Thursday, May 18, 2023
“The U.S. Should Be a Force for Peace”: Nat’l Security Experts Demand U.S. Push to End Ukraine War | Eisenhower Media Network.
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THE EISENHOWER WARNING: Mad Dogs & Generals in The American Military-Industrial Complex
✓ Conceding the massive, unprecedented U.S. military shipments and other support to Ukraine, it is undeniable that President Joe Biden has at key points treaded cautiously in his stance toward Moscow. He and other U.S. officials have consistently said they do not want to risk direct military conflict with Russia.
" The NDAA now before Congress is a reminder of the prescience exhibited by President Dwight Eisenhower in his January 1967 farewell address. “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” Eisenhower said. “We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.” Eisenhower warned that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
theintercept.com
War Industry Looking Forward to “Multiyear Authority” in
Jeremy Scahill
11 - 14 minutes
"Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently offered some matter-of-fact observations about the immense human suffering and death caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and placed the responsibility for ending the war squarely on Moscow’s shoulders. “There’s one guy that can stop it — and his name is Vladimir Putin,” Milley said. “He needs to stop it.”
But then Milley crossed what he most certainly never imagined to be a tripwire when he said, “And they need to get to the negotiating table.”
The general cited the multiyear death toll of 20 million during World War I — caused, he said, by the failure to negotiate an earlier end to the war — and went on to suggest that it would be better for the war in Ukraine to end soon in negotiation rather than continue on indefinitely.
“There has to be a mutual recognition that military victory is probably — in the true sense of the word — is maybe not achievable through military means, and therefore you have to turn to other means,” Milley said during the November 9 event at the Economic Club of New York. Referring to recent Russian setbacks at the hands of Ukrainian forces and the coming winter, Milley went on: “When there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it. Seize the moment.”
Milley clearly did not think he had said anything controversial. . ."
Link: MesaZona
GLOBAL INFLATION: Why are central bank forecasts so wrong? | Chris Giles in London YESTERDAY [105 comments]
"That challenge is especially tough in an environment such as the present, when the after-effects of the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are hard to predict. El-Erian believes meeting it would prove difficult, particularly for the Fed. Central banks, especially in the US, had made major “one-sided” forecasting errors without acknowledging them. Those errors could be blamed on models “failing to keep up with significant structural change in the economy”, being too late to look at “micro data”, and groupthink.
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“The U.S. Should Be a Force for Peace”: Nat’l Security Experts Demand U.S. Push to End Ukraine War
Why are central bank forecasts so wrong?
Mistakes in forecasting the severity of price pressures lead to soul-searching among rate setters
"The Bank of England is holding a “Festival of Mistakes” this week, celebrating lessons learnt from financial disasters of the distant past.
Some would argue that they, and their counterparts at other central banks, should focus on more recent errors. Advanced economies are experiencing the most acute — and most enduring — outbreak of inflation for a generation. Yet almost all rate-setters failed to spot the degree to which price pressures would ratchet up — and stick around, despite record amounts of monetary and fiscal stimulus.
Most of the Federal Reserve’s rate-setters failed to foresee that inflation would ever rise, and then overestimated the speed of its decline.
Economists at the BoE and the European Central Bank underestimated the scale and persistence of inflation. Across the world, poor forecasts have contributed to central bankers failing to do their main job: maintaining price stability. The failure to spot inflation has not only left central bankers risking financial instability by having to raise rates far faster than usual but threatened the credibility of institutions that rely on trust to steer the economy towards sustainable growth.
Stephen King, senior economic adviser to HSBC, blames their collective failure on rate-setters relying too much on their own capacity to control the public’s expectations of what will happen to prices in the future.
In normal times, the rules that govern companies’ decisions on pricing and workers’ demands for wage rises can be influenced by central bankers’ own inflation targets of around 2 per cent. But what forecasts failed to show was that those rules only hold when inflation is broadly stable.
> Once price pressures soar — and stay high — people begin to believe that “the central bank is now talking nonsense”. Scepticism abounds, and recent inflation readings come to matter more than central banks’ insistence that their policies can quell price pressures.
The reputational hit from their failure to foresee inflation has left central banks having to raise rates aggressively — by up to 75 basis points in single policy votes — to convince investors and the public of their commitment to low inflation. In some quarters, it has also led to soul-searching.
The ECB issued a mea culpa for its underestimate of inflation and has promised to focus more on underlying inflation rather than forecasting models in future. The IMF has also talked openly about its forecasting “misjudgments” — although this candour did not appear in any of its flagship reports. The BoE has been more combative, arguing that its mistakes owed little to errors in how it devises its forecasts and were instead the result of big shocks such as the war in Ukraine, which it could not have predicted.
While other organisations have been less defensive, economists elsewhere caution that the public should focus less on whether or not projections turn out to be correct. That, they argue, is impossible and the public should focus more on whether the projections say something insightful about the economy at this point in time.
Richard Hughes, who heads the UK’s independent fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, acknowledged the failure to spot the build-up of price pressures was — along with underestimating the decline in productivity growth since the global financial crisis — one of “two big macro forecasting errors” made in recent decades.
However, forecasts remained, he said, “the best understanding of the future, conditional on your knowledge of the present”. He highlighted the similarity between these predictions and financial market pricing, which also moves as the facts change. “[Markets are] ‘reacting to news’, while [we] ‘got it wrong’,” Hughes said.
Alexandra Dimitrijevic, global head of research and development at Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agency, said the purpose of forecasts was not to get the numbers right to the last decimal point but “to look at the narrative, the direction and the risks”.
“By definition a forecast is never right. The question is whether it is useful,” added Dimitrijevic. Clare Lombardelli, the new chief economist at the OECD, noted that dire predictions of a bleak winter across Europe were based on assumptions for the weather that, by luck, was warmer than normal — meaning gas storage, and therefore economic growth, held up.
Daniel Leigh, who heads the team that produces the IMF’s World Economic Outlook — which includes projections for each of the fund’s 192 member countries — said that failing to predict major economic trends did not mean forecasters were clueless. Even if they turned out to be incorrect, officials and ministers still found the fund’s projections useful, he said, because they gave a sense of scale and explained the likely ripple effects of global trends.
“The priority is to give decision makers a sense of what to expect, but also the risks, so that they can take the steps needed,” said Leigh.
However, others are less sympathetic. Mohamed El-Erian, president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, and an adviser to Allianz, has said the Federal Reserve’s original forecast that high inflation would be “transitory” was “one of the worst calls in decades”.
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