Or people complaining that their sick mother is whingeing (?) by asking them for another cup of tea.

Or the other thing -  as one gets older, the people you remember as being good people turning into right wing assholes complaining about the war on Christmas or the small percentage of GDP the country gives in food aid to the starving.  Come on, is there no rationality left in them!!!

Too many right wingers on this planet!

... The proposition that demand determines outputs and supply determines price is logically, intuitively and empirically reasonable in any time period and for most industries. Why can't economists just tilt their supply curve 45 degrees to the right?

Well, at this point a few things become apparent. The theory of the firm becomes indeterminant: one of economist's beloved negative feedback loops that allows the economy to self-equilibrate is gone, as firm size is not limited by production costs. Hence, the marginal theory of the firm goes from explaining everything - from firm size to income distribution - to explaining very little. This also makes explicit the idea that output in the economy is driven by demand, both in the short and long run, which contradicts conventional macro theory, where demand only matters because prices are sticky.

Overall, a flat supply curve turns the conventional story told in neoclassical economics, where the economy is self-equilibrating, bar a few frictions, to one where many key variables - wages, output, firm size - go from being at the equilibrium or `natural' level, into one where they are largely arbitrary. It's easy to see why economists would resist this.

I've long been fascinated with looking at private sector financial balances in particular. There was an economics professor at Cambridge University called Wynne Godley who passed away a couple of years ago, who basically used this type of framework to look at business cycles in the U.K. and also in the U.S. for many, many years, so we just started reading some of his material in the late 1990s, and I found it to be a pretty useful way of thinking about the world.

It's usually not something that gives you the secret sauce at getting it all right, because there are a lot of uncertain inputs that go into this analytical framework, but I do think it's a reasonable organizing framework for thinking about the short to medium term ups and downs of the business cycle.

Basically, in order to have above-trend growth - a cyclically strong economy - you need to have some sector that wants to reduce its financial surplus or run a larger deficit in order to provide that sort of cyclical boost, most of the time.

Migeru Shimbun is out! http://paper.li/MigeruBlogger/1351816577 ... ▸ Top stories today via @MigeruBlogger @YoSisanidaduniv @economiasol

The bonds, which include two T-bills and three floating-rate notes with maturities ranging between two months and three years, will be transferred to Spain's Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring (FROB) in the coming days.

The FROB will use €37bn for the recapitalisation of BFA-Bankia, Catalunya-Caixa, NCG Banco and Banco de Valencia - categorised as Group One banks - and the remaining €2.5bn to capitalise SAREB, the Asset Management Company (AMC).

ESM stated the bonds were not funded via the capital markets.

"We call this a payment in kind. The banks can post these bonds as collateral to the ECB and receive cash," said a eurozone official close to the discussions.

The EU elite is not clueless, it is evil.

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS