Economics of Contempt and I are typically at loggerheads on financial services industry policy matters (he’s far too positive about the bank reform measures for my taste, even though his technical explanations are always instructive). But he had an inspired idea today:
Read more...I think Obama should seriously consider Sheila Bair for the CFPB job….
We’ve taken aim repeatedly at Tom Miller’s obvious soft touch toward banks in his role as lead negotiator in the 50 state attorney generals negotiation over foreclosure abuses. Some of his questionable actions:
Read more...Promising to put people in jail, then quickly reversing himself
Working closely with the bank-friendly Treasury Department when the state and Federal legal issues are very different, rendering the rationale for cooperation suspect…..
PhD epidemiologist points out dangers from radiation, but says that we should put our energy into demanding a saner energy policy … so it doesn’t happen again.
Read more...I missed this extraordinary scene. When the aspiring politician Kit Fraser stripped to his boxer shorts outside RBS’s annual shareholder meeting last Tuesday, I was already inside the meeting, listening to chairman Sir Philip Hampton defend the bank from shareholder allegations that he had lost the plot on pay.
Read more...I trust readers don’t mind that we are a bit heavier than usual on the political-related postings tonight, since this is a slow news week. But that may be useful, given that the big new subtexts at the INET Conference were the importance of “political economy” (three years ago, that expression was seen as having a decidedly Marxist color to it) and the rising wealth and power of the top 1%.
One nagging question is how the increased concentration of income and wealth in the top strata came to pass. The story that this group and their hangers-on would have us believe is that it is all the result of merit and hard work. Two offerings raise doubts about that line of argument.
Read more...The question of centralization versus decentralization might be even more important than fossil fuels versus nuclear versus alternative energy …
Read more...The immediate concern in the wake of the Citizens United decision was that corporate funding would play such a dominant role in election campaigns as to trounce all other interest groups (as if that hadn’t already occurred in large measure).
But a story in The Nation, “Big Brothers: Thought Control at Koch,” by Mark Ames and Mike Elk points to a second channel of influence: major employers pressuring their staff to vote for the company’s pet candidates.
Read more...By David Apgar, the Director of ApgarPartners LLC, a new business that applies assumption-based metrics to the performance evaluation problems of development organizations, individual corporate executives, and emerging-markets investors, and author of Risk Intelligence (Harvard Business School Press 2006) and Relevance: Hitting Your Goals by Knowing What Matters (Jossey-Bass 2008). He blogs at WhatMatters.
It’s tempting to look for a little consolation on the anniversary of the oil spill from BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig in the idea that our worst industrial accidents are unpredictable and not the result of negligence. The only trouble is that the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was predictable.
Read more...By Satyajit Das, the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (Forthcoming September 2011) and Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2006 and 2010)
John Quiggin (2010) Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us; Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford
R. Christopher Whalen (2011) Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream, John Wiley, New Jersey
Michael E. Lewitt (2010) The Death of Capital: How Creative Policy Can Restore Policy, John Wiley, New Jersey
“Mortmain”, derived from medieval French meaning “dead hand”, refers to legal ownership of property in perpetuity. Jurisprudence, to varying degrees, has sought to prohibit the control of property by the “dead hand”. Unfortunately, economic thinking seems to be controlled by dead economists or as John Quiggin, himself an economist, argues – “living dead” economists.
Read more...Yes, I know I dissed the S&P report as fundamentally wrongheaded, but as we will discuss shortly, it contained some interesting commentary on the US financial sector that has gotten perilously little notice.
But I’d first like to address the way the media and some blogosphere commentators have hopelessly muddied the issues on the downgrade scaremongering. One is the “we depend on foreigners to fund our budget deficit” hogwash. As Michael Pettis pointed out, the idea that the US is funding its federal deficit from foreigners is a widespread misconstruction.
Read more...The urban legend that Eskimos the Inuit have more words for snow than the rest of us nevertheless has intuitive appeal. A population might indeed develop a richer vocabulary to describe phenomena its members consider to be important. Consider how oenophiles make a show of describing the flavor of wines in ways that elude mere mortals. And it turns out the Sami, the natives inhabiting the arctic zones of the Scandinavian countries, do have hundreds of words for snow.
In keeping with underlying logic of the Eskimo snow words theory, as propaganda has become a more prevalent part of our culture, the terminology to describe it has also grown.
Read more...By Thomas Ferguson, Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is the author of many books and articles, including Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0
This just in: big oil companies and government ministers had discussions one year before invasion.
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