Yves here. America hates taking lessons from other countries, but Chile looks about to embark on tackling a student debt/overpriced educational system mess that makes ours pale by comparison. So it will be instructive to see how this reform effort takes shape.
Read more...A Blackstone deal in the runup to the financial crisis, its acquisition of Equity Office Properties Trust from Sam Zell in early 2007 was recognized at the time as a sign of a market peak. Is history about to repeat itself with Blackstone’s rental securitization?
Read more...Yves here. It’s obvious that student debt is a train wreck. Yet the severity of this problem is barely acknowledged as a problem among policy classes. Is that because the looting must continue? But even if so, why do colleges and universities have such privileged status?
Read more...Beware of conservatives arguing from a moral position, at least when it comes to proposals that they claim will help the poor, like open borders.
Read more...You are supporting the habits of the rich in more ways than you know, including their love of water views.
Read more...The Financial Times tell us gives us another sighting in the all-too-familiar general story of “the Brave New World is here, and then some.”
Read more...ves here. Having lived through some of these developments, I concur with Krippner’s observation that financial deregulation was well underway prior to the Reagan era and the most important driver was interest rate volatility, which wreaked havoc with interest rate caps and other policies that made sense only if inflation stayed within a limited and not all that high range. But similar deregulatory forces were underway in the securities industry side as well.
Read more...So why haven’t we said more about the Skunk Party?
Read more...Michael Hudson discusses austerity in Ireland, how US economic policy has affected Ireland, Europe and the rest of the world as well as how the various political parties in Ireland have mishandled the economic crisis.
Read more...America’s income inequality has grown so wide that the current “recovery” is driven primarily by the upper fifth of income earners, as revealed by the latest consumer spending data.
Read more...The headline sounds too good to be true, right?
Read more...The fact that the world’s biggest banks drove themselves off a cliff yet managed to save their hides and even profit from the exercise while leaving ordinary citizens to pick up the tab is ample reason for citizens and the small cohort of non-captured regulators and politicians focused on their continuing misdeeds.
But as a result, an even more powerful set of financial players, namely, private equity firms, is continuing to expand the scope of their activities with little scrutiny and pushback by the press and public interest groups.
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