Author Archives: Yves Smith

Stranded Fossil Fuels? Institutional Investors Concerned About “Unburnable Carbon” Fallout

Yves here. Given the almost innate bullish bias of equity investors, when they start worrying about something, that means it actually has non-trivial odds of happening. So the idea that investors think it’s possible that a lot of current proven fossil fuels won’t be lifted is an unexpected bit of good news on the climate change front. Whether this comes to pass soon enough to save our collective bacon is another question entirely.

Data Shows Democrats Bought and Paid for by Surveillance Industry

Obama started looking more stressed than usual around the time of the Snowden revelations. This Real News Network interview with political scientist Tom Ferguson helps explain why. The surveillance industry, broadly defined, gave proportionately much more to Obama than other industries in the 2012 election.

Links 10/26/13

Gretchen Morgenson on Bill Moyers: Ignore Those Crocodile Tears for JP Morgan

Yves here. Gretchen Morgenson gives an accessible presentation of why no one should feel sorry for the fact that JP Morgan is set to pay a roughly $13 billion settlement of a raft of mortgage-related liability. And she also dispatches the myth that the Department of Justice took a tough stance.

Yanis Varoufakis: The Dirty War for Europe’s Integrity and Soul

As Lambert says, get a cup of coffee, or maybe two. This is a long piece, but that is in part because it includes many damning vignettes from the Eurocrisis, so this is the antithesis of a dry read.

Link 10/25/13

How Banks Profit From Distress (British Edition)

Yves here. Readers will notice how closely the US banking model hews to the UK version (or more accurately, original), particularly in its predatory practices.

OCC Replies to Elizabeth Warren Reveal Extent of Regulatory Capture on Derivatives

I thought readers would have fun taking apart a reply by the Thomas Curry, the Comptroller of the Currency, to some written questions posed by Elizabeth Warren after a July 11 Senate Banking Committee hearing on systemic risk.

Bill Black: The New York Times Publishes the Most Ironic Sentence of the Crisis

Yves here. I enjoyed this piece by Bill Black because 1. Anyone who tries to pretend the Administration is serious about prosecuting bank-related fraud needs to be named and shamed and 2. I like the device of using a single sentence as the basis for a post.

Links 10/24/13

Fed Gives Middle Finger to Congress, Commodities Customers, and Public, Proposes to Allow More Banks to Participate in Commodities Business

Nothing like watching a captured regulator like the Fed use a public hue and cry to execute a big bait and switch. Here the ploy is to change rules to further disadvantage the parties making complaints. But it takes finesse to make the finger in the eye look plausible and reasonable, so that when the well-understood bad effects show up later, the perp can pretend to be mystified.

The Man Who Won a Nobel Prize for Helping Create a Global Financial Crisis

Yves here. While there have been some good posts expressing consternation at the recently announced winners of the so-called Nobel Prize in Economics, this one is particularly useful in explaining how economists come to treat obviously ridiculous theories as gospel truth.

Reps. Alan Grayson and John Conyers Call for End to Bank Welfare, Tough Rules on Bank Capital

Congressmen Alan Grayson and John Conyers have published a well-thought-out proposal on bank equity, with the objective of assuring that when banks do stupid things (which they do with great regularity, even before the era of casino banking, they’d embrace some new fad and run off the cliff together, like lemmings), they have enough capital to absorb losses. And that means a lot more capital than regulators are demanding they have now.

So I urge you to co-sign their letter (full text below) at http://nobankwelfare.com/.

Quelle Surprise! National Surveillance State Companies Were Huge Obama Donors in 2012 Election

By Thomas Ferguson, professor of political science at University of Massachusetts, Boston, Paul Jorgensen, assistant professor of political science at the University of Texas, Pan American, and Jie Chen, university statistician at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Long before President Obama kicked off his 2008 campaign, many Americans took it for granted that George W. Bush’s vast, sprawling national security apparatus needed to be reined in. But that’s not how this movie turned out, and it’s obvious why once you look at the 2012 election money trail.