The enormous number of people who work only part-time for economic reasons is one the tragedies of the unemployment crisis in this country. And that started before the financial crisis.
Read more...If kleptocracy is a disease, Tunisia is in Stage 4. Its ruling family that controlled an impressive swathe of the economy. But what is sobering about the Tunisian case study is that an overthrow of the government has done little to reverse the concentration of wealth and power. Is that because Tunisia was so far gone, or is this native to kleptocracy, that once it becomes established, it is difficult to extirpate?
Read more...It’s easy to be cynical about the state of bank regulations, since the regulators themselves have for the most part been badly captured by the industry. So it’s important to give them credit when they take a meaningful step in the right direction.
Read more...I remember the days when people were worried about using the Internet for purchases because they weren’t convinced their credit card information would be transmitted securely. It now turns out that a version of Open SSL that has been in production for two years, and on which https and other services like instant messaging, e-mail, and other web applications use has a gaping security hole called the Heartbleed bug.
Read more...Susan Beck at American Lawyer (hat tip Abigail Field) has managed to get an inside view of what was going on at the SEC when it launched its case against Goldman and a Goldman vice president, Fabrice Tourre, over a Goldman CDO called Abacus that went spectacularly bad. So was the SEC corrupt or merely incompetent?
Read more...Michael Hudson gives an update on the West’s resource grab in the Ukraine
Read more...40 central banks have invested in yuan. Should the US be worried?
Read more...Private equity firms have been hoovering up houses all over the US to convert into rentals. But they were active in the New York City rental market before their big buying spree, and that experience gives a window on how they are likely to behave as landlords.
Read more...Today, two stories broke on the SEC’s activities in private equity, one in Bloomberg, another in Reuters, and they look to be based on authorized leaks. Together, they suggest that the SEC, which obtained new oversight authority for private equity firms under Dodd Frank, has been turning over rocks and found so many creepy-crawlies that even the normally complacent agency felt compelled to take notice.
Read more...By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil. Originally published at Fixing the Economists I’ve been asking myself that question rather a lot in the past two weeks. This is because I have had two separate commissions for pieces of writing that require […]
Read more...While Congress cowers before multinationals’ lobbyists and moves to re-enact loopholes that let corporations like GE and Apple hide their income from the IRS, the Maine Legislature decided it had had enough.
Read more...How absurd are the goals of the pension funds that invest in private equity? Plenty absurd, it turns out.
Read more...In case you missed it, on Wednesday the US Trade Representative Michael Froman attacked Japan in front of Congress for undermining the TransPacific Partnership via refusing to give much ground on protection of its agricultural sector. So how are the Japanese responding to this US sniping?
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