Jill Stein, A Thought

Jill Stein is running for President on the Green Party ticket. I believe that Jordan Weissman, of Slate's money box, did a fine job recently of chronicling some of the difficulties in taking her policy positions seriously. Yes, Weissman is probably in the tank for HR Clinton, and probably figures running down Stein helps save the world from Trump. Still, when he's right he's right.

I'll simply paraphrase here one of Weissman's contentions, about Stein's ignorance of monetary policy.

Student loans, she said, "should be canceled in the same way that the debt of Wall Street was canceled, essentially writing it off as a digital 'hat trick,' which is done in the form of quantitative easing.”

Let's ignore this as a contribution to discussion of student loan. The point here is whether she knows an anus from a hole-in-the-ground in the realm of monetary policy. The conclusion is: she does not.

I'm against quantitative easing. I think is a disastrous policy, and Stein's implicit amiability with QE is one of the points here that should concern us. But ... never mind that. DOES SHE EVEN KNOW WHAT SUCH TERMS MEAN? That is a prior question surely. And Weissman aptly makes the point that she does not.

QE doesn't involve cancelling the debt that banks owe. It involves the central bank buying the debt that banks own and that somebody else (often the US Treasury) owes to them.

Debt owed or debt owned. Just one small letter, eh? Just an "n" sound inserted in the right spot.

Um, no. The words "marital" and "martial" sound and look a lot a like, too. But I hope Ms Stein doesn't take them as synonyms.

Briefly. Suppose a trading desk at Bank of America owned a lot of Treasury bills. QE means the Fed buys those bills and pays for them by newly created money -- poof! the B of A desk can put the newly 'paid' money on its own books, and the Fed has the T-bills on the asset side of its balance sheet. The money supply is larger than it was a moment ago. No debt of Bank of America has been forgiven, but B of A does have more cash on hand than it did a moment ago.

The 2008 bank bailout and the subsequent rounds of QE are somewhat different subjects, conflated here. (They are related, though, and again Weissman covers all this ground well.)

In another statement, Stein connected the bailout to her proposed student debt relief program more elaborately. She said the bailout "didn't put money in" the banks' pockets, but "rid them of all that debt that they would otherwise have had to pay." That's what she wants to do for former students who owe a lot of money.

Sorry, Ms Stein, the bailout -- and the QEs -- did and DO put money into banks' pockets. Creating the money in the process. The banks are the points whence the new quantities of money enter the system, because dumping it from helicopters is considered inelegant. Such ignorance from someone of her prominence and ambitions is almost Trumpian. Though, to be fair, she is in many other respects utterly unTrumpian.

All of that said: I would still say to anyone wavering between a vote for Clinton and a vote for Stein: vote for Stein. Just as I would say to anyone wavering between a vote for Trump and one for Johnson: vote for Johnson. The big issue now is the rejection of the two party system itself, the one tat keeps giving us these 'choices.' Stein and Johnson together represent the very imperfect heads of the little rebel alliance.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog