Monday, April 13, 2015

Podcast: My phone conversation with Paul Craig Roberts

Podcast for April 13: My phone conversation with Paul Craig Roberts.

This started out as a podcast, but it got contentious and sloppy, so I am summarizing with this podcast.



7 comments:

Peter Pan said...

It was Boris Yeltsin who handed over the Soviet Union to western economists and homegrown oligarchs. If the US had shown a greater interest in manipulating the situation, perhaps Russia would have become the equivalent of an American colony.
My impression at the time was that Russia had lost the war for consumer choice. They had a corrupt system, run by apparatchiks, and the people were fed up with inefficiencies.

PCR is on the record denying that supply-side economics is being practiced today, so perhaps you're working with different definitions.

Wish you had asked him about manipulation in the COMEX market.

John said...

Although there were oil shocks, this apparently exaggerates the economic impact. I've heard it argued that concentrating on this overlooks a more important factor - real estate.

What was decisive, and hardly ever touched upon, was the bursting of a gigantic real estate bubble, which then ignited a banking crisis. At the same time there was a stock market crash. A sort of blueprint for 2008.

In any case, oil was artificially cheap. It's not like other everyday commodities. It's more of a geopolitical weapon than a commodity, as we see today with the Saudis crashing the price.

The spikes in oil prices merely took the price up to fair value, and in any case got recycled by Wall Street to Washington's great joy.

Meanwhile, the US-backed dictatorships remained in place, having assuaged their restless populations that this was a slap in the face to their Western imperialist tormentors.

It all sounds plausible.

Comments anybody?

mike norman said...

Bob,

Never heard about that Comex story. What happened and when? I was a Comex member in the late 80s.

Matt Franko said...

Need data on what was happening with withdrawals from the TGA while all of that was going on...

The Just Gatekeeper said...

I have had this debate in the past. As usual, data is the best weapon against monetarist/right wing narratives such as this one. These charts from FRED clearly show the correlation between the rise in CPI and the rise in oil prices:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?graph_id=230357&category_id=

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?graph_id=232538&category_id=

Also re: 2008. Yes oil prices spiked in 2008, but we had a huge hole in demand from the collapsing housing bubble and we were technically in recession at the time, so no suprise it didnt translate into high inflation back then....

Peter Pan said...

Mike,

Paul has run a few articles about it. Here is the most recent one I could find:
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/12/22/lawless-manipulation-bullion-markets-public-authorities-paul-craig-roberts-dave-kranzler/

Peter Pan said...

Here's another one:
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/02/18/gold-futures-market-used-fraud-
dave-kranzler/

What this all about?