Debunking the Idea that Americans are Overtaxed
One of those cases where a picture is worth a thousand words.
Read more...Yearly Archives: 2013
Fed Argues that Mortgage Abuses are Trade Secrets, Meaning Institutionalized Fraud
When the media discusses how banks have ridden like a steamroller over borrowers and investors, the typical response is a combination of minimization and distancing: that the offense wasn’t such a big deal and that it was a mistake. Recall the PR barrage in the wake of the robosigning scandal: its was “sloppiness,” “paperwork errors”.
Two major government settlements later, this position is looking awfully strained. And the Fed, in stonewalling Elizabeth Warren’s and Elijah Cumming’s efforts to get more information about the Independent Foreclosure Reviews, presented the bad practices as servicer policies, which means that they were deliberate, hence, fraudulent.
Read more...The GFC is Dead, Long Live the GFC!
By David Llewellyn-Smith, founding publisher and former editor-in-chief of The Diplomat magazine, now the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics website. Cross posted from MacroBusiness
PIMCO famously coined the phrase to “the new normal” to capture what it saw was a structural change to global markets in the wake of the GFC. It was to be period defined by lower returns on assets owing to a combination of delevering, deglobalization, and reregulation. Today that looks like fantasy.
Read more...Obama Moves Forward with Cutting Social Security and Medicare as We Lecture Europe Otherwise
It must be really hard to be an Obama defender these days, at least if you are not on a big corporate payroll.
Read more...Links 4/10/13
OCC Releases Embarrassing List of Foreclosure Review Payouts on Eve of Senate Hearings
As much as people who were watching the shutdown of the foreclosure reviews expected the payouts to be grotesquely low, seeing the actual numbers is….revolting.
Read more...BBC on Child Poverty in the US
One of the ongoing frustrations in being (of necessity) a heavy consumer of what passes for media in the US is how insistent and disconnected the official narrative is with conditions on the ground. This BBC documentary gives a much-needed counterpoint.
Read more...Has Walmart Been Engaging in Large Scale Accounting Fraud?
We’ve been poking at Walmart of late because the Bentonville giant appears to have feet of clay. It has been pursuing its relentless cost-cutting strategy to the point where it is damaging its franchise. Bloomberg (and later, the New York Times) described how the retailer had cut headcount to the point where it was having difficulty keeping shelves stocked and checkout lines to a tolerable length. Proving the validity of the Bloomberg account, over 1000 Walmart customers e-mailed the news service, describing their crummy experiences.
But Walmart may have started going off the rails even earlier than the counterproductive staffing cuts suggest.
Read more...Links 4/9/13
Bill Black: The New York Times Thinks Bleeding Cyprus is “Strong Medicine”
Yves here. I’m overdue for a post on the propagandizing against Cyprus. Black describes one element of this barrage.
By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posed from Benzinga
I’m announcing the New York Times award for incompetence in macroeconomic reporting (IMR, pronounced like “screamer”).
Read more...The Damaging Links Between Food, Fuel and Finance: A Growing Threat to Food Security
By Timothy Wise, Director of the Research and Policy Program at the Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University. Cross posted from Triple Crisis
Just when you thought the unhealthy ties between food, fuel, and financial markets couldn’t get more perverse, we get the announcement that Vitol, the world’s largest independent oil trader, is entering the grain-trading business, hiring a team from Viterra, based in Toronto, to run the show. And lest we toss this off as just another corporate deal, Javier Blas in the Financial Times reminds us that Viterra has itself recently been bought by Glencore, perhaps the world’s greatest global commodity speculator.
What could go wrong?
Read more...Why Gary Gensler Should be #2 at Treasury
Last week, Simon Johnson pumped for Gary Gensler, now chairman of the CFTC, to become the Deputy Treasury Secretary. Frankly, it would have been better if Gensler were Treasury secretary (an idea Johnson also promoted), but we are past that point. Obama is serious about selling catfood futures via deficit scaremongering, and he’s tagged budget maven Jack Lew as his perfect front man.
Gensler, along with Sheila Bair, has been one of the few financial services regulators who has stood up to industry demands and scored some wins.
Read more...Michael Hudson: Thatcher’s Legacy of Failed Privatizations
Yves here. Be warned this piece is long but very much worth your time, since it demolishes the myth of the attractiveness of privatizations by looking at its record in England, where it was first undertaken on a widespread basis.
By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is “The Bubble and Beyond.”
As in Chile, privatization in Britain was a victory for Chicago monetarism. This time it was implemented democratically. In fact, voters endorsed Margaret Thatcher’s selloff of public industries so strongly that by 1991, when she was replaced as prime minister by her own party’s John Major, only 35 percent of Britain’s voters supported the Labour Party – half the proportion registered in 1945. The Conservatives sold off public monopolies, used the proceeds to cut taxes, and put the privatized firms on a profit-making basis. Their stock prices rose sharply, making capital gains for investors whose ranks included millions of Britons who had been employees and/or customers of these enterprises.
Yet by 1997 the Conservatives were voted out of office by one of the largest margins in their history. What concerned voters were the results of privatization that Mrs. Thatcher had not warned them about
Read more...Links 4/8/13
Launching Improved PC/Android/Printer Friendly Version of Our Free Ebook on the OCC/Fed Foreclosure Review Fiasco
As readers may know, last Friday we released an ebook based on our investigative series based on testimony from whistleblowers at Bank of America and PNC on the whitewash more formally known as the Independent Foreclosure Reviews. The response from readers was very positive, but some were disappointed that the side-by-side format we chose, which looks good on a Mac, renders badly on PC.
One of the problems of being in blogger low-overhead mode is that you wind up learning by doing, rather than in big corporate mode of being able to do a lot of pre-launch testing and double-checking. So we apologize for any frustration we may have caused to interested readers.
Read more...