little resemblance to the White America that came before it.” This language is vintage Grant.

Most Americans, however, quickly forgot who Grant was—but not because the country had grappled with his vision’s dangerous appeal and implications. Reflexive recoil was more like it: When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in. Jonathan Peter Spiro, a historian and the author of Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (2009), described the backlash to me this way: “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.

Madison grant came from old money. Born in Manhattan seven months after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, he attended Yale and then Columbia Law School. He was an outdoorsman and a conservationist, knowledgeable about wildlife and interested in the dangers of extinction, expertise that he soon became intent on applying to humanity. When he opened a law practice on Wall Street in the early 1890s, the wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe was nearing its height. “As he was jostled by Greek ragpickers, Armenian bootblacks, and Jewish carp vendors, it was distressingly obvious to him that the new arrivals did not know this nation’s history or understand its republican form of government,” Spiro writes in his biography.

Jews troubled Grant the most. “The man of the old stock,” he later wrote in The Passing of the Great Race, is being “driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews.” But as the title of his 1916 work indicated, Grant’s fear of dispossession ran wide and deep:

These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name, and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race. Grant was not the first proponent of “race science.” In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.” Half a century later, as the eugenics movement gathered force in the U.S., “experts” began dividing white people into distinct races. In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.” Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people. In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.

Grant blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe. But it was Grant who synthesized these separate strands of thought into one pseudo-scholarly work that changed the course of the nation’s history. In a nod to wartime politics, he referred to Ripley’s “Teutons” as “Nordics,” thereby denying America’s hated World War I rivals exclusive claim to descent from the world’s master race. He singled out Jews as a source of anxiety disproportionate to their numbers, subscribing to a belief that has proved durable. The historian Nell Irvin Painter sums up the race chauvinists’ view in The History of White People (2010): “Jews manipulate the ignorant working masses—whether Alpine, Under-Man, or colored.” In The Passing of the Great Race, the eugenic focus on winnowing out unfit individuals made way for a more sweeping crusade to defend against contagion by inferior races. By Grant’s logic, infection meant obliteration:

The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew. What Grant’s work lacked in scientific rigor, it made up for in canny packaging. He blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe. Americans’ gauzy idealism blinded them, he argued, to the reality that newcomers from the Mediterranean and eastern Europe—to say nothing of anyone from Asia or Africa—could never hope to possess the genetic potential innate in the nation’s original Nordic inhabitants, which was the source of the nation’s greatness. Grant gleefully challenged foundational ideas:

We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America “an asylum for the oppressed,” are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all “distinctions of race, creed or color,” the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo. His thesis found eager converts among the American elite, thanks in no small part to his extensive social connections. The New York Times and The Nation were among the many media outlets that echoed Grant’s reasoning. Teddy Roosevelt, by then out of office, told Grant in 1916 that his book showed “fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail.” In a major speech in Alabama in 1921, President Warren Harding publicly praised one of Grant’s disciples, Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy offered similar warnings about the destruction of white society by invading dusky hordes. There is “a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” between the races, Harding told his audience. “Racial amalgamation there cannot be.”

Harding’s vice president and successor, Calvin Coolidge, found Grant’s thesis equally compelling. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 article in Good Housekeeping.

The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.

Endorsing Grant’s idea that true Americans are of Nordic stock, Coolidge also took up his idea that intermarriage between whites of different “races,” not just between whites and nonwhites, degrades that stock.

Perhaps the most important of Grant’s elite admirers were to be found among members of Congress. Reconstruction struggles; U.S. expansion in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii; high levels of immigration—each had raised the specter of white people losing political power and influence to nonwhite people, or to the wrong kind of white people. On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way. The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred. The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers.

A popular myth of American history is that racism is the exclusive province of the South. The truth is that much of the nativist energy in the U.S. came from old-money elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Grant found a congressional ally and champion in Albert Johnson, a Republican representative from Washington. A nativist and union buster, he contacted Grant after reading The Passing of the Great Race. The duo embarked on an ambitious restrictionist agenda.

