Friday, July 24, 2015

News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 30


As of this writing the Dow is down another 125 points or so.  Don’t worry, though.  Primarily, of course, despite what “the experts” would have you believe, the stock market is not the sector where primary activity takes place.  That’s why it’s called “the secondary market.”  In a rational world, the primary market affects the stock market, not the other way around.

Welcome to Keynesian Backwards Land
Of course, we are not living in a rational world, at least economically speaking.  In Keynesian Looking Glass Land, everything is backwards.  The secondary market is the primary market, and vice versa.  The production of marketable goods and services depends on the money supply instead of the money supply — the medium of exchange — being derived from exchanges involving marketable goods and services.  And so on.

The other reason you shouldn’t be worried (much) is that the government will start pouring more money into the stock market to “reflate” the price level by issuing more debt.  As long as the new money goes to increase prices instead of being invested in new productive capacity or even direct consumption, everything will be fine.  Look how well it’s worked for Greece. . . .

Meanwhile, back in the real world:

• CESJ’s article that appeared last month in Homiletic and Pastoral Review, “Pope Francis and the Just Third Way”, has been translated into Spanish and is currently being edited and formatted.  We plan on releasing it both as a stand-alone piece and in a dual language version.

Soon available in Spanish
• Members of the CESJ core group recently re-discovered the original list of participants in the meeting on April 7, 1984 that led to the formation of CESJ.

• Plans for CESJ’s participation in the World Meeting of Families are moving ahead.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 52 different countries and 46 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Guatemala, and India. The most popular postings this past week were “Halloween Horror Special XIII: Mean Green Mother from Outer Space,” “News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 26,” “News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 28,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” and “Solving the Greek Debt Crisis, V: Presenting the Solution.”

Those are the happenings for this week, at least those that we know about.  If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into the next “issue.”  If you have a short (250-400 word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog — do not send them to us to post for you.  All comments are moderated, so we’ll see it before it goes up.

#30#