Yanis Varoufakis: The Emerald Isle Remains in Chains
A conversation with Phil Pilkington on Europe’s disgraceful triumphalism regarding Ireland’s ‘exit’ from its ‘bailout’
Read more...Category Archives: Dubious statistics
Ilargi: QE, The People And The Damage Done
A report issued by McKinsey Global Institute last week on the real world impact of QE warrants more scrutiny than it has gotten so far.
Read more...Managing Bureaucrats
Yves here. I have to confess that the big reason I’m partial to this article is it is consistent with my experience. Metricization of business, and worse, employee performance, has become a fetish.
Read more...David Dayen: IRS Confirms that $12 Billion in “Mortgage Relief” in National Mortgage Settlement Completely Worthless
The IRS settles something I noticed a while ago and has now been finally confirmed. In short: big banks who robbed homes from Americans got a penalty that entailed, quite literally, giving homeowners worthless allowances.
The issue concerns the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act, which expires at the end of the year. After December 31, all mortgage relief that involves debt forgiveness of any kind will be taxable to the borrower. This affects principal reductions, of course, but also short sales, with the idea being that this involves the bank “forgiving” the difference between the total owed on the mortgage and the price of the short sale. There are hardships exemptions to this but they involve the functional equivalent of bankruptcy – you have to prove that your total liabilities exceed your total assets.
Read more...ObamaCare Rollout: Administration PR Tactics and the First Release of Enrollment Numbers
The “enrollment” numbers for the Healthcare.gov website, even using the Administration’s Orwellian definition of “enrolled” was barely above half of the scary bad number published as a rumor by the Wall Street Journal earlier this week.. Generous application of porcine maquillage followed.
Read more...Randy Wray: What If China Dumps US Treasury Bonds? Paul Krugman Inches Toward MMT
Our deficit hysterians love to raise the specter of China.
Read more...The BLS Jobs Report Covering October 2013: Effects of the Shutdown Mostly Hidden But Still Large
Yves here. As Hugh said via e-mail:
Read more...The report is actually two reports fundamentally at odds with each other.
It’s like taking a hammer to a tomato. One report says the tomato got smashed. The other report says the tomato got bigger. Which are you going to believe?
Obama Wants to Cut Social Security
Yves here. The headline is hardly news, at least if you’ve been paying attention, but this post does a great job of debunking arguments against Social Security, particularly ones designed to stoke generational warfare.
Read more...Obamacare Bogus Numbers: Why Results Touted in West Virginia as Sign of Success Are Either Wrong or a Proof of Failure
Michael Olenick unearthed an anomaly that is so extreme that it raises doubts about the numbers that the Department of Health and Human Services is reporting for Obamacare signups and enrollments to date.
Read more...Reps. Alan Grayson and John Conyers Call for End to Bank Welfare, Tough Rules on Bank Capital
Congressmen Alan Grayson and John Conyers have published a well-thought-out proposal on bank equity, with the objective of assuring that when banks do stupid things (which they do with great regularity, even before the era of casino banking, they’d embrace some new fad and run off the cliff together, like lemmings), they have enough capital to absorb losses. And that means a lot more capital than regulators are demanding they have now.
So I urge you to co-sign their letter (full text below) at http://nobankwelfare.com/.
Read more...Harvard Business School’s Garbage In, Garbage Out “Gender Equity” Experiment
This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 54 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or another credit card portal, WePay in the right column, or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate, such as by check, as well as our current goal, on our kickoff post.
Readers may have taken note of a long article by Jodi Kantor in the Sunday New York Times magazine celebrating an experiment on the Harvard Business School graduating class of 2013.
The project was deemed a winner. More women students than ever graduated with academic honors. Student satisfaction levels also rose. Unfortunately, if you dig deeper, this “experiment” looks like a “garbage in, garbage out” exercise.
Read more...Ilargi: The Darker Shades Of Shale
By Raúl Ilargi Meijer, editor-in-chief of The Automatic Earth, Cross posted from Automatic Earth
No, I wasn’t going to write a third article on shale in 2 weeks, absolutely not. But what I’ve read these past few days doesn’t leave me much choice.
Read more...Fixing Old Markets With New Markets: the Origins and Practice of Neoliberalism
Philip Mirowski is the Carl Koch Professor of Economics and the History and Philosophy of Science University of Notre Dame. Professor Mirowski’s latest book is Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
The interview was conducted by Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Fields Institute
Read more...Ilargi: Capitalism, A Norwegian Rat And Some Cockroaches
Yves here. Ilargi takes up one of our favorite topics, how the fetishization of numbers and measurement is at best misguided and at worst profoundly dysfunctional, as we discussed in a 2006 article, Management’s Great Addiction.
Read more...“The Media Just Won’t Report on This Crappy Economy,” Such As 80% of US Adults Near Poverty, GDP Funny Business
Reader Cathryn Mataga complained yesterday in comments about the under-reporting of how bad things are out in the real world where most people live. It’s not hard to find proof of her thesis.
Read more...