Even as US crude oil inventories just hit a fresh record high for another week, both in Cushing and across all other regions, a more curious accumulation of excess oil inventory has emerged: according to the IEA, global oil production exceeded consumption by just over 1 billion barrels in 2014 and 2015.
Last year, virtually all the very “serious people” threw in the towel on global growth and trade.
It’s been apparent for quite some time (like say, a couple of years) that the slump in trade growth has likely become structural and endemic as opposed to transient and cyclical in the post crisis world.
Submitted by Erico Matias Tavares via Sinclair & Co.,
William R. White is the chairman of the Economic and Development Review Committee at the OECD in Paris. Prior to that, Dr. White held a number of senior positions with the Bank for International Settlements (“BIS”), including Head of the Monetary and Economic Department, where he had overall responsibility for the department's output of research, data and information services, and was a member of the Executive Committee which manages the BIS. He retired from the BIS on 30 June 2008.
Authored by Steve Keen, originally posted at Forbes.com,
The great tragedy of the global economic malaise is that it is caused by a shortage of something that is essentially costless to produce: money.
Both banks and governments can produce money at physically trivial costs. Banks create money by creating a loan, and the establishment costs of a loan are miniscule compared to the value of the money created by it—of the order of $3 for every $100 created.
Submitted by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
We often hear about homicide rates in Mexico and how they are among the highest in the world. While that is true for some parts of Mexico, much of Mexico — where nearly 80 percent of the population lives — has much lower rates than what are often quoted in the media.