By craazyman, long time Naked Capitalism reader, peanut gallery commenter, Yves Smith fanboy, and Profeser of Contemporary Analysis at the University of Magonia
You can unpack yer bags ‘cause we’re not going on a guilt trip. I’m way too lazy for that.
But I know a good deal when I see one….
Read more...Being exceptional apparently means never having take responsiblity for your actions.
Read more...The current posturing by both the Democrats and Republicans over the debt ceiling impasse is that both sides are digging in for a long shutdown. Whether that proves to be the case or not, the resolution is likely to involve some face-saving concessions offered by each side. One that is up for grabs is the provision that allows Congressmen and their staffers to continue to have their own Congressional policies. This plan has been attacked as generous, with the Wall Street Journal describing features like doctors on site at Capitol Hill.
This is basically a long-standing plot to try to persuade the public that they can get a free lunch, even when what they are getting is rancid cooking.
Read more...Yves here. A couple of days ago, we linked to a Financial Times story that featured hedge fund investor John Paulson talking up his investments in the two large Greek banks, Alpha Bank and Piraeus Bank. As a savvy investor buddy once remarked, “When some is talking up something they own, be on the watch that they are actually selling.” In this case, as Varoufakis describes, what Paulson is actually pushing for is for the Troika to change the pricing of warrants on his Greek bank investments because they aren’t providing the big payoff he wanted. So he is indeed “selling” in that he wants his payday now but needs to get official bodies to give him even more subsidies to get there.
Read more...Thanks to our loyal weekend readers and early risers! You’ve gotten us past our first target, which was $10,700 for hosting, ongoing battles with spambot and trying to minimize how that affects the comments section, and getting us out of Google hell (a recent change in Google’s algos has effectively blacklisted this site. I can put search strings from recent posts in the search field. I can find the post in Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, but all that comes up in Google is scraper sites that have ripped off our work, and not the original.)
As of 6:30 PM are over $1200 toward our second goal, which is $7800 for travel and conferences.
Read more...The author of this post is an anonymous Washington insider
The Federal exchanges on Obamacare don’t work. They just don’t. I don’t mean they don’t serve the interests of keeping people healthy, I mean they literally can’t serve pages that allow people to sign up. This is directly due to faulty IT processes, which Naked Capitalism was all over months ago
Read more...This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 54 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.
Readers may have taken note of a long article by Jodi Kantor in the Sunday New York Times magazine celebrating an experiment on the Harvard Business School graduating class of 2013.
The project was deemed a winner. More women students than ever graduated with academic honors. Student satisfaction levels also rose. Unfortunately, if you dig deeper, this “experiment” looks like a “garbage in, garbage out” exercise.
Read more...You know it’s bad when Grover Norquist is playing elder statesman.
Read more...Matt Taibbi described in “How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform” the many ways “the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law,” including the effort by House Republicans after the 2010 election to “pass a gazillion loopholes.”
“You might wonder,” Taibbi wrote, “how a bunch of lunkhead Republican Congressmen would even know how to write a coordinated series of ‘technical fixes’ to derivatives legislation, a universe so complicated that it has become hard to find anyone on the Hill who truly understands the subject. (One Congressman who sits on the Financial Services Committee laughingly admitted that when the crash of 2008 happened, he had to look up ‘credit default swaps’ on Wikipedia.)”
Yeah, that was me.
Read more...This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 52 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.
It’s a welcome departure to see Adam Davidson’s weekly column in the New York Times, which usually puts a happy face on how the 1% are winning the class war in America, have a guest writer look at the other side of the story.
Read more...Yves here. This report by David Vine describes how the US has been shifting its operations in Europe since 9/11 away from Germany and to the south, most of all to Italy. While geographic proximity to the Middle East is a superficial explanation for this shift, the bigger driver is that less wealthy countries are more compliant that Germany, which is becoming even more influential in Europe. Another factor could be that Germany imports most of its gas, and Russia is its biggest supplier. Russia is not only no longer a Cold War enemy, but some factions in Germany even favor cultivate closer ties to Russia.
But aside from the political calculus, this article also gives Americans a better sense of the sheer weight of our military spending abroad.
Read more...Now that fall is upon us, we are launching our annual fundraiser, the third in our seven-year history. I’m asking all of you to join me once again.
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