I’ve deliberately waited a bit before examining the remark of one Jason Barker, an employee of the New York Fed, on a New York Post article the day after the November 17 Occupy Wall Street protests. My initial negative reaction to his comment still holds.
The Post piece itself presented itself as a celebration of police bloodlust…
Read more...This Real News Network interview with economist Bob Pollin of the Political Economy Research Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts focuses on the deficit cutting impasse in Washington and what is needed to create jobs.
Read more...Our headline at odds with the media reports on the newest confidence-bolstering ploy by the Federal Reserve, that of new, improved stress tests for the six banks at the apex of the US financial services industry looting operation: Bank of America, Citi, Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Wells.
There’s a noteworthy gap between the scenarios employed in the 1.0 version, which took place in early 2009, when the banks were told to get more capital or else, and the ones about to be implemented.
Read more...A key German finance leader is talking tough about financial reform. But will his peers follow?
Read more...Reader 1SK sent me a story which I felt I had to call to the attention of Naked Capitalism readers. It strikes me as devious public relations ploy, in which an episode that sounds at best poorly executed and at worst a scandal is reframed by focusing on an account of alleged exceptional individual performance that also provides an unverifiable answer to a key question in an ongoing investigation.
The incident in question is the air shipping of a claimed $40 billion in cold hard cash airlifted from the New York Fed to Iraq from 2003 to 2008.
Read more...By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland. Simuposted in German on Faz.net
If the intensity of a phantasy increases to the point at which it would be bound to force its way into consciousness, it is repressed and a symptom is generated through a backward impetus from the phantasy to its constituent memories. All phobias are derived in this way from phantasies which, in turn, are built upon memories.
Sigmund Freud
There are certain words in our culture upon which so many taut emotions converge that they become nothing less than a breaking point for certain opinions and moral platitudes. ‘Sex’ is obviously one. ‘Inflation’ is another.
To even begin to unravel the complex of associations that the word ‘inflation’ brings to mind in the average citizen would be an enterprise worthy of a full book. But one of the key associations is that of robbery. People instinctively feel that if there is inflation occurring they are being robbed by someone or other – most likely some ominous governmental bureaucracy, like a central bank.
Read more...The GAO released a report yesterday that provided some anodyne but nevertheless useful confirmation of many of the things most of us knew or strongly suspected about the Fed: it’s a club of largely white male corporate insiders who do a bit too many favors for each other. But the GAO seemed peculiarly to fail to understand some basic shortcomings of its investigation.
Read more...If you have any doubt that Bank of America is going down, this development should settle it. I’m late to this important story broken this morning by Bob Ivry of Bloomberg, but both Bill Black (who I interviewed just now) and I see this as a desperate move by Bank of America’s management, a de facto admission that they know the bank is in serious trouble.
Read more...By Zarathustra, who is the founder of Hong Kong blog Also sprach Analyst. He was educated at the London School of Economics and the Chinese University of Hong Kong and was once a Hong Kong-based equity research analyst focusing on Hong Kong real estate (which he did not really like), with a secondary coverage on China real estate sector (which he actually hated). Cross posted from MacroBusiness
Zero interest rate policy and quantitative easing is not working to stimulate the real economy. No country has succeeded. The pioneer of quantitative easing, the Bank of Japan, failed (and Japanese yen is uber-strong). The Federal Reserve has failed, and the Bank of England has failed.
Read more...Edward here. Earlier in the month, I wrote how the currency is the real release valve for a credit based economy using a nonconvertible freely floating currency. It’s not about interest rates. If currency revulsion takes hold from negative real rates and people want to flee a country’s assets, this will be reflected in the […]
Read more...By Gal Noir, an undercover investigator of hijacked economic truths and an occasional blogger at New Economic Perspectives
In his Congressional testimony on October 4th, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke uncharacteristically praised the benefits of fiscal policy, calling it “of critical importance” and conveying concerns with the looming deficit reductions. He cautioned: “an important objective is to avoid fiscal actions that could impede the ongoing economic recovery.”
Many economists expressed worry that such advocacy of fiscal policy will erode America’s (already) wavering confidence in the Fed and will further weaken their support for austerity measures. More troubling still, the economists said, was the possibility that the public may follow suit and start demanding from Congress bolder government action on the jobs front.
A few dissenting scholars thought that it was high time for Bernanke to put his money where his mouth was, so to speak.
Read more...We can all look forward to higher quality trolls in comments courtesy of the New York Fed (assuming we don’t have them already) thanks to a more thorough blogosphere/social media monitoring program the Fed is planing to launch (hat tip reader Tom via TPM):
Read more...By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.
If the encampment in downtown NYC is a church, then the sprouting of more of these around the country is something of an religious awakening. And the reaction of the other religious faction is pretty telling.
Read more...Hoisted from comments, this from reader barrisj. When I went to read the London Banker post in question, I too was struck by the passage barrisj singled out:
Read more...Jeff Madrick is a journalist, economic policy consultant and analyst. He is also the editor of Challenge magazine, which seeks to give alternative views on economics issues, as well as a visiting professor of humanities at The Cooper Union, director of policy research at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, The New School, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the author of numerous books. His latest book, The Age of Greed, is available from Amazon.
Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer based in Dublin, Ireland.
Philip Pilkington: Your book The Age of Greed is a detailed historical survey of some of the key figures that facilitated — broadly speaking — the transition away from the progressive, government-regulated economy of the post-war years and toward the finance-driven, deregulated economy in which we now live. In this interview I don’t want to focus on all the figures that crop up in the book as that is done so there in great detail. Instead I want to explore the broad sweep of this history focusing both on some of the more recognisable of these figures and on the actual cultural, political and economic shift that took place over this period.
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