This is a post I just wrote over at Yves Smith’s site Naked Capitalism in response to a reader request. Marshall Auerback has already written a reply as well and I will post this later today.
A reader at Naked Capitalism asked us to respond to a recent article from the Christian Science Monitor asking Does [...]

I have written extensively about how I believe the bank bailouts were the worst of all possible solutions – fixes that perpetuate too big to fail, moral hazard and crony capitalism.  That ship has sailed, but the questions still linger – in large part because the fix has not trickled down to common folk to [...]

This is a crucial question because Devon Energy, the Oklahoma-based independent oil and natural gas producer has just decided to put billion of dollars in Deep sea Gulf of Mexico assets on the market.
Canada’s National Post reported:
Devon Energy Corp. hopes to raise up to US$7.5-billion from the sale of its Gulf of Mexico and international [...]

Max Keiser certainly has a way with words. In one of his latest TV appearances, using the colorful analogy of “Warren Buffett’s toilet paper,” he calls the U.S. dollar worthless.
He goes on to say that China is addicted to this worthless paper because they are using it to stimulate their domestic economy. In another [...]

On the eve of U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to China, a major Chinese official has criticized U.S. monetary policy in unusually harsh language. Liu Mingkang, China Banking Regulatory Commission chairman said the zero interest rate policy of the U.S. Federal Reserve posed a “new systemic risk.”
Liu, using language reminiscent of warnings by NYU economist [...]

Is it just me or did Secretary Geithner just talk out of other side of his mouth? Today he wrote an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal with two Asian leaders to mark a big meeting of APEC (Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation) in Singapore.
The WSJ article started out with a bunch of diplomatic niceties about [...]

L. Randall Wray has a post up at New Deal 2.0 which puts forward an idea which is pretty innovative. I would label it a private sector replacement for unemployment insurance. It’s the kind of thinking that might bring Obama out of a policy cul-de-sac as the economy hemorrhages jobs.
Let me present an excerpted version [...]

You could see this one coming given the humiliating circumstances under which the German Chancellor learned that GM was pulling out of the Magna deal.
The BBC is now reporting that Germany will give General Motors no aid to restructure it’s business. That’s 4.5 Billion Euros they now need to come up with.
Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle [...]

Tim Geithner has issued a Code Red on the U.S. dollar, but he doesn’t think Americans can handle it.
I believe deeply that it’s very important to the United States, to the economic health of the United States, that we maintain a strong dollar.

Secretary, I have just one more question. If you gave an order that [...]

You have probably heard the term money illusion.  I want to coin a related new term called unemployment rate illusion because I think it is significant in light of some of the things David Rosenberg said earlier today about the unemployment rate in the U.S.
Wikipedia’s definition of money illusion is good:
In economics, money illusion refers [...]