Most telling, though, was the discovery that my best prospects had Wallace stickers on their car bumpers. George Wallace ran a populist campaign for president in 1968 that was based on Tea Party-like resentment of Washington and contempt for “pointy-headed” intellectuals who wanted to tell you what to do.
.. Fast forward to the present, where the wealth gap and the bleak prospects of the lower middle class have made that pixie dust even more potent (it’s striking that median household income as measured by the Commerce Department is actually a bit less today in real terms than it was in 1968, when vastly fewer women had entered the work force).
Politics is Driven by Economics
Democrats, according to Pew, retained an advantage on less tangible qualities such as empathy, honesty and a willingness to compromise.
As attractive as those characteristics are, they are not top priorities for voters. Both Pew and Gallup have found that, except in times of crisis – for example, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks — voters’ top priorities consistently include bread-and-butter issues, jobs and the economy.
How much gold is there in the world?
Warren Buffett, one of the world’s richest investors, says the total amount of gold in the world – the gold above ground, that is – could fit into a cube with sides of just 20m (67ft).
But is that all there is? And if so, how do we know?
A figure that is widely used by investors comes from Thomson Reuters GFMS, which produces an annual gold survey.
Their latest figure for all the gold in the world is 171,300 tonnes – which is almost exactly the same as the amount in our super-villain’s imaginary cube.
Interfluidity: Some thoughts on QE
QE only works if it makes asset prices rise, and it is only conducted while it makes those prices rise in real and not just nominal terms.
In the same way that you might put Andrew Jackson‘s face on a Federal Reserve Note, you might describe QE as the most “Kaleckian” form of monetary stimulus, after this passage:
Under a laissez-faire system the level of employment depends to a great extent on the so-called state of confidence. If this deteriorates, private investment declines, which results in a fall of output and employment (both directly and through the secondary effect of the fall in incomes upon consumption and investment). This gives the capitalists a powerful indirect control over government policy: everything which may shake the state of confidence must be carefully avoided because it would cause an economic crisis.
Replace “state of confidence” in the quote with its now ubiquitous proxy — asset prices — and you can see why a QE-only approach to demand stimulus embeds a troubling political economy. The only way to improve the circumstances of the un- or precariously employed is to first make the rich richer. The poor become human shields for the rich: if we let the price of stocks or houses drop, you are all out of a job.