Yearly Archives: 2013

Links 3/12/13

FDIC Hides “Scores” of Bank Settlements Since 2007

The FDIC has been doing banks a big favor by agreeing not to publish the fact that they’d engaged in sufficiently wayward behavior for the agency to threaten regulatory action and negotiate a settlement. The Los Angeles Times unearthed this practice via a Freedom of Information Act request:

China’s Exploding Debt

By C.P. Chandrasekhar, Professor of Economics, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Cross posted from Triple Crisis

If the international media are to be believed the world, still struggling with recession, is faced with a potential new threat emanating from China. Underlying that threat is a rapid rise in credit provided by a “shadow banking” sector to developers in an increasingly fragile property market.

Did Intrade Do an MF Global?

By Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics, Barnard College, Columbia University. Cross posted from his blog

Links 3/11/13

Beppe Grillo on the Money System: Stand-up show, 1998

By lambert strether, who blogs at Corrente.

The following YouTube of Grillo’s 1998 show, in Italian, is captioned in English by d574 and German — Hi Angela! [waves] — by johndoe3k5. I turned the English captions into a complete transcript, tweaking the prose occasionally, and adding some annotations.

Lynn Parramore: Everything You’ve Been Told About Personal Finance Is Dead Wrong — Here’s the Truth

By Lynn Parramore, senior editor at Alternet. Originally published at Alternet.

Can’t save enough? Worried about your retirement? The personal finance industry is ready to prey on you.

Yes, Virginia, HFT and Liquidity are Not All They Are Cracked Up to Be

You may have seen a big outbreak in the academic literature and business media of defenses of liquidity for liquidity’s sake, evidently prompted by increased interest in and in the EU, implementation of transaction taxes as a way to tame speculation and secondarily raise revenues.

Gas and Stock Prices: Tied Together By Speculators?

If you are old enough to remember the 1970s, the idea that gasoline and stock prices would be correlated seems bizarre.

Links 3/10/13

Work Is The Force That Gives Us Meaning

Tell the folks back home this is the promised land callin’

And the poor boy’s on the line –Chuck Berry, Promised Land

By Lambert Strether, who blogs at Corrente. Portions of this piece were originally published at Corrente.

Every so often Yves gets a request from a reader who — not to be unkind — thinks she’s Dear Abby and asks for advice. Lately people have been asking for what starts out sounding like career advice but ends up more like “What am I to do?” (given that population has increased by 13 million since 2007 and jobs have decreased by 3.2 million that’s not such an easy question to answer).

Meet David S. Cohen of Treasury and Stuart Levey of HSBC – Or Is It the Other Way Around?

By Nicholas Levis of OWS Alt-Banking, which originally published this piece.

Let us take a look at the careers of two men who live in the incestuous world that C. Wright Mills, in his classic and still-contemporary 1956 study, called The Power Elite. As Mills wrote and many others since have found, the really key people at the rarified heights of American power and policy tend to rise up from a narrow group of universities, enter the same country clubs (like the Council on Foreign Relations), and in their careers revolve seamlessly between high positions in the “private” and “public” sectors. They serve the needs of the far-less-than-one-percent who effectively own both sectors; in the course of which they usually make themselves stinking rich (in those cases when they weren’t already born that way). If you want to see a great film about these meritocrats (a term originally coined ironically in the 1950s by UK political scientist Michael Young), we recommend Lewis Lapham’s terrific documentary musical, “The American Ruling Class” (2005), which also foresaw the nascent rebellion of the 99%.

Now let us meet David S. Cohen of the US Treasury Department and Stuart Levey of HSBC – or is it the other way around?

Links 3/9/13

The BLS Jobs Report Covering February 2013: A Solid Seasonal Rebound

By Hugh, who is a long-time commenter at Naked Capitalism. Originally published at Corrente. A complete archive of Hugh’s reports can be found here.

The short form: Trendline, 236,000 jobs were added in February and the official unemployment rate fell to 7.7%. Actual jobs increased 959,000 but this followed a loss of 2.840 million last month. Similarly, employment rose 614,000 this month against a 1.446 million loss last month. However, notably the size of the labor force did not increase. The current rebuild and expansion of jobs should continue for the next two to three months. If this growth is choked off by the sequester or austerity, the consequences will extend through the rest of the year. My recalculated rate of unemployment remains high and declined only slightly to 12.5%. Hours increased this month which is good but wage gains taking inflation into account remain largely flat.