We’re now in the process of clearing up an interesting blogoshere miscommunication. Paul Krugman made a gracious reply to a remark in Links on a post of his on OccupyWallStreet that I was very keen about (Krugman gets it) and a related New York Times op ed that I liked save one paragraph which rubbed me the wrong way:
Read more...Dave Dayen saw this one coming. When Kamala Harris said she was not willing to participate in the so called “50 state” attorney general mortgage negotiations, he recognized Harris’ refusal to join the New York attorney general Schneiderman’s group as a bad sign. Note that the state of the talks is persistently misreported in the MSM as being only Schneiderman, when Delaware, Massachusetts, Kentucky, Nevada, and Minnesota are also out of the talks.
It is a safe bet that the Democratic party has been muscling Harris since her defection last week.
Read more...Despite the efforts of some liberal pundits and organizers (and by extension, the Democratic party hackocracy) to lay claim to OccupyWallStreet, the nascent movement is having none of it. Participants are critical of the President’s bank-coddling ways and Obama gave a remarkably bald-face confirmation of their dim views.
As Dave Dayen recounts, Obama was cornered into explaining why his Administration has been soft of bank malfeasance. His defense amounted to “They’re savvy businessmen”: “Banks are in the business of making money, and they find loopholes.”
Read more...By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland
Store clerk in transsexual shop: “Oh, look who’s back… are you going to buy something this time, or are you just curious?”
Tobias Funke: “Well, I guess you could say that I’m buy-curious!”
– Tobias Funke, Arrested Development
Mitch Hurwitz, the creator of Arrested Development – possibly the best comedy show ever produced for television – once said that the funniest things about people are their blind spots. We all possess these psychological blind spots and yet we usually have no idea. Caught up in our own little worlds we see or hear one thing while just about everyone else sees or hears something else. Just like poor, confused Tobias Funke – except, hopefully, in most instances a little less extreme.
Read more...One of the things that has been intriguing about the handwringing among European policy-makers has been the general refusal to consider the idea that one of the countries being wrung dry by doomed-to-fail austerity programs might just pack up and quit the Eurozone. The assumptions have been three fold. One is a knee-jerk assumption that the costs of exiting are prohibitive (this argument comes from Serious Economists in Europe, but they never compare it to the hard costs of austerity and the less readily measured but no less real cost of loss of sovereignity). Second is that an exit would come via a country being expelled, since the Eurozone treaties prohibit unilateral departure. Third is that it would be too much of an operational mess to revive a defunct currency.
A very good piece by Floyd Norris in the New York Times fills this gap by describing that Greece has the motivation and the means to leave.
Read more...We were far from alone in criticizing the servicer consent orders issued earlier this year. They were yet another whitewash masquerading as regulatory action, orchestrated by the banking industry toady, the OCC. As we wrote:
Read more...The current end run is apparently led by the Ministry of Bank Boosterism more generally known as the OCC and comes via consent decrees that were issued Wednesday (we’ve made that inference given the fact that John Walsh of the OCC presented the findings of the so-called Foreclosure Task Force, an 8 week son-of-stress-test exercise designed to give the banks a pretty clean bill of health, as well as media reports that the OCC was not participating in the joint state-Federal settlement effort).
This initiative is regulatory theater, a new variant of the ongoing coddle the banks strategy. It has become a bit more difficult for the officialdom to finesse that, given the extent and visibility of bank abuses. Accordingly, the final consent decrees are more sternly worded and more detailed than the drafts we saw last week, and also talk about imposing fines. But reading them reveals that there is much less here than meets the eye.
Pew Research conducted a large scale survey of veterans (divided into pre and post 9/11) and civilians on their attitudes toward the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. While there have been a number of news reports on the results, they are actually somewhat confusing because the findings in the data aren’t easily boiled down to snappy summaries.
For instance, the headline of this post, which is similar to typical MSM headlines, is technically accurate but somewhat obscures the survey results.
Read more...By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.
Journalist Amy Goodman arrested at the 2008 Republican National Convention
What do the people at #OccupyWallStreet actually want? What are their demands? For many people, this is THE question.
So let me answer it. What they want… is to do exactly what they are doing.
Read more...My last pop at New Zealand’s regulatory set-up mentioned New Image International, the company that uses multi-level marketing techniques to sell Colostrum as a miracle cure. The New Image product pitch is a generic hoax, as explained last time out:
…major warning signs include:
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By Gal Noir, an undercover investigator of hijacked economic truths and an occasional blogger at New Economic Perspectives
In his Congressional testimony on October 4th, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke uncharacteristically praised the benefits of fiscal policy, calling it “of critical importance” and conveying concerns with the looming deficit reductions. He cautioned: “an important objective is to avoid fiscal actions that could impede the ongoing economic recovery.”
Many economists expressed worry that such advocacy of fiscal policy will erode America’s (already) wavering confidence in the Fed and will further weaken their support for austerity measures. More troubling still, the economists said, was the possibility that the public may follow suit and start demanding from Congress bolder government action on the jobs front.
A few dissenting scholars thought that it was high time for Bernanke to put his money where his mouth was, so to speak.
Read more...Finra (the successor to the NASD plus the enforcement arm of the NYSE) suffered a major blow in a ruling on what should have been a routine matter: an enforcement action against a penny stock operator, Fiero Brothers. In 2000, the NASD charged Fiero with breaking federal fraud laws. Not only did the then NASD expel Fiero and its owner John Fiero from the organization, but it also fined it $1 million. John Fiero refused to pay, and Finra went to court to collect the money.
The ruling is astonishing and guts one of Finra’s disciplinary tools.
Read more...I was off the grid for a bit and am very much saddened to read this news. I came to be a Jobs fan via the NeXT computer, which was one of his best creations.
Read more...David Cameron displayed an astonishing lack of understanding of the banking sector in his interview with Sarah Montague on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Tuesday morning (as I’m afraid did Sarah, given her blinkered obsession with “bonuses”).
If Cameron’s stumbling performance was due to ignorance, then it’s simply inexcusable. If it’s down to him attempting to gloss over a situation he knows to be far worse than he claims, then it’s sinister.
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