We’ve described in various posts how evidence is growing that the participants in mortgage securitizations sometime early in this century appear to have ignored the requirements of a variety of laws and their own contracts. We believe the most serious and difficult to remedy problem results when the parties involved in the creation of a […]
Read more...By Joe Costello, communications director for Jerry Brown’s 1992 presidential campaign and was a senior adviser for Howard Dean’s effort in 2004 who writes at Archein and New Deal 2.0 Without meaningful reforms, our economy — and our politics — will continue to suffer. New York, New York big city of dreams And everything in […]
Read more...Yves here. I did a small study for a then midlevel, now top level Russian oligarch in the early 1990s who bought a US retail chain. It wasn’t exactly the most astute purchase. One of the factoids I came across in assisting him in figuring out how to scrub it up for resale was the […]
Read more...One of the defenses I occasionally hear about the Obama sellout to financiers runs something like this: “Obama isn’t interested in finance and economics, he delegated that to Summers and Geithner. Indeed, it was because he was so insecure in this area that he went with established figures who could [to use that horrid expression] […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist .hedge fund manager, and Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow My friend, Yves Smith, has posed the question as to why there is no political outlet for the anger on the left. In other words, where are today’s Huey Longs when you need them? It’s become patently obvious to anybody with […]
Read more...The notion that excessive supply can result in overly high costs no doubt contradicts most reader’s understanding of how markets work, but the market for medical services in the US bears no resemblance to an efficient market, in which buyers and sellers possess an equally good understanding of the merits of the goods and services […]
Read more...Some readers have wondered why this blog from time to time runs posts on the US health care system. Aside from the fact that it’s a major public policy problem in America, it is also a prime example of bad incentives, information asymmetry, and corporate predatory behavior. It thus makes for an important object lesson. […]
Read more...When analysts and commentators go through their laundry list of what ails the hopelessly overpriced US health care system, one of the most commonly cited reasons is the cost of “defensive medicine” meaning both the cost of medical malpractice policies to doctors, plus the costs of extra tests and procedures to provide doctors with cover […]
Read more...Stress will bring out an organism’s or an organization’s defenses, and the beleagured Obama administration is looking mighty defensive these days. The great unwashed public isn’t buying its PR about its supposed accomplishments, such as the disgrace that it misbrands as financial reform (which 80% are skeptical will prevent a future crisis) and health care […]
Read more...Don’t expect this updated assessment, that Medicare now is expected to be viable till 2029, to stem the expected push to gut Social Security and Medicare. From Bloomberg: Medicare will gain an extra 12 years of fiscal life as a result of the health law signed in March by President Barack Obama, a government report […]
Read more...This post first appeared on April 16, 2007 I always take note when a writer takes a position that is contrary to his usual stance. Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution is an intelligent and thoughtful commentator, but hews too closely to free market orthodoxy for my taste. But his review of Maggie Mahar’s Money- Driven […]
Read more...Reader Francois T highlighted a story at Washington Monthly that I recommend highly to readers. It illustrates how the intersection of corporate pursuit of profit and regulatory backfires can produce tidy oligopolies that pursue rent-seeking behavior with impunity. From his e-mail: A well-intentioned move by Congress in 1986, followed by another one in 1996 converted […]
Read more...For those who did not catch wind of it, the Peterson Foundation, which has long had Social Security and Medicare in its crosshairs, held a bizarre set of 19 faux town hall meetings over the previous weekend to scare participants into compliance and then collect the resulting distorted survey data, presumably to use in a […]
Read more...Readers may know I have perilous little sympathy for Big Pharma. The industry too often wraps itself in the mantle of science, in particular, claiming its needs its high profits and hence high prices to support its research and development efforts. In fact, it spends more on marketing than on R&D (and perilous few industries […]
Read more...The first section of this post is by Warren Mosler, the President of Valance Co. who writes for New Deal 2.0 Deficit doves are doing more harm than the hawks — here’s what they need to know. The deficit hawks are prevailing. The economy remains an economic and social disaster. Medicare has already been cut […]
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