This week, I have been mostly reading:

• In which Review causes Relief — Wondermark, by David Malki!:
• The False Promise of Negative Interest Rates — Robert Skidelsky: Economists are now busy devising new feats of monetary wizardry for when the latest policy fails: taxing cash holdings, or even abolishing cash altogether; or, at the other extreme, showering the population with “helicopter drops” of freshly printed money. The truth, however, is that the only way to ensure that “new money” is put into circulation is to have the government spend it. The government would borrow the money directly from the central bank and use it to build houses, renew transport systems, invest in energy-saving technologies, and so forth. Sadly, any such monetary financing of public deficits is for the moment taboo. It is contrary to European Union regulations – and is opposed by all who regard post-crash governments’ fiscal difficulties as an opportunity to shrink the role of the state.
• Yanis Varoufakis: Australia's negative gearing is 'scandalous' — Gabrielle Jackson commits some nauseating journalisticisms in her interview with "he, with his vibrant purple shirt and erect posture" for the Guardian: In Australia we have a scandalous system called negative gearing, the purpose of which is to subsidise the rich. […] Australia does not have a debt problem. The idea that Australia is on the verge of becoming a new Greece would be touchingly funny if it were not so catastrophic in its ineptitude. Australia does not have a public debt problem, it has a private debt problem.
• Is David Cameron's Austerity Three Times as Bad as Brexit? — Dean Baker at CEPR (US): If we can credit the I.M.F. research staff for knowing what they were doing in their 2008 projections, then the U.K.'s austerity policies have cost it an amount of output equal to 16.8 percentage points of 2007 GDP or more than three times the estimated cost of Brexit. This means that if Brexit is an economic disaster then Cameron's austerity has been three times as costly as an economic disaster.
• The Rough Beasts of Ed-Tech — Audrey Watters: “They’re brine shrimp,” my father explained to me when I begged him to let me order some, destroying the image I had in my head that these were little cartoon mermaids and mermen and mer-families. […] I’ve thought recently that for every silly news story we see that insists some new product is “like Uber but for education” or “like Facebook but for education,” one could easily substitute “like Sea Monkeys but for education.”
• Viet Con — Mr. Fish in Truthdig:
• The Brazilian Coup and Washington’s “Rollback” in Latin America — Mark Weisbrot in the Huffington Post: It is clear that the executive branch of the U.S. government favors the coup underway in Brazil, even though they have been careful to avoid any explicit endorsement of it. Exhibit A was the meeting between Tom Shannon, the 3rd ranking U.S. State Department official and the one who is almost certainly in charge of handling this situation, with Senator Aloysio Nunes, one of the leaders of the impeachment in the Brazilian Senate, on April 20. By holding this meeting just three days after the Brazilian lower house voted to impeach President Dilma Rousseff, Shannon was sending a signal to governments and diplomats throughout the region and the world that Washington is more than ok with the impeachment. Nunes returned the favor this week by leading an effort (he is chair of the Brazilian Senate Foreign Relations Committee) to suspend Venezuela from Mercosur, the South American trade bloc.
• London’s empty towers mark a very British form of corruption — Simon Jenkins in the Guardian: Now we know. The glitzy 50-storey tower that looms over London’s Vauxhall and Pimlico is, as the Guardian revealed yesterday, just a stack of bank deposits. Once dubbed Prescott Tower, after the minister who approved it against all advice, it is virtually empty. At night, vulgar lighting more suited to a casino cannot conceal the fact that its interior is dark, owned by absent Russians, Nigerians and Chinese. It makes no more contribution to London than a gold bar in a bank vault, but is far more prominent, a great smudge of tainted wealth on the city’s horizon.
• ECB’s expanded asset purchase programme – more smoke and mirrors — Bill Mitchell: We now have sufficient data to assess what has been going on under [the ECB's QE] program, and specifically under the public sector purchase programme (PSPP) components (one of three parts to the overall policy initiative). The conclusion is that the scheme has had very little impact on growth and inflation – which is no surprise. However, the pattern of purchases makes it clear that the ECB and the relevant National Central Banks (NCBs) have been engaged in a fiscal operation which has provided extensive debt relief to all Member States other than Greece. This is a demonstration of the European institutions once again engaging in smoke and mirrors (pretending to be operating within the ambit of the Treaties but openly doing the opposite) and behaving belligerently towards one nation (Greece) to ensure it stays subjugated.
• Iceland proves the nation state is alive and well — Bill Mitchell dismisses "grand (delusional) schemes of a Pan Europe Democracy": The scaremongers who claim that the weaker euro nations would experience massive and ongoing currency plunges are in denial of history. Iceland’s approach to the crisis was less painful and more effective. Greece and other weaker euro nations could have enjoyed similar improvements in their external competitiveness if they had exited the EMU and allowed their currencies to float. Internal devaluation has clearly not been an effective route to increasing international competitiveness despite all the neo-liberal claims to the contrary.