Yves here. This post by Barbara Garson, which originally appeared at TomDispatch, describes how big companies squeeze down even more on workers by turning what were once full-time jobs into part-time positions to avoid providing benefits and to push pay even lower (workers who are desperate to get more hours will also accept reduced wages, working off the clock, and abusive work conditions).
Read more...The big banks are desperate to prevent Janet Yellen from being appointed as Bernanke’s successor to run the Fed. Their sexist attacks have backfired.
Read more...Asian markets got off to an only mildly down start, so I busied myself on a post that took some concentration, along with some nagging tech matters. As I’m about to turn in, it appears that Asian markets decayed during the trading day and Europe is off to a wobbly start.
Read more...Yves here. Mirabile dictu! A VoxEU article discusses, admittedly in suitably dense economese, how economists create and enforce biases against taxation by using terminology that presupposes that it’s bad. And as Lambert noted after he saw it went up here: “That post got Tyler Cowen really ticked off, so it must be good.”
Read more...Yves here. The 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is ten days away. Brace yourself for the reminisces, most of which will be genuine, heartfelt, and insightful, while others which will treat the occasion as an opportunity for brand identification.
McKibben, a well-known and effective climate change activist, raises the question of leadership in movements to promote social change. He argues that the charismatic chieftain is out, and the model now is that of distributed leadership, with lower level “leaders” being more critical to movement success than ever before.
Read more...Yves here. This is the latest installment of Bill Black’s forensic work into why the FBI, which had in the past been a critically important working oar in investigating banking industry frauds, was nowhere to be found before and after the global financial crisis. This post, on how the Mortgage Bankers’ Association, succeeded in getting the FBI focused solely on frauds made on banks, as opposed to by banks, is an ugly and critical bit of the story.
Read more...Yves here. Bill Black continues his forensic work about the dogs that didn’t bark in both the runup to and the aftermath of the crisis.
Read more...Perhaps I’m just having a bad month, but I wonder if other readers sense what I’m detecting. I fancy if someone did a Google frequency search on the right terms, they might pick up tangible indicators of what I’m sensing (as in I’m also a believer that what people attribute to gut feeling is actually pattern recognition).
The feeling I have is that of heightened generalized tension, the social/political equivalent of the sort of disturbance that animals detect in advance of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, of pressure building up along major fault lines.
Read more...As Wolf Richter argues, Cisco has been a harbinger of market turns, and he describes an earnings call which struck him as eerily similar to another inflection point, that of fall 2007.
Read more...Yves here. We’ve written from time time about the latest plans underway to further degrade the lives of ordinary citizens in order to fatten the bottom lines of major multinationals, namely, two major US-led international trade pacts. Even though the US media has given these pending deals scant attention, they represent a far-reaching effort to restructure basic legal and regulatory frameworks.
Read more...By Yanis Varoufakis, a professor of economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his blog
As a child, I was fascinated by my mother’s, and her mother’s, tales from the 1940s, and in particular their stories about life under the Nazi occupation. Greece is in the grip of a calamity that those who lived through the 1940s had thought they would never have to live through again. But I must desist. For this is not the place for analysis and argumentation about our contemporary Greek catastrophe. This is a piece of brief summer tales. So, allow me to relate three such stories.
Read more...Yves here. We had predicted that the sharp rise in mortgage rates precipitated by the Fed’s taper talk would put a damper on the housing “recovery” and could even send it into reverse if rates continued to increase. They’ve in fact fallen over the past few weeks but are still markedly higher than in the spring. The central bank has been sending mixed signals over the last week or so, on the one hand seeming more inclined to taper based on its cheery view of the fundamentals, but concerned over what a budget slugfest might do to the confidence fairy.
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