OK, you remaining Obama fans: tell me why we should trust the biggest baiter and switcher in the history of the Presidency, particularly when he insists on unprecedented levels of secrecy? Because he has nice teeth and cute kids?
Read more...An article by doctors David U. Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandle, published by the Boston Fed, gives a stark picture of the extent and severity of medical indebtedness in the US, and why Obamacare won’t remedy that problem. And we’ll discuss later that getting the machinery running looks likely to be another serious shortcoming with the program.
Read more...Yves here. While readers may think development policy has limited relevance to US and advanced economy readers, the IMF and World Bank have been and continue to be vehicles to make the world, particularly smaller or otherwise more influenceable regimes, more friendly to the interests of US multinationals. And at the same time US companies are taking down a record share of GDP in profits, the country’s ranking in inequality is worse than that of many developing economies. New York City is more unequal than China, and as the chart below shows, is also more unequal than Russia, famed for its oligarchs, and India, which still has hundreds of millions living in abject poverty.
So the World Bank’s efforts over time to exclude issues like corruption and inequality from its analysis have direct and obvious parallels to policy discussions here. Wade’s anecdotes of the way the World Bank refused to even allow the “c” word to be acknowledged are striking.
Read more...Loyal Dems were over the moon with reports from California that the costs provided by insurers of various levels of plans on state exchanges were coming in under CBO estimates, as well as below prices on the current small-group market.. But early reports from other states give a more mixed picture.
Read more...Yves here. The consensus view among experts, despite considerable public opposition in Germany, is that the German Constitutional Court will not upend the Eurozone bailout mechanisms by ruling in favor of challenges to their legality. This confirms the policy issue that Dani Rodrik flagged in 2007: you can’t have national sovereignity, democracy, and deep integration of markets at the same time. You can have at most two of the three. Sadly, Europe looks ready to settle on only one on that list.
Read more...Obama is no longer bothering to pretend that he is anything other than a stooge for banks and other big money interests.
Read more...Yves here. It’s important to understand the scope and caliber of the police state apparatus that’s in place. The fact that it’s “dirty” meaning error-ridden and incomplete, is likely the big reason you have analysts like Edward Snowden with wide-ranging access. You still need humans to make connections and interpretations (and that introduces another layer for errors and plants to occur). And that also no doubt is used to justify even wider-ranging and more intrusive searches, such as NSA analysts listening to personal phone conversations of soldiers stationed in Iraq. That sort of casualness leads to abuses like NSA snoops inviting their colleagues to listen in on phone sex.
Read more...The Financial Times has caught a significant revolving door that its business press peers have largely overlooked.
Read more...Does anybody have a clear vision of the desirable financial system of the future?
Read more...Bill Black describes the spurious efforts to justify America’s recent fraudfests.
Read more...The first article in a series by Black on the remarkable, in the bad sense of the work, work by Nobel prize winners on regulation.
Read more...Warning: mortgage modifications can be yet another exercise in bank predation.
Read more...Yves here. Note how the need to pretend Deutsche Bank is not undercapitalized, mentioned in passing in this post, is playing into policy.
An interview by Yanis Varoufakis, Professor of Economics at the University of Athens, with Tomas Hirst of Pieria. Cross posted from Yanis Varoufakis’ blog.
Read more...The “March Against Monsanto” in 52 countries, an unapproved strain of its genetically modified wheat growing profusely in Oregon, cancelled wheat export orders…. A rough week for Monsanto. Now it threw in the towel in Europe where its deep pockets and mastery of lobbying had failed: “It’s counterproductive to fight against windmills,” it explained.
Read more...By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Standard Chartered and HSBC’s leaders must be doubly humiliated by the description by Mythili Raman, the acting head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Criminal Division, of Liberty Reserve’s money laundering operation. UK laws are, of course, very congenial to those suing for libel and I am sure that these banking titans are meeting with their solicitors to demand a retraction and apology from Raman.
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