Ya its pretty sad...

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Markovich wrote on 08/28/11 at 02:19:59:

This is very simple math. Six German ships could sail back but had to be repaired. That took also about a month.
So these were temporarily not fit for battle.

Markovich wrote on 08/28/11 at 02:19:59:

Agreed. Problem here is that it's not so easy to determine what a victory is as in say chess.
From a tactical point of view - mainly comparing losses - the Germans won. The strategical point of view is different though. The Germans did not achieve their main goal: a freeway to the Atlantic Ocean.

Markovich wrote on 08/28/11 at 02:19:59:

Well, than you haven't read my previous post closely enough. A month after Jutland the Grand Fleet was stronger than before. The High Sea Fleet wasn't. The German admirals realized that their victory wasn't big enough, ie chances to repeat the success only declined. That was a very rational calculation.
The Germans had learned a lesson from Pyrrhus.

Markovich wrote on 08/28/11 at 02:19:59:

Go ahead, show one.
In fact one could argue that the High Sea Fleet actually achieved this. The Grand Fleet never dared to come close to the German coast either.
That was not the German goal though; the goal was to break through the British blockade. That meant control of the North Sea plus breaking the line Shetland Islands-Iceland. Local superiority simply did not mean much.
But yeah, to keep the sailors busy, the High Sea Fleet could have tried som further provocations. Instead the Admirality decided to focus on submarines, which they put (too much) hope on.

Your prediction on Bernanke has become true.

Well, that's an off-topic subject I am very willing to discuss. To present the view of a highly respected General Admiral:

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http://www.battle-of-jutland.com/jutland-long-consequences.htm

It seems like the German victory was not big enough.

Addition: Wikipedia confirms this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jutland#The_outcome

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Bernanke clearly has less options than Jellicoe.

Markovich wrote on 08/25/11 at 13:02:11:

I'd say Bernanke has less options than Jellicoe. The latter did a fine job by containing the High Seas Fleet in its harbours for the rest of the war, thus contributing at least something to winning it. But how can Bernanke contribute to overcoming this crisis?

I'd like to commend to the attention of anyone interested in the ideas of Keynes the excellent The Economics of John Maynard Keynes -The Theory of a Monetary Economy, by Dudley Dillard. This classic work was first published in 1948, was republisned many times, and remains in my view one of the simplest and most faithful explanations of Keynes. Most particularly it is free of neo-classical bastardizations such as IS-LM theory, reliance on market inefficiencies, and the like. The work is out of print but is readily and inexpensively available on the web.

I don't know who that is, other than viewing that clip. In the clip, the supposed bond expert appears to assume that the S&P rating downgrade will cause an increase in the rate of interest on U.S. bonds. But that rate is market-determined, and I believe I'm correct in saying that it hasn't recently risen.

Yeah, I checked, and Treasury yields have fallen to historic lows since the downgrade. Some crisis of confidence! That, by the way, is the market saying that the downgrade was a joke.

Keyes has been widely misunderstood (for a discussion of how, see http://econ.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/8801/DavidsonKeynesMonetary.pdf), but it's rather difficult for me to see how anyone familiar with the history of modern capitalism cannot be, in some important sense, a Keynesian. 

I do understand that if one starts with the assumption that the government is the sole source of possible harm to a supposedly perfectly-functioning private economy, and that the only possible effect of government activity is to impede that functioning, then it avoids contradition to work backward to a great many interesting "facts" which must be true if that assumption is to hold, and to believe in those "facts" as fervently as one believes in the assumption.  And I think this is what a great many people in the academy, not only in the United States, have essentially done.  Certainly a great many ideologues on the right wing have (sometimes I am not sure what separates them from some professional economists).  So you have people claiming that Keynes maligned capitalism, merely because he pointed to the obvious fact that it frequently results in the economy settling in a suboptimal equilibrium (a fact which must be false, of course, if the given assumption is to be true).  I even read recently on a right-wing blog that World War II had nothing to do with the U.S. emerging from the Great Depression, but that this was due to the government "finally getting out of the way" in 1938-1940.  That's really a good example of a "fact" that must be true if anyone's firm belief that the government can only hurt things is to be sustained.

I read a remarkable critique of Keynes by a supposedly expert right-wing commentator (not a professional economist though), insisting that the standard Keynesian remedy for recession "supplants private industry."  How does it do that, for crying out loud, given that both capital and labor are unemployed?

When I look at history I see unambiguous support for everything Keynes said, and equally unabiguous contradiction of the classical, Say's-Law-based analysis that was current before him and now has become current again.  If there ever was a brilliant theoretical construct utterly bereft of factual support, it is the "rational expectations" hypothesis by which classical macro-economics was unfortunately unearthed and set walking, zombie-like, once again.  Rational expections, by the way, was another example of something being assumed true because its truth was required by dearly-held assumptions, in this case about rationality among agents and the supposed perfection of markets (bolstered by some fairly obviously false assumtions about the stationarity of economic time series).