Yearly Archives: 2011

Satyajit Das: Economic Uppers & Downers

By Satyajit Das, the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (Forthcoming in Q3 2011) and Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2006 and 2010)

Quantitative easing (“QE”) is the currently fashionable form of voodoo economics favoured by policymakers in the US.

QE, loosely “printing money”, entails central banks buying government bonds, which are held on the central bank’s balance sheet to inject money into the banking system thatcan be exchanged by banks for higher return assets, such as loans to clients. The purchases also increase the price of governments bonds, reducing interest rates.

Advocates of QE believe that it will lower interest rates promoting expenditure, growth, reduce unemployment and increase the supply of credit to underpin a strong economic recovery. In reality, QE is primarily directed at boosting asset values, subsidising banks, weakening the currency, helping the government finance its deficits and creating inflation.

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Our Polarized and Money-Driven Congress: Created Over 25 Years By Republicans (and Quickly Imitated by Democrats)

Political scientist Tom Ferguson prepared a short but important paper for the INET conference last weekend on how Congress got to be as polarized as it is today. His answer: it was redesigned quite deliberately by conservative Republican followers of Newt Gingrich starting in the mid 1980s and their methods were copied by the Democrats. Their changes resulted in firmer control by leadership (ie, less autonomy of individual Congressmen) and much greater importance of fundraising (which increased the power of corporate interests).

The extent of corruption may surprise even jaundiced readers.

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William Black: Why aren’t the honest bankers demanding prosecutions of their dishonest rivals?

This is the second column in a series responding to Stephen Moore’s central assaults on regulation and the prosecution of the elite white-collar criminals who cause our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. Last week’s column addressed his claim in a recent Wall Street Journal column that all government employees, including the regulatory cops on the beat, are “takers” destroying America.

This column addresses Moore’s even more vehement criticism of efforts to prosecute elite white-collar criminals in an earlier column decrying the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s criminal provisions: “White-Collar Witch Hunt: Why do Republicans so easily accept Neobolshevism as a cost of doing business?” [American Spectator September 2005] This column illustrates one of the reasons why elite criminals are able to loot “their” banks with impunity – they have a lobby of exceptionally influential shills.

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Satyajit Das: Voodoo Economics Redux

n the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, an economics teacher, played by Ben Stein, launches into an improvised soliloquy: “… Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. “Voodoo” economics.”

In the late twentieth century, US President Ronald Reagan discovered voodoo economics. In framing policy responses to the global financial crisis, central bankers and governments have increasingly embraced more exotic forms of voodoo.

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Gas From Fracking More Damaging to Climate Than Coal?

I’m pretty amazed that no one looked into the greenhouse gas impact of fracking until now. One of the big rationales for fracking, which is already controversial due to reports of damage to aquifers, is that it was abundant in North America and also produces comparatively little in the way of carbon emissions.

The problem, per a study soon to be published by Cornell University, is fracking results in the release of methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases, apparently enough to undercut the claims that it is relatively “clean”.

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Conflicted JP Morgan Next up for a Reputation Hit

Louise Story at the NYT has this: In the summer of 2007, as the first tremors of the coming financial crisis were being felt on Wall Street, top executives of JPMorgan Chase were raising red flags about a troubled investment vehicle called Sigma, which was based in London. But the bank chose not to move […]

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Evil Site Scrapers are Back!

Dealing with sites that rip off Naked Capitalism content feels like dealing with a persistent infestation: you go an exterminate a few and they just keep coming back. Per my last comment on this sorry matter in December:

Another thing I have too often been slow to address is people stealing my work. The last time I found I had a site scraper (meaning someone who rips off entire posts, no permission, and often no atttribution) it took me over half a year to get around to it, and readers were enormously helpful in getting the offender to cease.

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