One of the few upsides of the patently silly negative watch announcement for US Treasury bonds was that it elicited colorful and instructive commentary (see our view, along with Mark Thoma’s and Barry Ritholtz’s at the New York Times’ Room for Debate). Some sightings:
Read more...By James K. Boyce, who teaches economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is co-author, with Léonce Ndikumana, of Africa’s Odious Debts: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent, to be published this year by Zed Books.
Tax havens have got a lot of press lately. In Britain, the UK Uncut movement has mounted demonstrations across the country against tax dodging by large corporations and wealthy individuals – making the connection between profits parked abroad and deficits and budget cuts at home.
Read more...By William Hogeland, the author of the narrative histories Declaration and The Whiskey Rebellion and a collection of essays, Inventing American History who blogs at http://www.williamhogeland.com. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0
Hamilton is revered for putting America on sound financial footing, but he couldn’t have done it without federal taxation.
The annual drop-dead moment when Americans must file tax returns or face unpleasant consequences has become an opportunity for the Tea Party, protesting what it sees as crippling taxation and overactive federal government, to rally its supporters. Extending this year’s filing deadline from April 15 to today, April 18, the IRS gave Tea Partiers a big weekend, and all over the country, tax-day events hymned unregulated markets, excoriated federal programs like the health-insurance reform bill, and defended anti-labor governors. Anti-Obama leaders from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump urged the faithful to oppose evils summed up for them in the annual requirement to file federal tax returns. For the Tea Party, “Tax Day” represents all that’s gone wrong with America since the founding.
So as we stand on long lines at the post office hoping to avoid the midnight axe, we might spare a moment to consider the father of federal taxes, Alexander Hamilton.
Read more...The IAEA and Nuclear Regulatory Commission are funded by – and controlled by – the nuclear industry.
Read more...The FDIC has released a document that purports to show how it could have successfully resolved Lehman Brothers using its new Title II resolution authority granted under Dodd Frank.
All I can say is that this is an interesting piece of creative writing. The Lehman counterfactual rests on a series of assumptions, which as I will discuss shortly, look pretty questionable. The most charitable assessment one can make comes from a famous exchange between two technologists. Trygve Reenskaug says: “In theory, practice is simple.” Alexandre Boily asks: “But, is it simple to practice theory?”.
But some longstanding Administration cheerleaders have jumped on the bandwagon, arguing that “pundits” have asserted “without evidence or analysis” that the resolution authority can’t work. That’s pretty amusing, given that Shiela Bair herself concedes, per the Financial Times, that the resolution authority will not work on a major international bank with retail and investment banking operations:
Read more...By Douglas K. Smith, author of On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We In An Age Of Me
The recent federal budget deal eliminated $88 million of HUD funding for non-profit housing counselors. According to this report, these groups use roughly half the funds for foreclosure counseling and half for homebuyer education and qualification. The report says a separate foreclosure counseling effort is also being reduced by $65 million.
Historically, non-profit housing groups focused on low-income folks. But, for many years, people with moderate incomes – nurses, police, teachers and others in what used to pass for the middle class – have also sought help. The core purpose of the non-profits is simple: help people achieve affordable home ownership. This entails educating them on the realities of ownership, helping them shift credit, consumption and savings behavior, advising on how to avoid the worst practices of real estate and mortgage brokers — even at times doing lending. All of which together means, in effect, doing the real work of underwriting that has long since been abandoned by the too big to fail banks who, in their eagerness to increase volumes and squeeze out costs through technology and ‘modeled’ strategies, eliminated the capacity for this careful work.
Most non-profit groups are quite good at what they do. Yet, Obama, Boehner and others have now taken resources away from these groups. These cuts are cruel. They are also mind-numbingly stupid.
Read more...Surprisingly little note has been paid to the discussion of ETFs in three reports issued last week by international regulatory heavyweights, namely, the IMF, the BIS, and the G20 Financial Stability Board.
Make no mistake: the authorities are worried. The BIS report, for instance, has an unflattering comparison on its first page, noting that now ETFs seem to be serving the same function for institutional investors now as structured credit products did in 2002-2003, with dealers pushing the envelope as far as “innovation” is concerned. The Financial Stability Board was more straightforward, flagging its concerns that ETFs could pose a threat to stability in its report title.
The regulators discussed the fact that “ETF” no longer stands for a single product. Most investors probably assume that an ETF is more or less a mutual fund, when in fact Eurobank affiliated groups’ products are typically synthetic (that is, they use derivatives rather than securities. There are even more structural variants, but we’ll stick to these two for the purpose of this post). And too often, the relationship between the ETF and the sponsor is not arm’s length.
Read more...Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times in his weekly op ed discussed the use of humor in protests in Serbia and Egypt, as well as in changing attitudes on teen smoking. Funny that he did not mention UK Uncut, which has staged large scale rallies over the fact that many major corporations pay little in the way of tax when they are showing record profits yet ordinary citizens are expected to pay more in taxes and suffer large reductions in social services. Its US sister is starting to get a foothold, as a video of a protest at Bank of America in San Francisco attests.
And before you defend the current bias in our tax regime toward individual versus corporate taxes, consider this discussion from Richard Wolf in the Guardian (emphasis his):
Read more...Admittedly, this act of rebellion against MERS, the electronic mortgage registry by a Pennsylvania county is comparatively minor, but nevertheless illustrates the efforts various local bodies are taking to assert their authority against a system imposed without regard to state and local real estate laws.
Montgomery County estimates that it has lost $15 million in recording fees due to MERS, which its Recorder of Deeds, Nancy Becker, says has also made a mess of title records. She is working to get the county to cease doing business with banks that make use of MERS, and has launched an effort to get other counties in the state to follow suit.
Read more...Yves here. This post by Bill Black is important because it presents and dissects an ugly example of failure of morality and common sense within what passes for the elite in the US.
Earlier this week, Matthew Yglesias defended the Administration’s distaste for pursuing fraud investigations against financial players:
….the Obama administration felt it was important to restabilize the global financial system. That meant, at the margin, shying away from anxiety-producing fraud prosecutions. And faced with a logistically difficult task, that kind of pressure at the margin seems to have made a huge difference. There simply was no appetite for the kind of intensive work that would have been necessary.
I’m not as persuaded as, say, Jamie Galbraith is that the failure to do this is a key causal element in our economic problems. Indeed, I’d say that if you look at the situation literally, Tim Geithner’s judgment was probably correct.
This line of thinking is a favorite of authoritarians. Democracy, justice, and capitalism are messy affairs. All sort of repressive measures can be justified in the name of stability and safety. And the irony here is that the firms directly responsible for the most disruptive economic event of the last eighty years are to be shielded from the long arm of the law….in the name of stability, the one output they have clearly failed to provide.
Read more...Since Eric Holder seems to be lost somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, I don’t have much hope for Spitzer’s call to action, but it is gratifying to see someone calling out the Administration’s appalling lapses.
Read more...While the Japanese nuclear crisis might upstage the Gulf crisis, it hasn’t gone away.
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