This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (via Timothy Taylor):
  
• The rise of Donald Trump — Dean Baker, Real World Economics Review Blog: Whatever the final outcome of the presidential race, Trump has exposed a sense of extreme anger among large segments of the population. These people are unhappy about economic policies that have undermined their financial security. Their anger may be misdirected towards immigrants or other countries, but it is not about to go away unless the policies change.
• Larry Fink and His BlackRock Team Poised to Take Over Hillary Clinton’s Treasury Department — David Dayen at The Intercept: BlackRock is far from a household name, but it is the largest asset management firm in the world, controlling $4.6 trillion in investor funds — about a trillion dollars more than the annual federal budget, and five times the assets of Goldman Sachs. And Larry Fink, BlackRock’s CEO, has assembled a veritable shadow government full of former Treasury Department officials at his company. […] And his priorities appear to be so in sync with Clinton’s that it’s not entirely clear who shares whose agenda. Clinton, for her part, has refused to rule out a treasury secretary drawn from Wall Street.
• Joe Wilson to Hillary Clinton in 2010: Baghdad “Has Been Bled to Death” — Zaid Jilani in The Intercept: My trip to Baghdad (September 6-11) has left me slack jawed. I have struggled to find the correct historical analogy to describe a vibrant, historically important Middle Eastern city being slowly bled to death. Berlin and Dresden in World War II were devastated but they and their populations were not subjected to seven years of occupation that included ethnic cleansing, segregation of people by religious identity, and untold violence perpetrated upon them by both military and private security services. […] The service people don’t see themselves there to bring peace, light, joy or even democracy to Iraq. They are there to kill the “camel jockeys.”
• Why Trump? — George Lakoff: Language that fits [a conservative or progressive] worldview activates that worldview, strengthening it, while turning off the other worldview and weakening it. The more Trump’s views are discussed in the media, the more they are activated and the stronger they get, both in the minds of hardcore conservatives and in the minds of moderate progressives. This is true even if you are attacking Trump’s views. The reason is that negating a frame activates that frame, as I pointed out in the book Don’t Think of an Elephant! It doesn’t matter if you are promoting Trump or attacking Trump, you are helping Trump.
• The Federal Reserve and the Global Fracture — Antti J. Ronkainen interviews Michael Hudson: The aim of lowering interest rates was to provide banks with cheap credit. The pretense was that banks might lend to help the economy get going again. But the Fed’s idea was simply to re-inflate the Bubble Economy. It aimed at restoring the value of the mortgages that banks had in their loan portfolios. The hope was that easy credit would spur new mortgage lending to bid housing prices back up – as if this would help the economy rather than simply raising the price of home ownership. […] Banks did make money, but not by lending into the “real” production and consumption economy. They mainly engaged in arbitrage and speculation, and lending to hedge funds and companies to buy their own stocks yielding higher dividend returns than the low interest rates that were available.
• RICHARD KOO: The 'struggle between markets and central banks has only just begun' — David Scutt of Business Insider Australia points us towards this illustration of how trying to increase the amount of broad money by issuing base money is "pushing on a string":
  
• The Unemployment Rate Isn’t Used to Keep Unemployment Low (With Graph) — Ian Welsh: So, the unemployment rate from late 70s and on, has been used to determine if wages should cause inflation, and to then raise interest rates to make sure they don’t. Not incidentally, the result is also to crush wages, because, essentially, wages that improve are nothing more than wages that increase faster than non-wage inflation. The unemployment rate not only doesn’t measure how good the economy feels for ordinary people, it was actually used, with purposeful action, to crush wages.
• There's more than one way to kill negative gearing — Peter Martin: Before John Howard halved the headline rate of capital gains tax at the turn of the century, negative gearing was relatively unattractive. Landlords as a group made money. In 1999-2000 they made a combined $219 million. Ever since then they've lost money. In 2012-13 they lost a net $5.4 billion... Capital gains matter because they are the mechanism negative gearers use to make money. The profits they make from eventually selling their properties are meant to exceed their annual losses from rent. A cut-rate capital gains tax makes those profits more likely. Investors can write off their annual losses at the full tax rate and pay tax on their eventual profits at only half the rate.
• Exit Planning — Thomas Geoghegan in The Baffler: Toe-to-toe, it’s the elderly and not the robots who are taking jobs from the young. […] The more we shrink the welfare state—I mean cut back on private pensions, Social Security, and Medicare so that older Americans must stay in the workforce—the harder it is for a young person to land a job. D.C. think tanks love to tell the elderly that we’re really in fine shape and that it is our duty to keep on working. To an audience of older college grads, like me, they say, “Hang on to those college-type jobs.” At the same time, they push more young people into college. Isn’t this a contradiction? It seems that the one hand does not know what the other hand is doing. That’s the problem with neoliberalism.