The Naked Capitalism community has spoken loudly and clearly. You’ve said you want this site to be more effective and you’ve been willing to provide tangible backing for your desire to have us demystify finance, call out chicanery in high places, parse propaganda, and in our small way, help promote the creation of a more just society.
Read more...I’ve always been a big believer in the comments section, because you correct me, give ideas and information, and make my work and that of the other bloggers better. What’s happened this week took that up a level. It’s always a bit lonely to throw out ideas into the void, to see if they resonate with others. Over the past few years, and especially over the past week, you have showed me that we are actually a community, a group of people who believe together in justice. Individually, you decided to put your resources on the line to make sure that we keep going, grow, and get better, that our words and ideas matter. This is essential, it’s the first part of creating a different society, where we assert our own collective dignity.
Read more...Thanks to the many readers who have so generously responded to our appeal, we’ve beaten our target of 750 donors and are now at just over 825. Since we had over 200 of you contribute yesterday, we’d like to see if we can reach the new target of 1000 by midnight PST.
So far, your investments have paid for improvements we’ll be acting on in the upcoming months: upgrades to site speed and service, a travel budget, meaningful “thank yous” to the regular guest bloggers, vacation support to keep the site vibrant while I get some R&R, a grab bag of smaller site enhancements, like a mobile version of the site and audio equipment for podcasts, and using more support staff for specific tasks so I can spend less time on administration and more on site content. We have already given the go-ahead for a server upgrade, and one reader is trying to find a way to make compressing the antidote du jour photos easy for me to do every day (this will also evidently improves site performance a lot). One reader has a draft version of a mobile site I hope to be able to show you later today (he’s tweaking some recalcitrant bits).
The goal here is to build a culture where we pay for truth, instead of being lied to for free. Guest posters Matt Stoller and Mark Ames have described why we are engaged in this effort: because elite financiers have sought to create an information monopoly in the media and inside the Beltway, and Naked Capitalism has become one of a small number of sites that cuts through their propaganda.
Read more...So far, we’ve had over 620 of you chip in for our fundraiser, and are well on our way to reaching our goal of 750 donations. So far, these contributors have paid for upgrades to site speed and service, a travel budget, meaningful “thank yous” to the regular guest bloggers, vacation support to keep the site vibrant while I get some R&R, and a grab bag of smaller site enhancements, like a mobile version of the site and audio equipment for podcasts. Thanks to your speedy response, we’ve given our tech support the go ahead to get moving on the site upgrade, and we’ll be showing you a possible site design for your input in the next few days.
The goal here is to build a culture where we pay for truth, instead of being lied to for free
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 you’ve ever spend time physically going to and from Capitol Hill on the subway or the buses, it’s pretty hard not to notice the advertising. This isn’t standard advertising, for soap or consumer products, it’s advertising for corporate lobbying. Boeing splays posters all over Capitol South about their job creating efforts, JP Morgan for American innovation, and the American Association for I Just Set Up This Coalition to Push Corrupt Products for whatever the lobbyists have dreamt up that day.
The Hill trade publications have these same ads; in fact you can pretty much tell what is being fought over in Congress by the ad campaigns. Lobbyists take a slice of their budget, put it into ads, and thereby ensure that all information channels into policy-makers are owned by industry-friendly sources. Journalists on the Hill often go back and forth between staff jobs, think tanks, and lobby shops. This has traditionally formed a high wall around policy-making. With traditional tools of lobbying, campaign finance, and private think tanks replacing government expertise, the wall has traditionally been impenetrable.
Read more...Thanks to our generous and responsive readers, we met our fourth target (blog support so we can take a real vacation) late Monday evening. As of midnight EST, we hit 470 donors out of our target of 750. We also had a fund manager approach us about paying a research fee quarterly, as it does to some independent analysts. Quite a few readers told us after the crisis that our commentary helped them escape losses, and some investors also said NC was responsible for some profitable trades. And as much as our focus post the implosion has shifted to covering the failure to implement meaningful reforms, our ongoing coverage of current developments and underlying trends in the markets and the economy is still valuable to investors small and large.
Our fifth target is a grab bag of site enhancements.
Read more...I’m in the air on the way to the AmeriCatalyst concerence in Austin on mortgages and securitization, where I am speaking on two panels, the keynote (!) and the final one on litigation. Adam Levitin is also on the second panel, and I was looking forward to having his help in fighting the defenders of the “nothing to see here, move right along” school of thought, but he is now one of the moderators. So I have to go it alone. Wish me luck.
We were just short of meeting the the third target (nice ex-post facto honoraria to our loyal guest bloggers) when I left NYC, and we’ve met it now, so thanks for your great response! As of 4:30 PM EST, 300 of you of our goal of 750 have generously contributed.
We are now on our way to meeting our next target, which is a purely selfish one: I want a real vacation!
