We have now passed the event horizon into a world run by Dr. Pangloss. In a Sunday afternoon post, Paul Krugman enthusiastically endorses an IMF presentation by Larry Summers which depicts asset bubbles as necessary and desirable. And that means they both agree they should not only continue, they should be encouraged.
Read more...This is the first segment of an ongoing project, Eurowinter, to record the human toll of austerity policies in Europe. It focuses on the suffering Greece, as told by Greeks themselves.
Read more...ves here. Pettis highlights the difficulties of restructuring the Chinese economy to feature more small business lending and consumption and calls them “political.” I’m not sure I agree fully.
Read more...Yves here. I’ve been loath to write about the prosecution of SAC Capital because I’ve viewed it as a misuse of scarce SEC and DoJ resources. We had a global financial crisis and they make their top priorities two hedgie insider traders, Raj Rajaratnam and Steve Cohen?
Read more...The “enrollment” numbers for the Healthcare.gov website, even using the Administration’s Orwellian definition of “enrolled” was barely above half of the scary bad number published as a rumor by the Wall Street Journal earlier this week.. Generous application of porcine maquillage followed.
Read more...Absent sitting on the Supreme Court, it is difficult for a single judge to effect much change. Yet Jed Rakoff, in sending the SEC back to the woodshed in two separate cases over its failure to get factual admissions, meaning admissions of misconduct, on civil settlements of SEC cases, singlehandedly embarrassed the SEC and the Department of Justice into seeking these statements (for instance, numerous media reports indicate that the Administration wants that sort of confession as part of its pending settlement with JP Morgan).
Rakoff threw down another gauntlet in a New York Bar Association speech on Tuesday.
Read more...Wow, this is amazing. Word has apparently gotten out even to Congressmen who can normally be lulled to sleep with the invocation of the magic phrase “free trade” that the pending Trans Pacific Partnership is toxic. But this isn’t over until the fat lady sings. So this is the time when it is REALLY important to call or e-mail your Representative and let him or her know how terrible this deal is and how firmly opposed to it you are.
Read more...Given how similar they sound and how easy it is to imagine one leading to the other, confusing omniscience (having total knowledge) with omnipotence (having total power) is easy enough. But at the moment, Washington seems to be operating in a world in which the more you know about the secret lives of others, the less powerful you turn out to be.
Read more...An analysis at Bloomberg Law puts some numbers down that I hadn’t seen all in one place previously. The headline effort is to pin down what other banks being sued by the FHFA over mortgage-backed securities passed to Fannie and Freddie with poor underwriting will have to pay, given the standard set by the JPMorgan Chase settlement for $4 billion. The report, by Nela Richardson, actually botches that job by adding the $1.1 billion that FHFA simultaneously received from JPMorgan through reps and warranties on raw mortgages, and doing the calculations based on a $5.1 billion award. Only the $4 billion has anything to do with the lawsuit, which was about $33 billion in Fannie and Freddie purchases of MBS. In other words, FHFA netted about 12 cents on the dollar from JPMorgan. Redoing Richardson’s work, you can calculate how much that means other banks would be expected to pay FHFA in any settlement if they paid 12 cents on the dollar:
Read more...No wonder the Administration has been tap dancing about results of the Obamacare launch.
Read more...For a while now I have been arguing that Europe’s policies for reducing the public debts of fiscally stressed member-states can be described as a Ponzi austerity scheme. In this post I attempt precisely to define ‘Ponzi austerity’.
Read more...If a bad job market wasn’t damaging enough, the cost of paying off student loans does much more harm to the long-term prospects of young people than is commonly realized.
Read more...Once again, if you want to understand what has gone wrong with the funding of research, economists bear a lot of the blame.
Read more...Yves here. This post by Gaius not only reports on the latest rumors surrounding the Fukushima clean up (such as it is) but also the huge danger the site poses to Japan and the US if it is not stabilized.
Read more...Yves here. While readers may contend that Michael Olenick’s case is an outlier and anecdotes are not the same as data, the extreme secretiveness of the Obama Administration combined with deliberately misleading statistics leads one to give some weight to anecdote in the absence of better facts.
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