Tag: Michael Roberts
Dancing While the Dollar Depreciates
Feels appropriate to drop some remixes to go along with the Reagan era remix—Stephen Miran’s nomination to the Federal Reserve Board is just the latest track in a long playlist of dollar devaluation, austerity for the rest of us, and profits for the usual suspects. Still waiting on a proper critique from economists like Michael Roberts or Michael Hudson, but from what I’ve gathered so far, the “Miran Doctrine” is collapse choreography: pain for the working class, leverage for capital.
Marx saw this coming: the ruling class conjures up the ghosts of past ideologies to mask present-day extraction.
So here’s this DJ set of Madonna remixes—because I need an escape, and maybe you do too.
How China is refusing to fail despite Western narratives
AI going DeepSeek
Most readers will know the news by now. DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, released an AI model called R1 that is comparable in ability to the best models from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, but was trained at a radically lower cost and using less than state-of-the art GPU chips. DeepSeek also made public enough of the details of the model that others can run it on their own computers without charge.
Previously:
Interview with Deepseek Founder: We’re Done Following. It’s Time to Lead
Taiwan: the technology trade turn
Taiwan has a general election on Saturday. The international media has highlighted the election as an important geopolitical pivot – namely, if the current incumbent government party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), wins the presidency and legislature and continues its call for formal (not just de facto) independence from mainland China, that will mean intensified attacks on Taiwan by Beijing, perhaps leading to military conflict.
Taiwan: the technology trade turn
Visions of inequality
In this next of a series of reviews of some important books published this year, I look at Branco Milanovic’s Visions of Inequality.
Visions of inequality
The scissors of slump
Last week, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the US Congress that “We now are entering a period of transition from one of historic recovery to one that can be marked by stable and steady growth. Making this shift is a central piece of the President’s plan to get inflation under control without sacrificing the economic gains we’ve made.”
It’s true that the US economy since the depths of the pandemic slump, (which remember in terms of national output, incomes and investment was the worst since the 1930s – even worse that the Great Recession of 2008-9) has made a recovery. But it could hardly be described as ‘historic’. And as for the claim that the US economy, the best performing of the major economies in the last year, is heading towards ‘stable and steady growth’, that is not supported by reality.
The scissors of slump
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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