Author Archives: Yves Smith

Joe Firestone: The Great Austerity Swindle!

By Joe Firestone, Ph.D., Managing Director, CEO of the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI), and Director of KMCI’s CKIM Certificate program. He has taught political science as the graduate and undergraduate level and blogs regularly at Corrente, Firedoglake and Daily Kos as letsgetitdone. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

Our Congresspeople, corporate CEOs, tea partiers, most economists, Pete Peterson’s minions, and even our President, tell us that we’re running out of money; and that we can’t keep running huge deficits, and increasing our national debt forever, because eventually, our creditors will just cease lending us our dollars back….

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Republicans Backing Away from Debt Ceiling Brinksmanship, to Hold Line on Sequestration and Budget

A important shift in the Republicans’ negotiating stance over the austerity fight (do we go Dem lite or Republican high test?) was duly noted in the Financial Times a day ago, but a search in Google News (“debt ceiling”) suggests a lot of other commentators have not yet digested its significance, so it seemed worthy of a short recap here.

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Will New Consumer Financial Protection Bureau New Rules for Struggling Homeowner Stop Predatory Servicing?

The Wall Street Journal gives a teaser, in the form of excerpts from a speech to be made later today, on new rules the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will be implementing to regulate how servicers treat homeowners who become severely delinquent on their mortgages.

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Bill Black: German Growth Goes Negative but Merkel’s Press Remains Glowing

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

It is good to be Angela Merkel.

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More Whistleblower Leaks on Foreclosure Settlement Show Both Suppression of Evidence and Gross Incompetence

No wonder the Fed and the OCC snubbed a request by Darryl Issa and Elijah Cummings to review the foreclosure fraud settlement before it was finalized early last week. What had leaked out while the Potemkin borrower reviews were underway showed them to be a sham, as we detailed at length in an earlier post. But even so, what actually took place was even worse than hardened cynics had imagined.

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Richard Alford: To Learn or Not to Learn, That is the Question

By Richard Alford, a former New York Fed economist. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side.

The US has experienced numerous disasters both natural and man-made. Unfortunately, the authorities have not always availed themselves of the opportunity to learn from these episodes.

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