One big difference between West Coast and East Coast oligarchs is that a lot fewer people lionize the Eastern ones. But a pending lawsuit may finally tarnish some Silicon Valley halos.
Read more...So many of the assertions made about “maximizing shareholder value” are false that they should be assumed to be a lie until proven otherwise.
Read more...San Francisco may be extreme, but housing bubbles are now re-cropping up across the nation – and so are the very factors that helped inflate the prior housing bubble and then magnified the ferociousness of its implosion.
Read more...Yves here. I’m featuring this post in part as a development exercise to Cliff, a German economist who has been blogging off and on since 2011 and plans to post on a more consistent basis. He has been warned that the NC readership can be rough. His thesis: “Home production may be a popular or cultural preference, economically sensible it is not.”
Read more...Yes sports fans, New York City’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, is showing his true colors as a liberal by….pointedly not plowing the Upper East Side.
But is this really an effective gesture to stick it to the 1%, or even the top 5% in Manhattan (which is a lot higher income than the top 5% elsewhere)?
Read more...Minimum-wage increases are associated with a lower probability that a job will end, and with a lower probability that an unemployed person will find work.
Read more...So now we know why the Republicans have been going to such extreme lengths to try to preserve embattled New Jersey governor Chris Christie as a national figure…
Read more...The Fed is explicitly relying on the wealth effect to stimulate spending. It’s theory is that if asset values rise, people will feel richer and spend more. But that’s not exactly how this movie is playing out.
Read more...Why you can be sure Obama’s talking up progressive issues, like minimum wages, is another effort to re-entice (and re-deceive) the left-leaning voters that voted him in in 2008.
Read more...Chile is often a social laboratory that gives an advance view of what is coming……
Read more...Stock speculator Jay Gould remarked, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” That, sports fans, is the real foundation of the generational warfare propaganda effort.
Read more...In this segment, Thomas Cahill, author of the Hinges of History series and former director of religious publishing for Doubleday, discusses how Pope Francis is upsetting both conservatives in the Catholic Church and the public generally through his stress on traditional Christian values.
Read more...A new Bloomberg story, Americans on Wrong Side of Income Gap Run Out of Means to Cope, is a zeitgeist indicator: the normally-well-insulated-from-realty investing classes have noticed that large swathes of what was once the middle class aren’t just downwardly mobile but are struggling.
Read more...f you come to San Francisco or Silicon Valley and look around, you’d arrive at the conclusion that California is booming, that companies jump through hoops to hire people, that they douse them with money, stock options, and free lunches. But in the rest of the state, the picture isn’t that rosy.
Read more...A Christmas Carol is often mistakenly charged with creating our contemporary, festive, largely secular Christmas. And while that may have been one of Dickens’ motives, a bigger one is more obvious: that of better treatment of children and the working poor.
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