By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller.
The big story on Tuesday was Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s win over unions and liberals, as voters ratified his attacks on public workers, the young, and women’s rights. But that vote was relatively close. Two other voter initiatives, in deep blue California, were not.
Read more...The world seems convinced that Europe, perhaps under duress, put together a large Solidarity Fund (the EFSF) for the purposes of helping the fiscally-stricken Eurozone member-states avoid bankruptcy once they were frozen out of the money markets. The criticisms waged at this type of ‘solidarity’ centred on two issues: First, that the Fund’s size was not large enough (and thus unable to help Italy and Spain). Secondly, that this Fund resembles more a Victorian Workhouse whose real purpose was not to show solidarity to its residents but, rather, to make their life so unpleasant as to deter able-bodied workers from ever seeking its assistance.
Read more...Here we go again….
As the Obama administration is quietly working towards a “Grade Bargain”, which is the current branding for “let’s put the middle class on the austerity rack just when the economy looks depression prone”, rating agency Fitch does its part by lobbing in a “the US needs to get its fiscal house in order” message.
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager
As several newspapers have recently highlighted, Germany is slowly but surely moving toward a plan to combine much of Europe’s bad debt into a single fund with the idea of paying it off over 25 years.
Read more...Yves here. The Financial Times and New York Times tonight both have good overviews on the state of play in the effort to contain a slow-motion Spanish bank run. On the one hand, the Spanish government is in a position to tell the Eurocrats that it will consider only a bank bailout and not be required to take on further austerity measures. Given that retail sales have fallen nearly 10% year to year, it’s hard to see how anyone could expect more austerity to be a good idea.
Although markets reacted as if a deal was imminent, the FT makes it sound as if quite a few details need to be ironed out. And no wonder…
Read more...By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller.
On Tuesday, Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker humiliated his Democratic opponent, Tom Barrett, by easily turning back a popular recall attempt sponsored by unions and liberal activists. The numbers in the election, which were supposed to be close, were ugly, in favor of the Republican. But this wasn’t just any Republican, Scott Walker is THE Republican, the politician who made his governorship a referendum on a hard right agenda, in a blue state.
Read more...Yesterday, various news and financial sites picked up the release last Friday of a report by the Treasury’s Inspector General titled “SAFETY AND SOUNDNESS: OCC’s Supervision of National Bank’s Foreclosure Practices“. The media accounts are workman-like summaries with titles like “Bank oversight office failed to spot foreclosure fraud, Treasury inspector general says.”
The problem is that these various accounts are narrowly accurate (in that they summarize the report) but missed the real story.
Read more...Due to being a bit under the gun before taking off for our holiday (I hope you all enjoyed the posts from Matt Stoller, Lambert, and the other guest writers), we didn’t address a May 10 speech by the acting FDIC chairman, Martin Gruenberg, on the FDIC’s current thinking on how to resolve so called systemically important financial institutions, or SIFIs. I’m turning to this despite the delay because I see some people who ought to know better, such as the normally solid John Hussmann, taking the FDIC”s claims at face value.
Read more...Here’s Barney Frank, in an exit interview recently in New York Magazine, revealing unwittingly that Obama during the transition rejected a Bush administration concession to write down mortgages. Here’s what Barney said.
Read more...The mortgage crisis was worsened this past time because critical decisions were made during the transition between Bush and Obama. We voted the TARP out. The TARP was basically being administered by Hank Paulson as the last man home in a lame duck, and I was disappointed. I tried to get them to use the TARP to put some leverage on the banks to do more about mortgages, and Paulson at first resisted that, he just wanted to get the money out. And after he got the first chunk of money out, he would have had to ask for a second chunk, he said, all right, I’ll tell you what, I’ll ask for that second chunk and I’ll use some of that as leverage on mortgages, but I’m not going to do that unless Obama asks for it. This is now December, so we tried to get the Obama people to ask him and they wouldn’t do it.
By Tom Ferguson, Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Cross posted from Alternet
It’s good that the watchdog is barking, but we’d all better watch closely to see if it will bite.
Read more...As regular readers no doubt recall, Eric Schneiderman abandoned the dissident state attorney general effort to get a better mortgage settlement, assuring the Administration a win on this sellout to the banks. The bright shiny prize Schneiderman got in return for his betrayal was serving as one of five co-chairmen on a Federal mortgage task force, which appears to have gotten close to nada in resources beyond the staff in various Federal agencies who were already working on mortgage investigations. And given that were are now close to a full five years past the origination of toxic subprime deals, those existing investigations don’t exactly look to have been pursued with much in the way of vigor.
Read more...Paul Krugman’s partisanship has become so shameless that we are giving him the inaugural Eric Schneiderman Decoy Award for his post “Things Fall Apart“. The Schneiderman Decoy Award goes for exceptional achievement in turning one’s good name over to particularly rancid Obama Administration initiatives.
Read more...Last month, shareholders finally rebelled against Citigroup, the worst of the Too Big To Fail bailout disasters, by filing a lawsuit against outgoing chairman Dick Parsons and handful of executives for stuffing their pockets while running the bank into the ground.
Anyone familiar with Dick Parsons’ past could have told you his term as Citigroup’s chairman would end like this: Shareholder lawsuits, executive pay scandals, and corporate failure on a colossal scale.
Read more...We’ve featured past Real News Network segments on the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. UNCTAD has increasingly become a forum for struggles between advanced economies and developing economies over what the rules of the road should be in trade. UNCTAD was early to call the benefits of financialization into question, and has also been taking issue with the comparatively small take countries in the “south” get from extended supply chain production. This, needless to say, is a vision that is a direct challenge to how multinational like to conduct their affairs, so it should be no surprise that the big, rich countries are trying to bring UNCTAD to heel.
Read more...It has come to our attention that an article by Tom Ferguson, the political scientist who is generally recognized as the expert on the role of money in American politics, had an article posted on TPM’s website on April 17, 2008, which appears to have been removed from the site.
Read more...