During the protracted negotiations over what was to become the 49 state/Federal mortgage settlement, New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman was hailed as a progressive leader and California’s Kamala Harris was characterized as an opportunist.
Turns out the opportunist cut a much better deal for her constituents than the supposed true believer.
Read more...Jack Lew really needs to get better at lying in public. So far, he’s making a hash of it.
Read more...By Lynn Parramore, a senior editor at Alternet. Cross posted from Alternet
The LIBOR price-fixing scam has cost at least $110 million — in the state of Oregon alone!
Read more...A relatively unforeseen implosion in housing markets figured prominently in the 2007 meltdown in capital markets and the subsequent downturn in the global economy. This column presents new research on the political geography of subprime lending. Congressional leaders – as well as other recipients of campaign contributions – may have benefited from gains to trade in the direction, pricing, and sizing of subprime mortgage loans.
Read more...The consternation at the not-exactly-a-surprise nomination of billionaire Penny Pritzker to be Commerce Secretary, is sadly much less than is warranted. That suggests that the Forbes 400 member will survive her confirmation hearings. And in a telling bit of synchronicity, last week some fauxgressives set about amplifying an article in the Nation that big bank lobbying efforts were the reason Dodd Frank was amounting to very little. As we’ll discuss, both reflect how much Obama supports the interests of the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate).
Read more...Yves here. I had really wanted to write this piece, but Lynn Parramore beat me to the punch. There’s been almost universal enthusiasm for Brown-Vitter, legislation proposed by Sherrod Brown and David Vitter to get tough with the too-big-to-fail banks. The legislation is sufficiently stringently written that if it were enacted (big if), it would force the banks to make changes to maintain anything remotely resembling their previous profit margins. Goldman and Morgan Stanley would probably drop their banking licenses and the other US systemically dangerous banks would presumably downsize by hiving off major operations.
So what’s not to like? The problem is that the enthusiasts haven’t looked behind the curtain. This bill is being pushed, hard, by big insurers, who would be major winners.
Read more...It’s been far too long in coming, but Jamie Dimon may finally be getting his comeuppance.
Read more...By Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist and a member of the Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Group. Cross posted from mathbabe
I recently read and article off the newsstand called The Rise of Big Data, It was written by Kenneth Neil Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger and it was published in the May/June 2013 edition of Foreign Affairs, which is published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). I mention this because CFR is an influential think tank, filled with powerful insiders, including people like Robert Rubin himself, and for that reason I want to take this view on big data very seriously: it might reflect the policy view before long.
I’m glad it’s not all rainbows and sunshine when it comes to big data in this article. Unfortunately, whether because they’re tied to successful business interests, or because they just haven’t thought too deeply about the dark side, their concerns seem almost token, and their examples bizarre.
Read more...Wellie, we finally witness an exception that proves Krugman’s rule about hopeless partisan rancor. Republicans and quite a few Democrats gave the raspberry to Obama’s nomination of Mel Watt to replace Ed DeMarco as the head of the FHFA, which oversees Fannie and Freddie.
Read more...By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus
Discussions of centralized planning in the West often take it for granted that the Soviet Union and similar social systems are the only ones with centralized planning. This is a basic (albeit ideological) confusion that results from the belief that markets and centralized planning are incompatible. This is not the case
Read more...By David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, the co-authors and co-editors of seven books and 85 articles on a variety of industrial and occupational hazards, including Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution and, most recently, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children. Rosner is a professor of history at Columbia University and co-director of the Center for the History of Public Health at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. Markowitz is a professor of history at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Cross posted from TomDispatch
A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can’t escape it in our cars. It’s in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, young and old. And there’s a reason why you’ve never read about it in the newspaper or seen a report on the nightly news: it has no name — and no antidote.
Read more...Yves here. We’re a little EU-centric tonight as a result of a wealth of particularly good material, which is often a sign that stresses are rising (there was tons of good material in the runup to the crisis as well).
By Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Professor of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Luis Garicano, Research Fellow with the Productivity and Innovation Programme, Centre for Economic Performance; Professor of Economics and Strategy, Departments of Management and of Economics. Cross posted from VoxEU
By the end of the 1990s, under the incentive of Eurozone entry, most peripheral European countries were busy undertaking structural reforms and putting their fiscal houses in order. This column argues that the arrival of the euro, and the subsequent interest-rate convergence, loosened a tide of cheap money that reversed the incentives for further reforms. As a result, by the end of the euro’s first decade, the institutions and governance in the Eurozone periphery were in worse shape than they were at the start of the decade.
Read more...Imagine you’ve just landed a job with a big-time retailer. Your task is to load and unload boxes from trucks and containers. It’s back-breaking work. You toil 12 to 16 hours a day, often without a lunch break. Sweat drenches your clothes in the 90-degree heat, but you keep going: your kids need their dinner. One day, your supervisor tells you that instead of being paid an hourly wage, you will now get paid for the number of containers you load or unload. This will be great for you, your supervisor says: More money! But you open your next paycheck to find it shrunken to the point that you are no longer even making minimum wage. You complain to your supervisor, who promptly sends you home without pay for the day. If you pipe up again, you’ll be looking for another job.
Read more...Your humble blogger was surprised when Obama nominated Mary Jo White to head the SEC, since her reputation as a tough prosecutor is at odds with Obama’s well established pattern of catering to banks (the fact that he gives them only 97% of what they want is nevertheless offensive enough to their tender sensibilities). I surmised that there had to be an angle here…
Read more...By Delusional Economics, who is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2013/02/europe-waits-for-italy/“>MacroBusiness.
Another chapter in the Italy political story comes to a close as a government is formed, for how long who knows, but a familiar figure appears to be playing puppet master…
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