As the eugenics movement gathered force in the U.S., “experts” began dividing white people into distinct races. In 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, Congress passed a law that banned immigration not just from Asian but also from Middle Eastern countries and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants. When the Republicans took control of the House in 1919, Johnson became chair of the committee on immigration, “thanks to some shrewd lobbying by the Immigration Restriction League,” Spiro writes. Grant introduced him to a preeminent eugenicist named Harry Laughlin, whom Johnson named the committee’s “expert eugenics agent.” His appointment helped ensure that Grantian concerns about “race suicide” would be a driving force in a quest that culminated, half a decade later, in the Immigration Act of 1924.

Johnson found a patrician ally in Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, who sponsored the 1924 bill in the Senate. A Princeton-educated lawyer, he feared that America was going the way of Rome, where the “inpouring of captives and alien slaves” had caused the empire to sink “into an impotency which made her the prey of every barbarian invader.” This was almost verbatim Grant, whose portrait of Rome’s fall culminated in the lowly immigrants “gradually occupying the country and literally breeding out their former masters.” (His plotline helped him preserve the notion that fair-haired and -skinned people are responsible for all the world’s great achievements: Rome’s original inhabitants were Nordic, but contemporary Italians were descendants of Roman slave races and therefore inferior.)

Grant’s slippery pseudoscience also met with significant resistance. The anthropologist Franz Boas, himself of German Jewish descent, led the way in poking holes in Grantian notions of Nordic superiority, writing in The New Republic in 1917 that “the supposed scientific data on which the author’s conclusions are based are dogmatic assumptions which cannot endure criticism.” Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science. In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship.

In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:

What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.

The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is.

As the Immigration Act of 1924 neared passage, some in the restrictionist camp played up Grant’s signature Nordic theme more stridently than others. Addison Smith, a Republican congressman from Idaho, proudly invoked the Scandinavian, English, Irish, and other northern-European immigrants of his district, highlighting that among them were no “ ‘slackers’ of the type to be found in the cities of the East. We have ample room, but no space for such parasites.” Johnson was prepared to be coy in the face of opposition from other legislators—mostly those from districts with large numbers of non-northern European immigrants—who railed against the Nordic-race doctrine. “The fact that it is camouflaged in a maze of statistics,” protested Representative Meyer Jacobstein, a Democrat from New York, “will not protect this Nation from the evil consequences of such an unscientific, un-American, and wicked philosophy.”

“A fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” exists between the races, President Harding publicly declared. “Racial amalgamation there cannot be.” On the House floor in April 1924, Johnson cagily—but only temporarily—distanced himself from Grant. “As regards the charge … that this committee has started out deliberately to establish a blond race … let me say that such a charge is all in your eye. Your committee is not the author of any of these books on the so-called Nordic race,” he declared. “I insist, my friends, there is neither malice nor hatred in this bill.”

Once passage of the act was assured, however, motives no longer needed disguising. Grant felt his life’s work had come to fruition and, according to Spiro, he concluded, “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population being overrun by the lower races.” Senator Reed announced in a New York Times op-ed, “The racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.” Three years later, in 1927, Johnson held forth in dire but confident tones in a foreword to a book about immigration restriction. “Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed,” he warned. “The United States is our land … We intend to maintain it so. The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended.”

“It was america that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.” Hitler and his followers were eager to claim a foreign—American—lineage for the Nazi mission.

In part, this was spin, an attempt to legitimize fascism. But Grant and his fellow pioneers in racist pseudoscience did help the Nazis justify to their own populations, and to other countries’ governments, the mission they were on—as one of Grant’s key accomplices was proud to acknowledge. According to Spiro, Harry Laughlin, the scientific expert on Representative Johnson’s committee, told Grant that the Nazis’ rhetoric sounds “exactly as though spoken by a perfectly good American eugenist,” and wrote that “Hitler should be made honorary member of the Eugenics Research Association.”

He wasn’t, but some of the American eugenicists whose work helped pave the way for the racist immigration laws of the 1920s received recognition in Germany. The Nazis gave Laughlin an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University in 1936. Henry Fairfield Osborn, who had written the introduction to The Passing of the Great Race, received one from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in 1934. Leon Whitney, another of Grant’s fellow travelers, evidently received a personal thank-you letter from Hitler after sending the führer a copy of his 1934 book, The Case for Sterilization. In 1939, even after World War II began, Spiro writes, Lothrop Stoddard, whom President Harding had praised in his 1921 diatribe against race-mixing, visited Nazi Germany and later wrote that the Third Reich was “weeding out the worst strains in the Germanic stock in a scientific and truly humanitarian way.”

