Loyal Dems were over the moon with reports from California that the costs provided by insurers of various levels of plans on state exchanges were coming in under CBO estimates, as well as below prices on the current small-group market.. But early reports from other states give a more mixed picture.
Read more...Yves here. The consensus view among experts, despite considerable public opposition in Germany, is that the German Constitutional Court will not upend the Eurozone bailout mechanisms by ruling in favor of challenges to their legality. This confirms the policy issue that Dani Rodrik flagged in 2007: you can’t have national sovereignity, democracy, and deep integration of markets at the same time. You can have at most two of the three. Sadly, Europe looks ready to settle on only one on that list.
Read more...Obama is no longer bothering to pretend that he is anything other than a stooge for banks and other big money interests.
Read more...Apparently, the most important criterion for getting an important post in the Obama Administration is telling Big Lies, better yet with data. Jason Furman claims Walmart is a “progressive success story.”
Read more...Yves here. Reader From Mexico often chides readers in comments who like try to depict Argentina and other Latin American states as failures, when the ones who have distanced themselves from American/neoliberal policies have made solid social and economic progress.
This piece highlights a tangible indicator of the wane of US influence in the Americas.
Read more...A weak job market, killer student loans and a crappy economy mean continued struggle for America’s college grads.
Read more...Yves here. It’s important to understand the scope and caliber of the police state apparatus that’s in place. The fact that it’s “dirty” meaning error-ridden and incomplete, is likely the big reason you have analysts like Edward Snowden with wide-ranging access. You still need humans to make connections and interpretations (and that introduces another layer for errors and plants to occur). And that also no doubt is used to justify even wider-ranging and more intrusive searches, such as NSA analysts listening to personal phone conversations of soldiers stationed in Iraq. That sort of casualness leads to abuses like NSA snoops inviting their colleagues to listen in on phone sex.
Read more...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 greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
The supreme misfortune is when theory outstrips performance.
Leonardo da Vinci
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Former CIA employee, most recently Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden was already the intel community’s biggest nightmare, and now this:
Read more...The Financial Times has caught a significant revolving door that its business press peers have largely overlooked.
Read more...Yves here. While most investors and analysts were busy fixating on the Fed’s taper and the unemployment report and the Abenomics roller coaster, some important housing market news slipped under the radar.
Read more...Why is a whole job getting harder to find every day in America?
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