We were surprised and pleased when a reporter from the Reuters publication peHUB, Chris Witkowsky, contacted us a couple of days ago about the suit we had filed against CalPERS, the California Public Employees Retirement Systems, over their refusal to provide us with information they had given to three Oxford academics who had used that data as the basis for a recently-published paper.
Read more...Earlier this week, the Nikkei Asian Review published At odds with US, Japan reaches out to other TPP partners. The title would lead you to believe Japan is working with other countries to strengthen opposition to the toxic, mislabeled trade deal known as the TransPacific Partnership.
The text of the article suggests otherwise, that Japan’s prime minister Abe will feel compelled to offer some concessions when Obama visits next month. On the surface, that would represent a significant shift.
Read more...Yves here. A tongue-in-cheek article in the Financial Times, Putin putting Europe in its place, written from Putin’s viewpoint, concluded:
Read more...“As to your plans for emergency economic aid for Ukraine, this is an excellent plan. They could use the money and I’d rather not shell out myself. Incidentally, to save time why not make the cheques payable to Gazprom?”
Why Obama’s budget is yet another economic policy failure.
Read more...Whenever a scandal of sufficient magnitude arises at a bank, it’s standard practice to hire an “independent” third party to conduct an investigation and give a report to senior management and the board. But now even bank friendly regulators are starting to suspect that banks are hiring attorneys do to this work, not to come clean, but to facilitate a cover-up.
Read more...Yves here. The writing is delicious. But one thing that is frustrating (and of course quite deliberate) in reading the Western media account of the standoff in Ukraine is that they airbrush out how the West stoked this conflict and can hardly be surprised that Putin finally felt compelled to respond.
Read more...Yves here. Although Keen’s use of the Godzilla metaphor is fun, the unvarnished facts he presents are plenty alarming. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney is actually gleeful at the prospect that England’s banking sector might grow to be as large relative to its economy as Iceland’s and Cyprus’ on the eve of their busts. But even worse, Carney’s enthusiasm for a banking sector that continues with its cancerous (or as Keen would have it, monstrous) growth gives license to bank lobbyists in the US and Europe to press for high rates of growth in their finance sectors so as to defend their national champions.
Read more...One thing we’ve discussed repeatedly is that the activities of large banks, as presently constituted, are purely extractive. And to add insult to injury, GDP calculations exaggerate what in the way of value they arguably do add.
Read more...Yves here. Among other things, this post shows what passes for analysis among elite technocrats.
Read more...Yves here. It’s remarkable how much of London has turned into a ghost town thanks to the influx of serious foreign money. When I worked for a few months in London, in 1984, it was Mayfair that was the destination for Saudi money, and it clearly had far too little in the way of street […]
Read more...Yves here. This post does a nice job, if unintentionally, of showing the limits of using economics as the lens for viewing well-established social norms and biological urges.
Read more...In late February, Bloomberg stated that the SEC is “considering” forgiving decades of private equity firms acting as unregistered broker-dealers and possibly legalizing the practice going forward. In case you think this is not a big deal, as we explain later in the post, the SEC is in fact vigilant about enforcing these regulations, so this would be an unprecedented waiver of liability. But richer-than-Croesus private equity firms are special, right?
Read more...Yves here. Teach for America is a classic example of a ploy used by wealthy right-wing interests: find reputable, well-liked left-leaning organizations that are having financial troubles, rescue them, and turn their agenda to one more to their new patrons’ liking.
Read more...Yves here. Another entry in the “What could go wrong?” category.
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