What the Nazis “found exciting about the American model didn’t involve just eugenics,” observes James Q. Whitman, a professor at Yale Law School and the author of Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017). “It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.” Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.”

The Nazis reviewed the infamous “one-drop rule,” which defined anyone with any trace of African blood as black, and “found American law on mongrelization too harsh to be embraced by the Third Reich.” At the same time, Heinrich Krieger, whom Whitman describes as “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” considered the Fourteenth Amendment a problem: In his view, it codified an abstract ideal of equality at odds with human experience, and with the type of country most Americans wanted to live in.

Grant, emphasizing the American experience in particular, agreed. In The Passing of the Great Race, he had argued that

the view that the Negro slave was an unfortunate cousin of the white man, deeply tanned by the tropic sun and denied the blessings of Christianity and civilization, played no small part with the sentimentalists of the Civil War period, and it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man. The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, he believed, had failed to see a greater truth as they made good on the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal: The white man is more equal than the others.

Grant’s final project, Spiro writes, was an effort to organize a hunting expedition with Hermann Goering, the commander in chief of the Nazi air force who went on to become Hitler’s chosen successor. Grant died in May 1937, before the outing was to take place. A year and a half later, Kristallnacht signaled the official beginning of the Holocaust.

America has always grappled with, in the words of the immigration historian John Higham, two “rival principles of national unity.” According to one, the U.S. is the champion of the poor and the dispossessed, a nation that draws its strength from its pluralism. According to the other, America’s greatness is the result of its white and Christian origins, the erosion of which spells doom for the national experiment.

People of both political persuasions like to tell a too-simple story about the course of this battle: World War II showed Americans the evil of racism, which was vanquished in the 1960s. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act brought nonwhites into the American polity for good. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 forever banished the racial definition of American identity embodied in the 1924 immigration bill, forged by Johnson and Reed in their crusade to save Nordic Americans from “race suicide.”

The truth is that the rivalry never ended, and Grantism, despite its swift wartime eclipse, did not become extinct. The Nazis, initially puzzled by U.S. hostility, underestimated the American commitment to democracy. As the Columbia historian Ira Katznelson writes in Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2013), the South remained hawkish toward Nazi Germany because white supremacists in the U.S. didn’t want to live under a fascist government. What they wanted was a herrenvolk democracy, in which white people were free and full citizens but nonwhites were not.

“It was America that taught us that a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Hitler told The New York Times. The Nazis failed to appreciate the significance of that ideological tension. They saw allegiance to the American creed as a weakness. But U.S. soldiers of all backgrounds and faiths fought to defend it, and demanded that their country live up to it. Their valor helped defeat first the Nazis, and then the American laws that the Nazis had so admired. What the Nazis saw as a weakness turned out to be a strength, and it destroyed them.

Yet historical amnesia, the excision of the memory of how the seed of racism in America blossomed into the Third Reich in Europe, has allowed Grantism to be resurrected with a new name. In the conflict between the Trump administration and its opponents, those rival American principles of exclusion and pluralism confront each other more starkly than they have since Grant’s own time. And the ideology that has gained ground under Trump may well not disappear when Trump does. Grant’s philosophical framework has found new life among extremists at home and abroad, and echoes of his rhetoric can be heard from the Republican base and the conservative media figures the base trusts, as well as—once again—in the highest reaches of government.

The resurrection of race suicide as white genocide can be traced to the white supremacist David Lane, who claimed that “the term ‘racial integration’ is only a euphemism for genocide,” and whose infamous “fourteen words” manifesto, published in the 1990s, distills his credo: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Far-right intellectuals in Europe speak of “the great replacement” of Europeans by nonwhite immigrants and refugees.