Read more...Dear readers, if you are a weekday only reader or sensibly were off the grid yesterday, please visit our kickoff post where we tell you what we hope to accomplish with our fundraiser.
I really appreciate the speedy and generous responses. It was a bit distracting yesterday, in a good way, to see all the PayPal notifications, “Check is in the mail” messages (the kickoff post gives you the sordid details), and updates from James B., who is processing non-PayPal credit card donations via this link.
Our first target was $4700 for upgrading both the site hosting and the level of site support. You met that in 6 hours. Our next target was $10,500 for travel, which will include travel expenses for some members of our core team (for instance, Andrew Dittmer, who was of great help on ECONNED and is going to be coming from Boston to NYC periodically to work on one of the OWS committees. He also did security duty at Zuccotti Park last night). We met the second target by midnight. We are up to 159 donors, and our target for the week is 750 (some of our donors thus far have given us quite sizable contributions, but we also value the participation of those of you who are on limited budgets but still want to say thanks).
The third target is…
Read more...This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week! Please support our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. For details on how to participate, please see our kickoff post.
Thanks to our loyal Saturday morning readers! We’ve already gotten just shy of 100 donations in the first six hours (out of our fundraiser target of 750 donors), and blew past our first target, which was $4700 to provide for upgraded tech support, which will provide for faster loading times, better ability to handle traffic spikes on big news days (as in fewer/shorter outages) and faster resolution of other site issues.
Our second goal is $10,000 for travel, and as of 1:00 PM, we already have over $1700 towards that target.
Read more...One of the things that I suspect has brought many of you to Naked Capitalism is the hard lesson that conventional wisdom in finance and economics has been very costly to ordinary citizens around the world. If you had believed the prevailing world view of early 2007, that markets were efficient and bad actors would of course be found out and shunned, that were were in the midst of a Great Moderation and could expect to enjoy continued prosperity, punctuated by shallow recessions, and that financial innovation was a boon and therefore to be encouraged, you had an ugly awakening. The global financial crisis imposed tremendous costs on investors and society at large, via unemployment, a housing bust, plunging tax revenues, cuts in government services and increasing political discord.
Yet no one in power before the crisis has been punished or even suffered much. In fact, 2009 and 2010 Wall Street bonuses exceeded the record levels of 2007. As former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson described in a May 2009 Atlantic article, the US instead suffered a quiet coup, with the top end of the financial services industry becoming more concentrated, more powerful, even more concentrated and more firmly in charge of the political apparatus.
Most of you understand this. It’s awfully hard not to notice that we have a two-tier system of justice, in which the major financial firms get to flout the law and violate their own contracts, yet are able to get their agreements enforced against seemingly everyone, from credit card, mortgage, and student debt borrowers to municipalities who entered into risk-laden swaps they didn’t understand to nations like Greece, where a clearly insolvent borrower cannot get a deep enough restructuring out of fear of triggering payouts on credit default swaps. But complexity, leverage, and opacity have been the big banks’ best friends in executing this program of looting. You’ve come here to get educated so you won’t be so easily taken next time.
So the lies that the elite financiers have peddled appeared to be free, when in fact, many of them were sold via clever messaging and lobbying.
Read more...Three weeks ago, I asked for some input about the blog, and the possibility of a fundraiser. Many of you were so kind as to say “attagirl”, give me lots of good advice, as well as offers of assistance, both in comments and privately. I feel guilty that I have not been able to thank you all, since I continue to be chronically time stressed (my inbox is a war zone, and I do hope to get back to those of you I have not yet responded to by the weekend).
Read more...We have multiple channels for helping support this site. The first are here on the blog, the “Donate” and “Subscribe” buttons in the upper right, both of which take you to PayPal (the charge will be in the name of Aurora Advisors). If you are allergic to PayPal, you can send a check (or multiple […]
Read more...Dear faithful readers,
I’ve been giving some thought to what to do to make Naked Capitalism a more effective and appealing voice. The big constraint is me.
Read more...By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
You know that the debt kerfuffle is as staged as melodramatically as a World Wrestling Federation exhibition when Mr. Obama makes the blatantly empty threat that if Congress does not “tackle the tough challenges of entitlement and tax reform,” there won’t be money to pay Social Security checks next month. In his debt speech last night (July 25), he threatened that if “we default, we would not have enough money to pay all of our bills – bills that include monthly Social Security checks, veterans’ benefits, and the government contracts we’ve signed with thousands of businesses.”
This is not remotely true. But it has become the scare theme for over a week now.
Read more...I’ve noticed in the last six to nine months a marked increase in new folks showing up in comments who don’t look, for want of a better word, organic. No, I don’t mean Berkeley-Bikrenstock-wearing-save-the-whales-and-wolves-and-frogs-granolaheads. I mean people who found the blog out of curiosity and decided to pipe up versus ones who look to be here strictly to pursue a narrow agenda.
Why don’t I think this change is random?
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