In a mere four months, the SEC has gone from calling out widespread abuses in the private equity industry to not just walking back its detailed criticisms, but actually enabling a coverup.
Read more...A corrosive development is the ease with which lenders steal extract income which is not properly theirs from borrowers through what is at best incompetence and in far too many cases is fraud. This pattern has repeats itself again and again: in mortgage servicing, with debt collection, and more and more with student loan servicing.
Yves here. It’s hardly uncommon for big international pow-wows like the G20 to produce grand-sounding statements that when read carefully call for unthreatening, which usually means inconsequential, next steps. But this G20 just past was revealing, in a bad way, about the state of international political economy.
Read more...If you had any doubt the US economy had been rearchitected to favor the haves versus the have-lesses, this chart by Pavlina Tcherneva should settle it. Justin Wolfers, hardly a raging liberal, just tweeted:
Read more...Yves here. In the wake of increased debates over rising inequality, particularly income inequality, many economists take the point of view that high levels of disparity are a state of nature. But that’s a terribly uninformed way to look at the question. Economies of any complexity are not natural; even modern capitalism comes in many forms. This post looks at developing economies that have done a better job of dampening inequality to see what they have in common.
Read more...The housing market is looking wobbly now that big money investors are pulling back. But anyone who was paying attention should not be surprised.
Read more...Yves here. Please note that Don’t Start from Here: We Need a Banking Revolution has been released in the UK and was scheduled for publication in the US in early September but apparently is not yet for sale. I hope readers will keep an eye out for it, because it appears to fill a void, that of describing in high-level accurate terms why the banking system no longer works for society at large, how post-crisis banking reforms missed the mark, and what measures need to be put in place.
Read more...Memo to Chris Christie: when you are in a hole, quit digging.
Read more...Executive rentiers and their media lackeys are invoking the canard that they can’t find decent investment opportunities. The truth is that they’ve exhausted the first and second lines of value extraction, that of labor-squeezing and disinvestment, and aren’t prepared to accept the lower but still attractive returns of taking real economy risks.
Read more...A remarkable (in a bad way) New York Times op-ed shows that Roger Cohen is so deep in the banksters’ pockets that he cannot see that he is a leader in the movement to ensure that no bankster will ever “pay for his sins.”
Read more...The Fed-induced emerging markets party is bound to come to an end. How bad will the hangover be?
Read more...Fall is upon us, which means the NC annual fundraiser will be starting soon!
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