Michael Hudson: U-V: Usury to Vested Interests
Parts U-V in the Insider’s Economic Dictionary
Read more...Author Archives: Yves Smith
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel Forced Into Historic Runoff
This Real News Network interview describes why the coming mayoral runoff in Chicago is in many ways a referendum on failed neoliberal policies, such as privatizing schools. The very fact that this race is taking place at all reveals an unexpectedly large degree of popular discontent with misrule by what passes for our elites
Read more...Links 2/27/15
John Helmer: What is Russia’s Answer to Greece’s Plan B? Smile, Blow the Whistle, Pass the Red Card
Helmer’s post confirms our view that Russia will not rescue Greece, and for many of the same reasons that we’ve stated.
Read more...A Grassroots Win: FCC Approves Net Neutrality
Thanks to those Naked Capitalism readers who supported, through your petition signatures, e-mails, calls, and donations, the push to preserve net neutrality and keep the major telecom and cable incumbents from giving preferential access to content providers with the financial heft to pay for it. Over time, that practice would be certain to drive smaller sites like ours into a death spiral of lower attractiveness, lower visibility, and lower traffic.
Read more...How Gaza’s Natural Gas Became the Epicenter of an International Power Struggle
Guess what? Almost all the current wars, uprisings, and other conflicts in the Middle East are connected by a single thread, which is also a threat: these conflicts are part of an increasingly frenzied competition to find, extract, and market fossil fuels whose future consumption is guaranteed to lead to a set of cataclysmic environmental crises.
Read more...The Cost of Delaying Action to Stem Climate Change
The cost of delaying climate action has been studied extensively. A one-decade delay in addressing climate change would lead to about a 40% increase in the net present value cost of addressing climate change.
Read more...Links 2/26/15
The Alternative in Greece
Let us begin with what should be indisputable: the Eurogroup agreement that the Greek government was dragged into on Friday amounts to a headlong retreat.
Read more...The School Closure Playbook – How Billionaires Exploit Poor Children in Chicago
A hard-hitting overview of who is behind the taxpayer looting program known as “corporate school reform” and the mechanics of how it operates.
Read more...Wolf Richter: What the Heck Has Suddenly Hit American Consumers?
Consumer confidence just hit an airpocket. Is this turbulence or a harbinger of things to come?
Read more...Links 2/25/15
Yellen Defies Congress, Defends Greenspanian General Counsel Scott Alvarez After Elizabeth Warren Grilling
Elizabeth Warren subjected Fed chairman Janet Yellen to one of her fiercest interrogations ever in Congressional hearings yesterday.
Read more...ECB and IMF to Greece: No Escaping the Austerity Hairshirt
We warned readers who are still keen to take the Syriza “Hope is coming” slogan as something more promising that a subconscious echo of the Obama 2008 “Hope and change” campaign, that the memo that Greece signed with the Eurogroup last week did not represent a victory or a lessening of austerity. The comments by the ECB and the IMF on the reform list from Greece submitted Monday confirmed our earlier readings, that austerity is still very much on in Greece.
Read more...Ilargi: How Far Is It From Kiev To Athens?
A detailed analysis of why the unbelievably uncreditworthy Kiev government is getting big IMF loans.
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