Yearly Archives: 2013

Monday DataDive: May’s Consumer Credit, LPS Mortgage Monitor, and JOLTS

By rjs, a rural swamp denizen from Northeast Ohio, and a long-time commenter at Naked Capitalism. Originally published at MarketWatch 666.

In this post, I respond to concerns raised about the consumer credit report in two posts that were included in Naked Capitalism links this week, and find that consumer credit gains in May were not imaginary, and that the seasonal adjustment process did not significantly distort the results; then, in the May Mortgage Monitor from LPS, we’ll see that although delinquencies and foreclosures continue to decrease, the average time that those delinquent remain in their homes without foreclosure and the average length of time that those in foreclosure remain in the process without their homes being seized continues to lengthen. Finally, we’ll look at May job openings and job turnover and find not much has changed since April.

Links 7/14/13

Thug Politics

Evan Williams reports from Athens. He is now based in London as an independent TV journalist and documentary filmmaker working regularly as a reporter for Channel 4’s weekly international current affairs program Unreported World. Here’s his report on Golden Dawn (hat tip, Into the Fire).

Are Private Schools Really Better? Not for Everybody and not Everywhere

By Giuseppe Bertola, Professor of Economics at EDHEC Business School; CEPR Labour Economics Programme Director. Originally published at VoxEU.

School voucher programmes that are meant to allow students who could not otherwise afford private schools to attend them are often hotly, and often emotionally, debated. This column presents findings based on the PISA survey of private education in 72 countries and regions. Evidence suggests that in countries with basic government-provided education, private schools occupy a high-quality market niche. Overall, the education policy menu should include improvement of public education standards as well as vouchers, which policymakers in countries with better public education should not adopt without considering their distributional and efficiency implications. While they can be beneficial, voucher schemes do not enhance overall equality of opportunities and efficiency in countries where governments supply high-quality education.

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As readers may know, in addition to contributing here at Naked Capitalism, Lambert has his own blog, Corrente, which focuses on politics and policy.

Has Snowden Just Misplayed His Cards?

It may seem a bit presumptuous to question how Edward Snowden has conducted his affairs so far. After all, he is still alive and not in the tender care of the so-called American justice system, despite having crossed the surveillance arm of the world’s only superpower and fomenting multiple diplomatic uproars. And the political part of Snowden’s project seems to be going as well as he could have hoped.

But it isn’t clear Snowden has been as adept in his personal affairs of late. His press conference in Russia may have made a tenuous situation worse.

Links 7/13/13

Bill Moyers: Weapons of Mass Distraction

Bill Moyers interviewed Marty Kaplan who heads the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California on how the choice of media stories helps keep Americans politically somnambulant.

Links 7/12/13

ObamaCare Train Wreck on the Twitter: Administration PR Team Launches Google Hangout to Online Derision, Part II

In Part I, we looked at the first Google hangout organized by HHS, with Julie Bataille, Director of CMS’ Office of Communications, and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, Executive Director/CEO and Co-Founder of MomsRising, at #HCgovHangout. We concluded, after categorizing and color coding the twitter stream, that the event was a public relations debacle. Today, we’re going to color code the transcript, helpfully provided, on virtually no notice, by the transcriber: Bataille and Rowe-Finkbeiner in their own words. Let’s break out our color-coding Magic Markers…..

Banks Win Again: CFTC Caves, SEC Opens Door Wide Open to Fraud

I’m going to be brief, in part because the CFTC’s probable demonstration of lack of gumption is still in play, while the SEC’s was expected but nevertheless appalling. But the bottom line is that even though we seem some intermittent signs of the officialdom recognizing that big banks remain a menace to the health and well-being to the general public*, the measures to constrain them continue to be inadequate.

Links 7/11/13