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Satjajit Das: Discusses Financial Depression & The Age of Stagnation

Satyajit Das: DISCUSSES FINANCIAL REPRESSION & THE AGE OF STAGNATION

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FRA Co-founder Gordon T. Long is joined by Satyajit Das in discussing the consequences of financial repression and current policy making, along with the effects of the Chinese economy.

SATYAJIT DAS is an internationally respected expert in finance, with over 35 years’ experience. Das presciently anticipated many aspects of the global financial crisis in 2006. He subsequently proved accurate in his warnings about the ineffectiveness of policy responses and the risk of low growth, sovereign debt problems (anticipating the restructuring of Greek debt), and the increasing problems of China and emerging economies. In 2014 Bloomberg nominated him as one of the fifty most influential financial thinkers in the world.

Mr. Das is the author of a number of key reference works on derivatives and risk management. Das is the author of two international bestsellers, Traders, Guns & Money (2006) and Extreme Money (2011). His latest book is A Banquet of Consequences (2015) (published in North America as Age of Stagnation).

He was featured in Charles Ferguson’s 2010 Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, the 2012 PBS Frontline series Money, Power & Wall Street, the 2009 BBC TV documentary Tricks with Risk, and the 2015 German film Who’s Saving Whom.

VIEWS ON FINANCIAL REPRESSION

Slide1It started around 2008 and prices relate to debt. Fundamentally, the way the surprises were dealt with were in a very old fashioned way to grow and inflate their way out of debt. As we know, this process hasn’t really worked, and there’s really only two choices left. One of them is to default, which is hugely unpalatable because writing off peoples’ savings like that has consequences for future consumption, and a huge amount of wealth loss in the world. The other option is financial repression, which is a way of managing excess debt. The most common way is by very high levels of taxation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Killed the Middle Class?

What Killed the Middle Class?

If the four structural trends highlighted below don’t reverse, the middle class is heading for extinction. 

Everyone knows the middle class is fading fast. I’ve covered this issue in depth for years, for example: Honey, I Shrunk the Middle Class: Perhaps 1/3 of Households Qualify (December 28, 2015) and What Does It Take To Be Middle Class? (December 5, 2013)

This raises an obvious question: what killed the middle class? While many commentators try to identify one killer cause (for example, the U.S. going off the gold standard in 1971), the die-off of the middle class is more akin to the die-off in honey bees, which is the result of the interaction of multiple causes (factors that increase the toxic load dumped on bees and other pollinators by modern agriculture).

Longtime collaborator Gordon T. Long and I discuss the decline of the middle class and other key topics in a new 29-minute video How did that work out for you?

So where do we begin this detective story? With the engine of all real prosperity, productivity. This chart reveals that wages stopped rising with productivity around 1980.

Here’s another look at the same phenomenon:

Productivity has been slipping since around 2003: Alan Greenspan:”Productivity is Dead”

Cause #1: declining productivity, which means the pie of real wealth is no longer expanding.

Exhibit #2: middle class wage earners have not received any of the gains.Wages as a percentage of GDP have been falling for decades, with occasional blips up in tech/housing bubbles:

Inflation-adjusted household income has dropped back to levels first reached in the 1980s:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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