The Ideology of the S&P Threat to Downgrade Brazil to Junk
Why you should look hard at the rationales and motives of ratings agencies like S&P in giving sovereign debt downgrades.
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Lies, Damned Lies, and Greek Statistics
A detailed account of the long and tortured history of budget fakery in Greece and how it is has been aggressively defended by successive Greek governments. A tidbit from the post: one section is labeled “When revising wrong statistics is treason.”
Read more...How Big Corporations Are Starving Public Schools of Billions of Dollars
How big corporate tax avoidance hurts local schools.
Read more...China’s Stock Market Falling Off a Cliff: Why, and Why Care?
What explains the turmoil in Chinese stock markets, and what does it mean for the rest of the world?
Read more...Greece Negotiations Already Starting to Look Wobbly
Silly me! I thought that given that the Greek government had prostrated itself and had complied with the creditor demand to pass legislation double-plus quickly or else, that the worst of the hurdles to getting the third bailout passed had been surmounted.
I should know better than that.
Read more...The Yellen Subsidy: Fed Chair Pumps for Keeping Financiers Fat Over Filling Potholes
Yellen tries conning journalists and the Great Unwashed Public in her defense of preserving the current level of Fed dividends to banks.
Read more...Comparison of Greek and English Version of Kathimerini Scoop on Varoufakis Parallel Currency Plan
Filling in some details on a bombshell report about a call that Varoufakis had with hedge fund managers about a parallel currency.
Read more...Gaius Publius: Goldman Sachs – Masters of the Eurozone
Goldman Sachs wields more power in the Eurozone than you think. And it’s not hard to guess who benefits.
Read more...Dan Davies: Greek Banks Were Bigger Beneficiaries of the 2010 Bailout Than French and German Banks
Even though French and German banks benefitted from the 2010 Greek bailout, Greek banks did even more so.
Read more...Ugly Greek Bank Resolutions and Depositor Bail-Ins Coming Soon
Why the coming bank bail-ins in Greece are going to be far more costly in economic terms than most observers imagine.
Read more...New York Times DealBook Underplays Misconduct By Regulatory Fixer Promontory, Under Investigation by New York Department of Financial Services
Promontory Group, which plays a major role in helping financial firms tilt the regulatory playing field in their favor, is about to get a long-overdue comeuppance.
Read more...Why Debt Sustains Corruption in Greece and Vice Versa
This post makes important observations about how the elite levels of Greece engage in rent-seeking, aka corruption, and can continue those strategies even in the face of economic collapse, to the detriment to the rest of Greek society.
Read more...The 3 Most Ludicrous Corporate Arguments Against CEO-Worker Pay Disclosure
Public corporations and their lobbyists make intelligence-insulting arguments against Dodd-Frank mandated CEO-worker pay disclosure.
Read more...The Augean Stables – How Corruption Has Amended the Constitution
The institutionalized elements of corruption in America are so powerful that they’ve been able to gut the Constitution.
Read more...ECB Expected to Continue to Strangle Banks, Not Provide More ELA Funding Today, Despite Greek Parliament Passing Austerity Legislation (Updated: ECB Does Not Provide All of Requested Funding, Attaches New Strings)
The ECB is in full sack-of-Carthage mode if it fails to increase the ELA today to give Greek banks some hope of survival and more important for the economy, of providing payment services to citizens, businesses (particularly importers) and tourists
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