This week, I have been mostly reading:

• So Sue Them: What We’ve Learned About the Debt Collection Lawsuit Machine — Paul Kiel, ProPublica: In 1996, there were around 500 court judgments in New Jersey from suits filed by debt buyers. By 2008, that number had reached 140,000. […] For the most part, debt buyers purchase defaulted credit card accounts, typically for a few pennies on the dollar. Starting in the late 90’s, the industry began a period of rapid growth and then exploded in the middle of the last decade. That led to a sharp spike in suits, many of them by smaller debt buying companies that have since gone out of business. The industry is now dominated by several large companies.
• Hey Joe, banks can’t lend out reserves — Steve Keen: For me, watching academic economists and Central Bankers (the vast majority of whom trained as economists) tell the banks to “lend your excess reserves to the public, dammit!”, is akin to watching some delusional person in a playground watching two kids playing on a see-saw, and criticising them because they weren’t both up in the air at the same time.
• The Barbarism of Donald Trump — Ian Welsh: I don’t know if Clinton will torture. I know Bernie Sanders won’t. I know there are options available in the American election that don’t sell the tattered remains of America’s soul.
• Corbyn's Progress — Tariq Ali: Blair, angered by this outburst of democracy in a party that he had moulded in his own image, declared that the Labour Party would be unelectable unless Corbyn was removed. Brown kept relatively quiet, perhaps because he was busy negotiating his very own private finance initiative with the investment firm Pimco (Ben Bernanke and the former ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet are also joining its ‘global advisory board’). Simultaneously, his ennobled former chancellor, Lord Darling, was on his way to work for Morgan Stanley in Wall Street. Blair, an adviser to J.P. Morgan since 2008, must have chuckled. At last, a New Labour reunion in the land of the free. All that ‘light-touch’ regulation was bearing rich fruit. Virtually every senior member of the Blair and Brown cabinets went to work for a corporation that had benefited from their policies.
• Folks Worried About Robots Taking Our Jobs Need to Learn Arithmetic — Dean Baker: It is important to recognize that “owning robots” is a political issue, not an economic one. Specifically, people own robots because we give them patent monopolies. In most cases robots would be very cheap to produce if the government didn’t threaten to arrest people for not respecting patents. […] So we end up with money going from the rest of us to people who own robots because the government has given these people a monopoly over the use of the technology. Suppose the government didn’t give a monopoly over the use of the technology. Suppose that we funded the research through a different mechanism or at least made the monopolies shorter and weaker. Then the folks who developed the robots would not have so much money, the robots would be cheaper, and the rest of us would be richer.
• MMT, trade balance and balance of payments — Mike Norman: A net importer is gaining "stuff" in an exchange with a net exporter, and the net exporter is accumulating the currency of the net importer. Thus the net importer is benefiting in real terms while the next exporter is benefiting in financial terms. The net exporter is diminishing domestic product (real) for domestic use, and the net importer is increasing indebtedness (financial) to the net exporter. On the other hand, net imports are beneficial to the economy and nation at full employment. The nation has more stuff than it would otherwise have at the current level of productivity. Because foreign workers are contributing to domestic productivity. And the country is not exporting jobs.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
• Listening to past Treasurers is a dangerous past-time — Bill Mitchell: On January 23, 2016, a former Australian Treasurer Peter Costello (1996-2007) gave a speech to the Young Liberals (the youth movement of the conservative party in Australia) – Balanced Budgets as a Youth Policy – which was sad in the sense that some people never get over being dumped as out of touch and unpopular and was ridiculous in the sense that it is a denial of reality and macroeconomic understanding. He mounted the same old arguments that have been used to justify the pursuit of fiscal surpluses (grandchildren etc) but failed to recognise that his period as Treasurer was abnormal in terms of our history and left the nation exposed to the GFC as a result of the massive buildup in private sector debt over his period of tenure. The only reason he achieved the surpluses was because growth was driven by the household credit binge which ultimately proved to be unsustainable. Fiscal deficits are historically normal and should not be resisted. They are the mirror image in a national accounting sense of non-government surpluses, which historically, have proven to be the best basis for sustained growth and low unemployment.
• Tilting at windmills: The Faustian folly of quantitative easing — Steve Keen, Real World Economics Review Blog: QE gets into the money supply—not via lending, which is impossible, but via asset purchases, which far and away benefit rich households more than poor ones. Rich households also benefit from the income the share transactions generate. And finally, some of that money gets to poor households when the rich ones—made richer still by QE—buy some services off them. The real economy has thus received some impetus from QE, but only a relatively trivial amount of the money created has got into circulation in Main Street. As Michael Hudson puts it, Bernanke’s helicopter dumped money on Wall Street, not Main Street. The bubble before the financial crisis had already exaggerated income inequality past what is sustainable in a capitalist society. Central Bank meddling via QE has made this problem worse, and without the illusion of a boom (like the Internet and Subprime Bubbles) to make it seem somehow palatable. And Neil Wilson adds some more context, though I must admit that I couldn't follow his logic for one crucial step.
• Bernie Sanders proved politicians can make it this far without selling their souls — Robert Reich in the Guardian: Sanders’ courage in taking on the political establishment has emboldened millions to stand up and demand our voices be heard. Regardless of what Sanders decides to do now, he has ignited a movement that will fight onward. We will fight to put more progressives into the House and Senate. We will fight at the state level. We will organize for the 2020 presidential election. We will not succumb to cynicism. We are in it for the long haul. We will never give up.
• We are being led by imbeciles — Bill Mitchell: I was reading John Maynard Keynes recently – circa 1928 – that is, 8 years before the publication of the General Theory with his Treatise on Money intervening. He was railing against the principles and practice of ‘sound finance’, which he noted had deliberately caused billions of pounds in lost income for the British economy. He urged the Treasury and the Bank of England to abandon their conservative (austerity) approach to the economy and, instead, embark on wide-scale fiscal stimulus to create jobs and prosperity. He concluded that with thousands of workers idling away in mass unemployment that it was “utterly imbecile to say that we cannot afford” to stimulate employment via large-scale public works – building infrastructure etc. He considered the policy makers who opposed such options were caught up in “the delirium of mental confusion”. The stark reality is that 88 years later, he could have written exactly the same article and would have been ‘right on the money’.
• Why I don't use heroin — Chris Arnade, The Guardian: Addiction is a symptom of something very wrong with our society. That in any city or town, across all of America, people live on the streets, shooting up, selling themselves for another bag, should make us all stop and ask ourselves “why does our society create and allow such pain?”.