Yves here. One of my colleagues is back from a month in Europe (a lot of travel, and lots of meetings with economists and political types). I need to debrief him more fully, but his short take was Portugal is clearly in crisis, with Spain and Italy not far behind, and that the political train wrecks will hit faster than the economic ones. Although I can’t see how the former won’t accelerate the arrival of the latter.
Read more...The poor have to endure not just the indignity of struggling to survive, but also from having to listen to pious lectures on how they really can proper on their meager incomes.
Read more...Spitzer is the only major U.S. politician whose deeds, and not simply words, prove that he does not think corporate titans are too big to jail. And as New York City Comptroller, he’d have subpoena power.
Read more...Yves here. This post looks at the unwinding of quantitative easing in the UK and raises some concerns.
Read more...Yves here. I suspect NC readers can go even further will Bill Black’s question!
Read more...Yves here. Last week, we used a the latest release of an every-other-year report by Transparency International on corruption to discuss the need to come up with more granular descriptions of the many forms it takes. This post on a major bribery scandal in Spain will hopefully elicit reader comment on the common forms of corruption in the EU and how they’ve changed over time.
Read more...As readers may know, in addition to contributing here at Naked Capitalism, Lambert has his own blog, Corrente, which focuses on politics and policy.
Read more...It may seem a bit presumptuous to question how Edward Snowden has conducted his affairs so far. After all, he is still alive and not in the tender care of the so-called American justice system, despite having crossed the surveillance arm of the world’s only superpower and fomenting multiple diplomatic uproars. And the political part of Snowden’s project seems to be going as well as he could have hoped.
But it isn’t clear Snowden has been as adept in his personal affairs of late. His press conference in Russia may have made a tenuous situation worse.
Read more...Bill Moyers interviewed Marty Kaplan who heads the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California on how the choice of media stories helps keep Americans politically somnambulant.
Read more...Econ4, a group of heterodox economists, has released a short video and a statement on the “new economy” which they define as more sustainable and equitable forms of organizing “productive” activity and the resources that support them.
Read more...I’m going to be brief, in part because the CFTC’s probable demonstration of lack of gumption is still in play, while the SEC’s was expected but nevertheless appalling. But the bottom line is that even though we seem some intermittent signs of the officialdom recognizing that big banks remain a menace to the health and well-being to the general public*, the measures to constrain them continue to be inadequate.
Read more...Sadly, we’ve entered into a world where the word “corruption” has become inadequate to describe the many and varied practices of profitable abuse by the powerful and connected of their inferiors. Like the popular (and sadly apocryphal) accounts Inuit with their numerous words for “snow,” we need more refined and granular terminology to describe various types of corruption. Hugh uses “kleptocracy” but that’s a name for a system of governance, not particular behaviors within that system.
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