OK, today’s subprime securitization rage is in the auto-loan sector, not mortgages. About 31% of all outstanding auto loan balances are rated subprime. They’re the foundation of booming auto sales.
Read more...Stuffing people into cars they can’t afford and ultimately may not be able to pay for is big business.
Read more...The “ground truth” of the protests, the forces arrayed against them, the grand jury, political economy in Ferguson, and Mike Brown’s father.
Read more...Yves here. This brief post by Doug Short is even more important than it appears to be. We had an outburst of neoliberal orthodoxy in comments yesterday on a post that discussed how wealth of most households had fallen since 1987. Some readers assigned blame for stagnant average worker wages (which was a big contributor to the lack of growth in household wealth) to immigrants, particularly Mexicans and H1-B visa workers.
The Doug Short chart below looks at corporate profit share versus labor share. This pinpoints the degree to which wage stagnation is the result of corporate managers and executives succeeding in cutting the pie to favor themselves (executive pay has become increasingly linked to stock prices, and relentless focus on short-term earnings, as well as stock buybacks, do wonders for earnings per share).
Read more...The Washington Post has a story that blandly supports the continued strip mining of the American economy. Of course, in Versailles that the nation’s capitol has become, this lobbyist-and-big-ticket-political-donor supporting point of view no doubt seems entirely logical. The guts of the article: Three years ago, Harvard Business School asked thousands of its graduates, many […]
Read more...How America facilitates a labor and environmental race to the bottom, helping companies based in Europe, Canada, and Mexico.
Read more...Writer libbyliberal describes how the Obama Administration’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration worked with GM for years to cover up the automaker’s ignition system defect that would lead to sudden power system failure. That fault is estimated to have caused at least 13 deaths and over 30 crashes. It’s also a textbook case of crapification.
Read more...The credit card industry gets short shrift when it comes to history.
Read more...After the last few years of strong sales growth, the US auto industry may be headed for a world of hurt. If that happens, the US economy would suffer too.
Read more...Yves here. While this piece provides a solid overview of the fallen status of cars, it misses an obvious contributor to the lack of enthusiasm for them among the young: with weak incomes and in many cases, heavy student debt loads, an automobile is too large an expense relative to what they get out of it.
Read more...A mere day after strikes at Amazon warehouses in Germany, which caught the attention of the media in the US, Slate ran as its lead piece in Moneybox an article that bears all the hallmarks of being a PR plant: Amazon Warehouses Are the New Factories.
I suspect the author, Emma Roller, wouldn’t recognize a factory if it fell on her.
Read more...CNI (UK)’s confusing attitude to its connections with Carbon Neutral Investments, service provider to carbon scams
Read more...Lotus F1 quietly drop AGT from their Official Team Partner list just after Naked Capitalism tells the world that AGT’s a scam.
Read more...A sceptical look at anti-carbon-scam enforcement activities in the UK.
Read more...A last look at the lovely contact list of scammers’ friends, Carbon Neutral Investments Limited
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