[Yves asked me to sticky this — lambert]
Although it’s probably sensible to expect a public agency to resist providing information in response to a Freedom of Information Act filing, the lengths to which CalPERS has gone to mislead and obfuscate in trying to thwart my efforts is quite remarkable, particularly since some of the moves CalPERS staff took are in violation of CalPERS’ own procedures.
Read more...Martha R wrote to tell me that a serious effort is underway in Vermont to launch a state bank.
Read more...Some savvy investors were warning the single family home rental market was overheated nearly a year ago. Now it looks like more and more are realizing that party is over.
Read more...Are austerity-promoting Democrats stupid or evil?
Read more...I was hacked yesterday.
On the scale of hacks, it was simultaneously trivial but meant to intimidate. Or else hugely inept.
Read more...Yves here. I’m a huge fan of Jamie Galbraith’s book The Predator State. Aaron Swartz wrote a good recap. Pilkington, who is also keen about the book, uses it to raise a different set of issues: how it reveals the deep-seated impediments to having well-informed public discussions about economic issues.
Read more...Yves here. I’ve written from time to time how openly partisan the Congressional Budget Office is, not in the traditional sense of favoring one party over the other, but as serving as an key enforcer of neoliberal ideology. For instance, its projections of government debt to GDP ratios were highly misleading by virtue of failing to net out financial assets. And after being called out for that error in paper, what did the CBO do? Make it even harder to find the data to prove the magnitude of their misdirection.
Read more...Bloomberg has an intriguing story about a bit of lobbying the big dealer banks are engaged in via a group called the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, which represents 15 out of the total of 22 primary dealers (a primary dealer, among other things, gets to bid for its own account at Treasury bond auctions). Of course, the object of their efforts is to improve their profitability, here by putting parties they regard as competitors at more of a disadvantage.
Read more...Ryan Grim and Mark Gongloff of Huffington Post described one of the key mechanisms by which CEO pay has risen to stratospheric levels: cronyism and backscratching among board members, many of whom are also CEOs. And that’s not the only one that gets less attention than is warranted.
Read more...I think of globalisation as a light which shines brighter and brighter on a few people, and the rest are in darkness, wiped out
Read more...To fix or to float, that is the question.
Read more...The Sochi Olympics were the great success Russia hoped for.
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