This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Where Has All the Money Gone? — Robert Skidelsky in Project Syndicate: But in his Treatise on Money, Keynes provided a more realistic account based on the “speculative demand for money.” During a sharp economic downturn, he argued, money is not necessarily hoarded, but flows from “industrial” to “financial” circulation. Money in industrial circulation supports the normal processes of producing output, but in financial circulation it is used for “the business of holding and exchanging existing titles to wealth, including stock exchange and money market transactions.” A depression is marked by a transfer of money from industrial to financial circulation – from investment to speculation. So, the reason why QE has had hardly any effect on the general price level may be that a large part of the new money has fueled asset speculation, thus creating financial bubbles, while prices and output as a whole remained stable. One implication of this is that QE generates its own boom-and-bust cycles.
• On The Cusp — George Monbiot: If there’s one thing we know about climate breakdown, it’s that it will not be linear, smooth or gradual. Just as one continental plate might push beneath another in sudden fits and starts, causing periodic earthquakes and tsunamis, our atmospheric systems will absorb the stress for a while, then suddenly shift. Yet everywhere, the programmes designed to avert it are linear, smooth and gradual. Current plans to avoid catastrophe would work in a simple system like a washbasin, in which you can close the tap until the inflow is less than the outflow. But they’re less likely to work in complex systems, such as the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere. Complex systems seek equilibrium. When they are pushed too far out of one equilibrium state, they can flip suddenly into another. A common property of complex systems is that it’s much easier to push them past a tipping point than to push them back. Once a transition has happened, it cannot realistically be reversed.
• US government rights in patents on Molnupiravir, based upon funding of R&D at Emory University — Luis Gil Abinader at Knowledge Ecology International: Molnupiravir, the oral pill that is showing promising results as a potential treatment for covid-19, was invented at Emory University with U.S. government funds. After more than six years of non-clinical testing, Emory licensed molnupiravir to Ridgeback Biotherapeutics to continue its development as a potential treatment for covid-19. The discovery and further research efforts made at Emory between 2013 and 2020 benefited from an estimate of $35 million dollars in government support. As a consequence of these investments, the U.S. government has rights in key molnupiravir patents. […] Perhaps one of the reasons why Ridgeback is minimizing the role of the U.S. government in the development of molnupiravir is to avoid demands to make the drug available at a reasonable price. That kind of move has worked for companies like Novartis in the past. Yet, as a promising oral pill with many potential generic suppliers, the availability and affordability of molnupiravir will likely face intense scrutiny in the upcoming months. Harvard and King’s College researchers Melissa Barber and Dzintars Gotham recently estimated the cost of production for molnupiravir. Based on a previously developed algorithm and public information they concluded that the cost of producing molnupiravir’s active pharmaceutical ingredients, including a 10% profit margin, is $19.99 a course. In June 2021, Merck announced an agreement to supply the U.S. government approximately 1.7 million courses of molnupiravir for approximately $1.2 billion. KEI has obtained a copy of this contract, which is discussed in another blog published today. According to the contract, the U.S. government will pay $712 dollars per unit of molnupiravir, about 35 times the cost of production as estimated by Barber and Gotham.
• GOP Lawmaker Pushes Insane Claim ‘Octopus-Like Creatures’ Are in Vax — Zoe Richards in the Daily Beast: The email from the legislator contained a 52-page “report” with disinformation on COVID-19, including claims that “unknown, octopus-like creatures are being injected into millions of children worldwide.” The report also made claims that 5G technology had somehow been inserted into the vaccine to control people’s thoughts and called the pope and others “at the top” of the Roman Catholic Church “satanists” and “luciferans” for backing public health measures. The report additionally made the wild suggestion that the babies of vaccinated parents in Mexico were “transhuman”—born with “pitch-black eyes” and undergoing accelerated aging.