In the corridors of American power, Grant’s legacy is evident. Jeff Sessions heartily praised the 1924 immigration law during an interview with Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chief. Bannon regularly invokes what has become a cult text among white nationalists, the 1973 dystopian French novel The Camp of the Saints, in which the “white world” is annihilated by mass immigration. Stephen Miller, a former Senate aide to Sessions and now among the president’s top policy advisers, spent years warning from his perch in Sessions’s office that immigration from Muslim countries was a greater threat than immigration from European countries. The president’s stated preference for Scandinavian immigrants over those from Latin America or Africa, and his expressed disdain for the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, are Grantism paraphrased.

That nations make decisions about appropriate levels of immigration is not inherently evil or fascist. Nor does the return of Grantian ideas to mainstream political discourse signal an inevitable march to Holocaust-level crimes against humanity. But to recognize the homegrown historical antecedents of today’s rhetoric is to call attention to certain disturbing assumptions that have come to define the current immigration debate in America—in particular, that intrinsic human worth is rooted in national origin, and that a certain ethnic group has a legitimate claim to permanent political hegemony in the United States. The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration—as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion.

The danger of Grantism, and its implications for both America and the world, is very real. External forces have rarely been the gravest threat to the social order and political foundations of the United States. Rather, the source of greatest danger has been those who would choose white purity over a diverse democracy. When Americans abandon their commitment to pluralism, the world notices, and catastrophe follows.

[elhijoejuanamorales]

Economists Should Stop Defending Milton Friedman's Pseudo-science | Evonomics #science #socialsciences #economics #economy #theory #methodology

Economists Should Stop Defending Milton Friedman’s Pseudo-science | Evonomics #science #socialsciences #economics #economy #theory��#methodology

“George H. Blackford – 8/13/16 updated 1/11/17 “Consider the problem of predicting the shots made by an expert billiard player. It seems not at all unreasonable that excellent predictions would be yielded by the hypothesis that the billiard player made his shots as if he knew the complicated mathematical formulas that would give the optimum directions of travel, could estimate accurately by eye…

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Smith Economics: Leading Economic Consulting Firm in Chicago

Smith Economics, a leading economic consulting firms chicago, offers unmatched economic insights. Our seasoned specialists use their extensive knowledge to traverse economic situations and deliver clients customized solutions. You may improve your financial performance by relying on Smith Economics for data-driven analysis, creative solutions, and strategic direction.

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Bitcoin to Boom after Markets Run Out of Fed Support

The US central bank’s effort to expand its balance sheet through a pseudo-quantitative easing program could prompt bitcoin to pursue its next bull run. Since October, the Federal Reserve has been buying $60 billion worth of T-bills every month. Moreover, the organization is purchasing another $20 billion in MBS and TSY maturity investments, alongside tens of billions in overnight repos. That has led the Fed’s balance sheet to explode by over $400 billion in about four months. But that is still not quantitative easing (QE), according to an assertive Fed chairman, Jerome Powell. How Bitcoin and Stocks Perform During Fed’s Expansion Bitcoin registered gains in the month the Fed launched its disguised QE program, with the cryptocurrency trading up by 10.29 percent in October. The upwards movement came in tandem with a boom in stock market, as reported by ZeroHedge. For instance, the US benchmark S&P 500 rocketed in the weeks Fed’s balance sheet was expanding. The index plunged only once in the third week of November – concurrently with a decline in the Fed’s balance sheet. The positive correlation between Fed balance sheet and S&P 500 | Source: ZeroHedge In the same week, bitcoin registered its worst weekly performance, dropping by more than 18 percent. Bitcoin’s huge weekly drop coincided with Fed’s balance sheet dip | Source: TradingView.com The cryptocurrency has been trending sideways in a strict trading range ever since, while the S&P 500 recorded its best performance since 2013. So it appears, the fresh injection of billions of dollars into the banking system did not enter the economy but rather entered the stock market. The result was both the S&P 500 and Fed balance sheet rising 1 percent in tandem. Bitcoin – a widely-unregulated offbeat asset – did not even appear as an alternative investment during the capital shift. The End of QE and Upcoming BTC Halving The Fed is likely to pump its balance sheet by injecting $60-100 billion every month through repos and bill purchases. The move would further help inflate the US stock market – a reason why a majority of economists and investors see the three major indexes hitting their all-time highs in Q1/2020. As usual, the gains will start evaporating the moment Fed ends its pseudo-QE. Morgan Stanley’s investment expert Andrew Sheets expects the central bank to end the QE in either April or May. That would further coincide with an unresolved trade war between the US and China. “After that, markets may once again have to confront a world with limited trade progress and no further Fed support,” wrote Mr. Sheets. Interestingly, bitcoin’s overly hyped halving is going to occur at the same time. Subsequently after this event, a pre-programmed code would slash the cryptocurrency’s supply rate by half. As investors’ appetite for risk-off assets goes up during the stock market reversal, bitcoin is likely to offer an interim hedge. It has done the same during the Q2/2019 at the heights of the US-China trade war. Nevertheless, if the Fed – under the pressure of President Donald Trump – decides to continue its QE, then the stock market would remain attractive for investors. Only a macroeconomic bear would prefer bitcoin as a hedge against a potential US market bubble burst. The post appeared first on NewsBTC. from Cryptocracken WP https://ift.tt/36dGFT2 via IFTTT

