In pursuing its dream, the EU has created a ballooning superstructure of governance manned by 41,000 bureaucrats and mostly unelected politicians. In 2011, they spent €129 billion of taxpayer money. But now, the European Court of Auditors released its audit report for that year—a damning document that outlines how up to 4.8% of the EU budget seeped through the cracks and disappeared.
Read more...Tonight’s Financial Times has a eye-popping story, that the survival of Sharp, one of Japan’s top consumer products manufacturers, is in doubt:
Read more...Yves here. I’m featuring the key portion of a post by Varoufakis, which is his rough reconstruction of the conclusion of an unscripted talk before the Caledonian Club in London on “Global and European Recovery: What Will it Take?”
Read more...The French government has been flailing about to counter economic trends that started while Nicolas Sarkozy was still president. And one of the most bandied-about catchwords these days is “competitiveness”—entailing the cherished and untouchable 35-hour workweek, equally untouchable wages, and sky-high employer-paid payroll taxes and social security charges. An explosive mix.
Read more...Bill Moyer’s latest show, with Matt Taibbi and and Chrystia Freeland, focuses on how the super rich have established a yawning chasm between themselves and ordinary Americans, both in financial and physical terms. One major focus is view the rich are where they are by virtue of their talents and efforts, not (say) by regulatory and tax arbitrage, and how they’ve convinced themselves and a large swathe of society of this myth.
Read more...While deathbed conversions might earn you a spot in heaven in some religions, they don’t carry you very far here on Planet Earth.
Christine Lagrade has taken too small a step in the right direction far too late to do much good.
Read more...Even in the cases where the outsourcing cost savings were significant, the idea that American wages were way out of line with Chinese wages and the only future for American workers was grinding wages lower and lower to compete with China has been oversold.
Read more...John Harvey is Professor of Economics at Texas Christian University. He blogs at Forbes and is the author of the book ‘Currencies, Capital Flows and Crises: A Post-Keynesian Analysis of Exchange Rate Determination’
Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington
Philip Pilkington: Your book seeks to outline an alternative theory of what determines exchange rates in our world today.
Read more...By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.
Eduardo Porter began by studying physics but decided not to complete his studies and pursue a career in that field in favor of becoming a journalist. He worked for the Wall Street Journal before joining the New York Times, where he writes a periodic column. His primary interest is now economics. I was intrigued by a recent column he did entitled “The Folly of Attacking Outsourcing.”
I reviewed a number of Porter’s NYT columns to get a feel for his views. Defending outsourcing and minimizing the criticisms of undocumented immigrants are his twin passions. He has written roughly a dozen columns on each of these topics. Porter’s starting point is neo-liberal economics. As I will show, he does so despite knowing that neo-liberal economics dogma has proven disastrously wrong.
Read more...Over the weekend, the newspaper Bild released the results of a new poll on German sentiment on the Euro. It found that 51% thought Germany would do better by leaving the Eurozone with 29% saying Germany would fare worse. In addition, 71% of the respondents said Greece should be expelled from the Eurozone if it could not live up to its austerity commitments.
These results aren’t particularly novel; a large cohort of Germans have been vocally opposed to Eurorescues for some time. What is new about this poll is how low the percentage is that sees being in the Euro as good for Germany.
Read more...Is there a connection between New Zealand’s Ian Taylor and Sean Quinn, Ireland’s asset-hiding bankrupt? Could be…
Read more...My last post on this little mess implied that there was pretty slack official monitoring of the NZ Company Register for obviously false or impermissible registration information. But one or two other sightings invite the question: does anyone in New Zealand take Para 1, Section 377 of the Companies Act seriously, any more? 377 False statements […]
Read more...In a previous post, we looked briefly at NZ companies that have now, or have ever had, “Bancorp” in their name, uncovering a rich vein of seediness. Filter out the more-or-less legit-looking companies and the more-or-less dodgy ones that I wrote about then, and there’s more. There always seems to be more.
The New Zealand Companies Office is asleep on the job.
Read more...In my last post on the attempts to clamp down on New Zealander Ian Taylor’s buccaneering (ahem) company registrations, which have facilitated arms-smuggling and massive moneylaundering, I wrote of his latest venture
Read more...Naturally, various official and unofficial sleuths will now be sniffing after this new firm and the “reputable Asian jurisdiction”…
One awaits the next grisly sightings of Taylor’s legacy, registered in “Asia”, or Delaware, or London, or wherever.
This Real News Network segment tackles the ugly topic of whether the deterioration of public education in the US is by design. You might also want to see the earlier shows in this series, the first on Obama’s educational policies, the second on Romney’s.
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