If you’ve read The Men Who Stare at Goats, you already know that the defense establishment has a peculiar fondness for funding quackery. But this is still a doozy.
Read more...Two-front wars in Europe aren’t good for Germany.
Read more...In a new paper for the Institute For New Economic Thinking’s Working Group on the Political Economy of Distribution, economist Lance Taylor and his colleagues examine income inequality using new tools and models that give us a more nuanced — and frightening —picture than we’ve had before. Their simulation models show how so-called “reasonable” modifications like modest tax increases on the wealthy and boosting low wages are not going to be enough to stem the disproportionate tide of income rushing toward the rich. Taylor’s research challenges the approaches of American policy makers, the assumptions of traditional economists, and some of the conclusions drawn by Thomas Piketty and Larry Summers. Bottom line: We’re not yet talking about the kinds of major changes needed to keep us from becoming a Downton Abbey society.
Read more...How many variants of the old “commies in the woodpile” scare will the War on Terror serve up?
Read more...If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
The Troika’s willingness to turn Greece into a failed state first, as a side effect of its “rescue the French and German banks” operation, and now, as part of its German hegemony protection racket, is killing people and in the longer term will only accelerate the rise of extreme right wing elements in the Eurozone. As Ilagi wrote last week:
Does the EU have any moral values at all? And if not, why are you, if you live in the EU, part of it? .
Read more...Because you don’t have any, either? And if you do, where’s your voice? There are people suffering and dying who are part of a union that you are part of. That makes you an accomplice. You can’t hide from that just because your media choose to ignore your reality from you.
As we describe in our earlier post today on Greece, the ECB’s hit job on Greece is an continuation of the destructive and ultimately self-defeating practice of letting the pet needs of banks trump those of governments and social orders. The ECB is willing to turn Greece into a failed state out of what looks like sheer brutality, with the apparent rationalization that punishing Greece will serve pour decourager les autres, meaning the other periphery countries, and potentially even France, that are calling for relief from failed austerity policies.
Read more...Even by the standards of bank thuggishness, the move by the ECB against Greece last night was a stunner. Americans have become used to banks taking houses under dubious pretexts when both the investors and borrowers would do better with a writedown. But to see the ECB try take a country is another matter entirely. As one seasoned pro said, “If anyone had tried something like this against a country with a decent sized military, the tanks would be rolling.”
Read more...One of the sorriest chapters in recent American history was how we allowed an unprecedented opportunity to assist Russia in managing the end of its Communist era to turn into a looting exercise by well-placed insiders, including advisors under contract to Harvard.
onathan Hay ran the day-to-day operations of the Russia Project. He was found guilty of violating three counts of the False Claims Act and was debarred from serving in USAID. But he’s managed to resurface in Ukraine, working in the local operations of a Polish think tank. Nicely played.
Read more...Rather than listen to thousands of borrower complaints, housing advocates, foreclosure attorneys, market experts and, well…, us, the Obama Administration tried to paper over the many problems in the mortgage servicing market by creating the foreclosure settlement (officially the National Mortgage Settlementof 2012), as well as the earlier OCC enforcement actions against big mortgage servicers.
Now we have the disaster of Ocwen, the fifth largest servicer in the country, imploding as a result of the settlement charade.
Read more...The super wealthy are building better bunkers rather than a better society.
Read more...A US court ruling has warped the otherwise precise meanings of three key words – “republic”, “sovereign”, and “default” – leading to absurdities like a New York district court holding the Republic of Argentina in “contempt of court”! The entire understanding of sovereign debt and its restructuring is being read through private “contract law” that cannot address the complex questions that are inherently public in nature, à la questions around restructuring Argentina’s debt. It appeared that a misreading of key words could benefit some vulture funds, but so far no one has seen as much as a penny! Maybe they never will.
Read more...When it became clear that the supposedly epic blizzard of earlier this week was overhyped, at least as far as New York City was concerned, we wondered about the thinking process that led to the only shutdown of the entire public transportation system for a snowstorm.
We raised doubts about this measure, on a philosophical as well as a practical level. As we noted,
I’m bothered by the continued creep of safety concerns being used to restrict individual movements. Maybe I’m a dinosaur, but citizens used to be deemed competent to make prudent choices.
But the real, largely untold story of the transit shutdown and travel restrictions was the impact on people who were working what amounted to second and third shift, meaning not white collar professionals but service workers and their managers, most of all those with long commutes, as well as staff (nurses, orderlies, cooks, cleaners) in New York’s many hospitals.
Read more...Seldom have well-credentialed and well-meaning people worked so hard to produce so little of substance.
Read more...Aside from the independent merit of this post, in calling out an aspect of the Sheldon Silver scandal that the media has sanctimoniously overlooked, I am also a big believer in encouraging the use of the word “corruption” when it fits, which is sadly all too often these days.
Read more...Yves here. Richard Smith is on the trail of what looks to be his biggest international scam find ever, orders of magnitude larger than the usual below the radar single to low double digit million dollar/pound/euro operation that he has ferreted out in the past. And mind you, even though he focuses on the dubious looking inter-corporate relationships and the often evident lack of normal investors protections and business substance, these companies sell hope and glamour to typically credulous retail investors who lose their money and have no recourse.
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