Yves here. While it may seem like Larry Summers is finally done with public life, think again! Wikipedia reports that Summers joined the board of OpenAI in November 2023. And one can be sure that he would like to influence the economic policies of the Harris Administration, if not an official role, even if it is open and back channels.
Remember that Summers has one of the leaders of the hawkish view of our current inflation, which the American people have been rightly told is done, even if many are still suffering from high prices. A summary of this outlook from 2022: History shows no example of US rates moving too quickly, Summers said.
In fact, as the Dutch economist Servaas Storm has shown in several papers, analyzing the data carefully, inflation is caused mainly if not entirely due to the reduction in supply: the impact of Covid on workers and supply chains and the backlash of fines. Biden’s deficit may have played a role, but Summers’ view that excess demand has fueled inflation meant that his call for a Fed interest rate hike was giving the wrong medicine.
So Mark Ames’ hardy perennial, which he wrote for our first fundraiser thirteen years ago, is still an important warning.
Although this is our analogue to Christmas staples like The Grinch That Stole Christmas or It’s a Wonderful Life. Ames’ episode is the opposite of sappy. Ames also explains one of the reasons why the left is so bad in power: its followers see finance as a luxury and thus not worth studying.
And in the spirit of Christmas coming early, we hope you’ll leave something nice in our stocking, um, Tip Jar!
By Mark Ames, author of Going Post: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine..
If you’ve been reading Naked Capitalism for any length of time without making a donation—and most of us have been since the moment we discovered Yves Smith’s powerful, sharp voice and brilliant mind—then you’ve been missing out. to kill. Naked Capitalism is that rare blog that makes you smart. He is smart about many things, but especially about Yves’ area of expertise, finance.
In the unfortunate misfortune of history, the American Left has gone two generations without understanding finance, or even caring to understand it. It was the hippies who decided 50 years ago that money was beneath them, so they happily left the whole field—finance, business, economics, money—otherwise known as “power politics”—over there. Walking away from the financial struggle was like a mountaineer returning a gun to the Manson Family. There’s a great line from Charles Portis’s anti-hippie novel, “South Dog” that captures the boomers’ “mathematical” adventure:
He always said—boastfully, in the way of those people—that he had no head for math and could do things with his hands, subtly hinting at the existence of virtues.
That part about the hands—which could refer to another great failure of the hippies, turning away from Labour, because Labor didn’t go along with the Hippies’ Culture War. And so the Left finds itself, fifty years later, dealing with the consequences of all those years of destructive financial and labor neglect—the consequences are political impotence and impotence.
This is why Yves Smith is so important to anyone who cares about politics and the bad path this country is taking. In 2008, the Left suddenly discovered that while it could talk very well about how bad foreign wars are, and how wrong sexism and homophobia are, it was completely and shamefully caught by surprise by the 2008 financial collapse. Ignorance was crippling, politically and psychologically. Even the lexicon was unusual. Unless you were one of the first fans of Yves Smith’s blog.
It wasn’t always like that.
Back in the 1930s, the Left was firmly entrenched in economics, finance and money; back then, the Left and Labor were one and the same. On a financial and economic basis, the Left understood work and political power and ideology and organization much better than the Left today, which may be like the right’s special stupidity to spray us with. We are just learning how politically stuck and ignorant we are, how much time and information we have wasted, and how much we still have to do.
That is why Naked Capitalism by Yves Smith is one of the most important assets of the 99% in the long struggle ahead: He is an analyst and a teacher, with a rare talent for writing (especially in finance). The one thing the financial oligarchy is protected by is the turgid horrible prose in which they hide their poisonous ideas and concepts. Yves is one of the few who can make learning finance as emotionally charged as it needs to be.
Naked Capitalism is our online university of finance and politics and ideology. While other online universities have been created to turn millions of gullible youth into debt-ridden Wall Street cattle, Naked Capitalism is the opposite: It’s completely free, consistently smart, important, and necessary, making us smarter, teaching us how to do it one day. to overthrow the financial oligarchy. Another difference between Naked Capitalism and online university scams: (Stanley Kaplan cough-cough!) Your donations won’t end up paying Ezra Klein’s salary.
