Even during the pre-Lehman days of the financial crisis (yes, Virginia, there were three acute episodes before the Big One), blogs and professional investors in my various e-mail conversations would discuss the idea that the Fed had a “plunge protection team” which would intervene to stem market routs.
Read more...France’s government is struggling to stay relevant….and Groupe BPCE may have provided an answer by telling Germany to pay up or exit the Eurozone.
Read more...Several bellwether software initiatives have gone off the rails over the last five years. I am going to focus on one, because I learned about it on Naked Capitalism, and is where I first saw the expression “Code is Law”. I hope when history is written, this example will stand out on how the anarchist nerds that we call software engineers inadvertently started to hijack public institutions.
Read more...A conversation with Phil Pilkington on Europe’s disgraceful triumphalism regarding Ireland’s ‘exit’ from its ‘bailout’
Read more...The best political system that money can buy is doing a great job for its customers and a lousy job for the rest of us.
Read more...It has been a good generation to be involved with software. The scarcity of the skillset combined with the demand for the output have generated outsized incomes, while the work has been consistently rewarding. Our quirky group of builders has had an outsized influence on our industries, not to mention our culture and ideals. But that influence is looking less benign as the rigid procedures of computing are changing commercial relationships and the application of the law.
Read more...A report issued by McKinsey Global Institute last week on the real world impact of QE warrants more scrutiny than it has gotten so far.
Read more...By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Here’s something to listen to with your morning coffee; it’s a lecture on co-operatives, with Q&A following, by Gar Alperowitz at the New Economy Summit in Boone, NC, in April of this year. I like the title, because the agency in “What Then Must We Do” is explicit, in contrast (intentional or not) to [Anglophone usage of] Lenin’s famous “What Is To Be Done” (sez who?) where lack of agency signals the Bolshevik’s intent to tell people what was to be done. We know how that movie ended; there were a lot of movies that ended that way in the 20th Century. The video:
Read more...When we pull away the camouflage that New York Times reporter Calmes deploys to obscure matters, the “dirty secret” that emerges is that key members of both parties realize that the purported “Grand Bargain” actually represents a self-destructive Grand Betrayal that should be opposed.
Read more...Buried on CNN’s website is a story about an early Obamacare success…
Read more...One of the proofs that Obamacare is really about helping insurers and Big Pharma rather than ordinary Americans is its failure to do much about the seamy practice known as balance billing.
Read more...Yves here. I have to confess that the big reason I’m partial to this article is it is consistent with my experience. Metricization of business, and worse, employee performance, has become a fetish.
Read more...Yves here. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in hoping for the best from the new journalistic venture funded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar that Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, among others, have joined with much fanfare. But the fact that one wishes them well should not blind observers to the possible large flies in the ointment.
Read more...By Don Quijones, a freelance writer and translator based in Barcelona, Spain. His blog, Raging Bull-Shit, is a modest attempt to challenge some of the wishful thinking and scrub away the lathers of soft soap peddled by our political and business leaders and their loyal mainstream media. Cross posted from Testosterone Pit
There are certain things politicians should never do – assuming, that is, they want to hold on to their jobs. Using the dirty “s” word (sovereignty) for example, is a definite no-no. Also high up on the list of “don’t dos” is threatening the interests of foreign creditors and bondholders.
Yet this is precisely what Oriol Junqueras, the firebrand leader of Esquerra Republicana Catalana (ERC), the second largest party in Catalonia’s government coalition, did last week
Read more...Yves here. The post below by Michael Klare is hardly radical; in fact, the Department of Defense has been for at least the last five years working on geopolitical scenarios that give a large role to climate change induced political instability, such as mass migrations out of heavily populated low-lying areas. So as much as Klare anticipates more and more popular uprisings, I’d anticipate that the powers that be are expecting them and are prepared to suppress them brutally. Thus the places they might succeed are in advanced economies with comparatively little police brutality in large cities (ie, where you’d have lots of media coverage which would constrain how harsh the retaliation would be).
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