Archive (Page 19) • Schooling in Socialist America • Buttondown

A capitalist dilemma

April 13, 2020

If you want to hear some capitalists going at it over one of the biggest questions for capitalism right now, listen to this Squawk on the Street podcast...

Towards a socialist finance

April 12, 2020

From the article “Concrete Utopia,” on Yugoslavian Architecture.I’m trying to understand finance as a socialist. The pandemic is a good opportunity because...

What the Fed did on Thursday

April 11, 2020

It was a pesach miracle. The Fed decided to initiate another program of $2.3 trillion, boldly buying credit it has never bought before (specifically junk...

'Green' Bonds Now

April 10, 2020

We know that carbon emissions are an emergency. They need to go down a lot and fast. We all know the Green New Deal and the Green Stimulus and other...

Poop back and forth, forever

April 9, 2020

Remember that scene from Me, You, and Everyone We Know where the little boy says I want to poop back and forth. Like, I'll poop into her butt hole... and...

The Wizard of Oz Effect

April 8, 2020

This strangely formatted article has so much important information about the financial terrain in this moment. What I’m getting from it is that there was a...

Spreading thin

April 7, 2020

Corporate debt spreads, here I come. This weekend I set myself the task of trying to understand this short piece at Econospeak on corporate credit spreads...

People before corporations?

April 6, 2020

This may be a dumb or unpopular question for a socialist to ask, but I’m interested in thinking it through: should our slogan be “people before...

What's rising?

April 5, 2020

The online news show Rising is a new favorite source for left news/analysis. I listen to it almost every day. One of the strangest and most interesting...

BOBVID-19

April 4, 2020

There’s a good piece on the difference between furloughs and layoffs in the Philly Inquirer today. The lines are fuzzy at best. Furloughed workers ‘maybe’...

Joblessness and suicide

April 3, 2020

(CW: suicide.) Joblessness claims went up again last week, making the total 6.6 million claims in the last month. In searching around for the impacts of...

Leverage: an assignment

April 3, 2020

A friend on Facebook who studies economics posted a challenge: try to read this semi-insidery article about what’s going on in finance right now and post a...

Black hole, not black swan

April 2, 2020

Finance people call this pandemic production crisis a black swan, but I don’t like that term. Of course it’s accurate from a ruling class point of view: it’s...

We need working class data collection

April 1, 2020

I think socialists need our own data collection that takes measurements from a working class perspective. For example: yesterday, US consumer confidence...

Remarkable, contentious leverage

April 1, 2020

I know you're dying to know about some sneaky leverage in the pandemic relief package signed last week! Apparently there's $454 billion of this package that...

Fed Up

March 31, 2020

I’ve been reading about the Federal Reserve. It just spent $6 trillion dollars to rescue capitalism from the pandemic. It’s a main character in the story of...

The Imperiali$m of Relief

March 30, 2020

American imperialism manifests in a lot of ways. But in this pandemic crisis, one way that’s getting my attention is in terms of protection against...

Interest rates like beer for a dime

March 28, 2020

Two big questions about the crisis are: what was the state of capitalism before coronavirus, and what’ll its future be?I rarely hear socialists talking about...

The (socialist) thing about buybacks

March 27, 2020

Everyone’s bashing buybacks. Bailouts and relief packages for Wall Street are so bad, critics say, because corporations just buy their own stocks and enrich...

$6 trillion isn't enough.

March 27, 2020

The big item in the news this morning is the CARES Act, passed in the Senate last night. It features a $2 trillion of fiscal programs including:$1200 of...