Which brings me back to “Shame on you!” the point I was trying to make earlier. When it comes to fundraising, nothing works like embarrassment. That’s how those late-night commercials work: You’re sitting there in your nice cozy house, and all of a sudden there’s this three-legged dog hopping around in his cage, with big watery eyes, and a bearded bully comes up and says, “Poor Rusty has endured more abuse and pain than you can imagine, and tomorrow, he will be gassed to death in a small house, with terrible poison. And you—look at you, sitting there with your Chunky Monkey and your central heating, what kind of sick bastard are you? Get out your Visa Mastercard and send money to Rusty, or his death is on your head. I hope you have a good night.”
Now I know this kind of appeal won’t work in the Naked Capitalism crowd—too many economists here, and as everybody knows, you can’t win the hearts of economists because, look under the heading “Larry Summers World Bank Memo” … I can see Larry watching that market at night with a three-legged dog, powering a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke and devouring a bag of Kettle Salt & Vinegar potato chips, calculating the productive value of a three-legged, motionless dog. with emotional appeal. Larry grabs the dictaphone: “Item: How can you stop the dogs from blowing up? Solution: Send all stray three-legged dogs to sub-Saharan Africa. Africans will not even notice. The dogs are saved. Private capital is freed up. Problem solved.”
So some of you are heartless, and some of us are shameless. But we all understand how important Naked Capitalism was in teaching us. I’m sure the other side knows how dangerous a site like this is, because as we become more educated and political, we become more and more of a threat.
The oligarchy has spent decades on a project to “reclaim the Left,” and they have succeeded in ways we now understand. “Funding the Left” does not mean rejecting funds from the corrupt Democratic Party; It means defunding everything that threatens the 1%’s hold on wealth and power.
One of their greatest successes, whether designed or not, has been the suppression of journalism, reducing it to a manageable size where its integrity can be submerged in the bathtub. It is almost impossible to make a living as a journalist these days; and as the economics of the journalism business continue to collapse like the Soviet refrigerator industry in the 1990s, media outlets are less inclined to challenge power, journalists are less inclined to rock the boat than ever before, and everyone is prone to corruption. (see: Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly). A ProPublica study in May put it in numbers: In 1980, the ratio of PR flaks to journalists was about 1:3. In 2008, there were 3 PR flaks for one reporter. And that was before the 2008 shit hit the journalism fan.
This is what an oligarchy looks like. I saw exactly the same dynamic in Russia under Yeltsin: When he took power in 1991, Russia had a journalistic culture that was fearless and different than any I’ve ever seen, a lo-fi, hi-octane version of American journalism in the 1970s. But as soon as Yeltsin created a class of oligarchs to ensure his election victory in 1996, the oligarchs seized all free news outlets, and forced anyone who challenged power, one by one. By the time Putin came to power, all the great Russian journalists that Taibbi and I knew had either left PR or political prostitution. It was the oligarchy that killed Russian journalism; Putin simply assembled the few remaining pockets of resistance.
The only way to prevent that from happening is to support the best of what we have left. Working for free is ridiculous. It can’t catch up, and it won’t.
There are many ways to give. The first one is here on the blog, Tip Jar, which takes you to PayPal. There you can use a debit card, credit card or PayPal account (payment will be in the name of Aurora Consultants).
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So donate now to Naked Capitalism. If you can’t afford more, donate what you can. If you can afford more, give more. If you can give more, give more. Whether you donate $5 or $5,000, it will pay for itself, I guarantee it. This is not just giving, it is a statement that you want a different debate, a different society, and a different culture.
Who knows, maybe we will win; maybe we’ll even find a way to shut Larry Summers in some kind of spaceship, and burn him up in deep space, so he can orbit Uranus forever. Yves? Can it be financed?
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