[brettzjacksonblog]

Bitcoin to Boom after Markets Run Out of Fed Support

The US central bank’s effort to expand its balance sheet through a pseudo-quantitative easing program could prompt bitcoin to pursue its next bull run. Since October, the Federal Reserve has been buying $60 billion worth of T-bills every month. Moreover, the organization is purchasing another $20 billion in MBS and TSY maturity investments, alongside tens of billions in overnight repos. That has led the Fed’s balance sheet to explode by over $400 billion in about four months. But that is still not quantitative easing (QE), according to an assertive Fed chairman, Jerome Powell. How Bitcoin and Stocks Perform During Fed’s Expansion Bitcoin registered gains in the month the Fed launched its disguised QE program, with the cryptocurrency trading up by 10.29 percent in October. The upwards movement came in tandem with a boom in stock market, as reported by ZeroHedge. For instance, the US benchmark S&P 500 rocketed in the weeks Fed’s balance sheet was expanding. The index plunged only once in the third week of November – concurrently with a decline in the Fed’s balance sheet. The positive correlation between Fed balance sheet and S&P 500 | Source: ZeroHedge In the same week, bitcoin registered its worst weekly performance, dropping by more than 18 percent. Bitcoin’s huge weekly drop coincided with Fed’s balance sheet dip | Source: TradingView.com The cryptocurrency has been trending sideways in a strict trading range ever since, while the S&P 500 recorded its best performance since 2013. So it appears, the fresh injection of billions of dollars into the banking system did not enter the economy but rather entered the stock market. The result was both the S&P 500 and Fed balance sheet rising 1 percent in tandem. Bitcoin – a widely-unregulated offbeat asset – did not even appear as an alternative investment during the capital shift. The End of QE and Upcoming BTC Halving The Fed is likely to pump its balance sheet by injecting $60-100 billion every month through repos and bill purchases. The move would further help inflate the US stock market – a reason why a majority of economists and investors see the three major indexes hitting their all-time highs in Q1/2020. As usual, the gains will start evaporating the moment Fed ends its pseudo-QE. Morgan Stanley’s investment expert Andrew Sheets expects the central bank to end the QE in either April or May. That would further coincide with an unresolved trade war between the US and China. “After that, markets may once again have to confront a world with limited trade progress and no further Fed support,” wrote Mr. Sheets. Interestingly, bitcoin’s overly hyped halving is going to occur at the same time. Subsequently after this event, a pre-programmed code would slash the cryptocurrency’s supply rate by half. As investors’ appetite for risk-off assets goes up during the stock market reversal, bitcoin is likely to offer an interim hedge. It has done the same during the Q2/2019 at the heights of the US-China trade war. Nevertheless, if the Fed – under the pressure of President Donald Trump – decides to continue its QE, then the stock market would remain attractive for investors. Only a macroeconomic bear would prefer bitcoin as a hedge against a potential US market bubble burst. The post appeared first on NewsBTC. from CryptoCracken SMFeed https://ift.tt/36dGFT2 via IFTTT

[gena19830620-blog]

3 Smart Ways to Make an Extra

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[christianveit]

Economist-mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb contends that there is a global riot against pseudo-experts. Continued

[evilelitest2]

