We are three and a half hours away from the end of our fundraiser. If you can give a little, give a little. If you can give more, give more. If you can give a lot, give a lot. You are investing in being part of the solution.
Read more...Only a bit over six hours remain in the Naked Capitalism fundraiser. Show your support of critical thinking, merciless evisceration of lame punditry, deep diving into muddy financial waters, and cute animal pictures. As our guest blogger, Michael Hudson, has said:
Read more...This is major.
Read more...The Naked Capitalism community is speaking! You’ve said you want this site to be even more valuable and you’ve been willing to provide tangible backing for your desire to have us demystify finance, call out chicanery, parse propaganda, and in our small way, help promote the creation of a more just society.
We’re closer to both our donor and financial targets.
Read more...If you make a quick scan of the headlines, which is the way a lot of people interact with the news, you’d see numerous reports stressing that Senate leaders had made “progress” in the “let’s try not to crash into the debt ceiling” talks and were hopeful of getting a deal done. Stock markets took cheer from these reports.
Read more...We’ve had 792 of you give our fundraiser, and are close to reaching our goal of 1000 donations. The goal here is to build a culture where we pay for truth, instead of accepting being lied to for free.
Read more...This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 788 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or another credit card portal, WePay in the right column, or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate, such as by check, as well as our current goal, on our kickoff post. And read about our current target here.
Yves here. I was going to say a few words about newly-announced recipients of the award known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, but Yanis Varoufakis beat me to the punch. I’ve taken the liberty of combining his two short posts on this topic. Rest assured that as Varoufakis indicates, that Eugene Fama (one of the three recipients of this year’s prize) was one of the leading proponents of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which as we discussed in ECONNED, provided critical intellectual support for the idea that markets, particularly financial markets, did an excellent job of price determination and thus should be left to their own devices as much as possible.
Read more...Yves here. I have to confess that I love this title. It serves as a reminder that the meme that lenders in the crisis were somehow victimized by borrowers is a lame defense of rank incompetence or worse. The basic rule of lending is that all you have is downside from a credit perspective. The borrower is never going to perform better than the terms of the agreement, and he may well do worse. Any competent lender knows that borrowers can be overly optimistic, naive, unlucky, or downright crooked. Lenders therefore need to take prudent measures to protect themselves from these well-known borrower foibles, the most important being not lending to obvious bad risks, and adding enough margin to your cost of borrowing to cover debtor bad luck and your own miscalculation. So to have a huge explosion of borrower defaults, including a meaningful swathe of subprime borrowers defaulting in the first 90 days, is proof not of massive borrower chicanery, but massive lender incompetence or corruption (as in presuming they could dump the dodgy loan on the next fool in the securitization pipeline).
Read more...We’ve made enough changes in the draft website that it seemed like a good idea to seek another round of reader input.
Read more...A lot of readers, when we’ve discussed the budget/shutdown/debt ceiling negotiations, have done the equivalent of declaring it all to be kabuki, that the fix is in.
While I have no doubt that any resolution of this impasse is certain to make matters worse for what is left of the endangered species known as the American middle class, what is going on in DC is not a pretty scripted stagefight.
Read more...Even casual scrutiny will tell you that the current ridiculous levels of CEO pay bear no relationship to anything other than their highly developed rent extraction skills.
Read more...I’ve always been a big believer in the importance of the comments section,. You correct me, give ideas and information, catch typos (aiee!) and make my work and that of the other bloggers better. Your reactions this week took that up a level.
Read more...Yves here. With the deficit showdown consuming so much media attention, a lot of important stories are not getting the attention they warrant. One is a case before the Supreme Court, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, which many have called Citizens United 2.0. Bill Moyers and his guest, Yale Law School election and constitutional law professor Heather Gerken, discuss how this case has the potential to further erode campaign finance laws and increase the already considerable influence that monied interests have on politics.
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