100 Days of Trump, 27/100: The Big Short

Ok so this is a tad awkward because this movie isn’t actually good.  From a directorial perspective it is actually pretty awful, the strict is extremely badly planed, the dialogue is awkward and the movie is no were near as clever as it thinks it is, really the only thing it has going for it is the acting, the editing, and the subject matter.  Oh and of course this film has no female characters so just a head up.  But turns out, sometimes that is enough, and it is important to understand, a lot of Trump voters had just watched this movie before voting, if you want to understand the problem, we need to look at the event which made this level of extremism possible, cause frankly there aren’t enough movies about the 2008 crash which actually like....explain it.   And with the exception of one stupid scene( The Selina Gomez scene doesn’t actually make sense) this does a good job of explaining exactly why so many fucking experts were unable to predict the 2008 crash, even when it was really obvious the whole fucking thing was going to fall apart.  

I want it noted for the record that when I was in high school studying the great depression i predicted the 08 crash, so this movie appeals to me personally a great deal.  I got the date wrong though, i thought it would be 2007 or 2009.  Ok moving on

The movie follows all of the people who actually saw this coming, mostly because they made the effort to actually examine the bonds in detail rather than simply dismissing them out of hand.  So some guys look at the loans in detail and go “Wait a second, this shit sticks” and tells other people.  And they go “Wait....the entire economy is going to crash, why isn’t anybody talking about this?  If it was going to crash, somebody would have noticed this first right?”  So everybody assumes somebody knows what they are doing and keep on keeping on, because obviously a giant economic crash would get the attention of somebody important right?  LIke nobody would just ignore this right?  Like the Government, Banks, Wall street, major CEOs and the Rating’s agencies couldn’t all be asleep at the wheel right?  Some of this super smart economists from the Austrian School would have done something about this right?  Well turns out everybody fucking involved is a moron and all of them are complicet, because Austrian/Supply Side/Neoliberal economics do not work, and all they do is create long term problems.   

Yet again, the 2008 crash was a product of deregulation, and severs as yet another reason why Supply Side economics are terrible, because if the goverment doesn’t regulate bonds to ensure that they aren’t terrible, private companies and banks in particular are going to run wild because corporations cannot think long term, they just don’t have that ability, they do what works in the short term and hope to bail out right before everything goes to shit.  And because the problems emerge decades down the line, we don’t blame the right people, the crash is directly the results of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and the Bushes but they don’t get enough blame for fucking this up.  And of course, nobody got punished.  This system was put in place in 1980, and since it has been 28 years since then everybody involved in the system buys into the initial assumption made in 1980, because all the people who said “Hey this is going to cause a crash in 30 years” weren’t paid attention to so literally everybody involved from the bank to the Fed to the Rating Agencies to the investors all buy into the false premise made in 1980 that deregulation is an inherent economic good.  So everybody buys into this system, every single person in the process to get there has to be a complete deregulation tool and they can’t see the fucking problem.  

Also critically the regulations agencies have had their budgets cut, they can’t do their job.  So if you taxed the rich and actually payed for regulation, we wouldn’t have the 2008 crash.  The film also talks about Wall Streets absolute bullshit pseudo macho bullshit, everybody is totally convinced they are this sort of lone individual bootstraps character who blazes a trail but they are all the same fucking hacks doing the same things as everybody else. And the amount of money is so overwhelming it is kinda hard to mentally comprehend and critically....the Wall Street execs don’t understand this shit any more than we do.  And when people are cynical about the whole process, they still assume some of it is working, when the whole thing is actually more corrupt than even the anti Wall Street people assume.    The whole thing was falling apart for over a year and nobody fucking did anything.  this is why Hillary Clinton was such a terrible choice, because the Clintons helped make this happen in the first place and tied by the hip to Wall Street.  

But most important of all, nobody blamed people correct, everybody instead blamed hte wrong peopel, the bailout was necessary but it didn't come with the punishments for Wall Street, instead everybody in power pretended that everything was fine...and them blamed immigrants and poor people.  And elected a CEO and thought he would fix it.  Look, I know the movie isn’t all that good, but if there is a single clip to watch, let it be this last one, the most important of them all.

America never seems to learn the lesson every time and the people who do it always get away with it. Welcome to Trump’s America.