To quote famed short seller David Einhorn: “No matter how bad you think it is, it’s worse.” On the “corruption among what passes for our elites” front, this story about self-dealing in the privatization of the Postal Service gives an indication of how bad things really are.
Read more...Yet another aspect of Gary Shteyngart’s dystopian fiction novel Super Sad True Love Story is coming true for reals this week.
Besides anticipating Occupy Wall Street, as well as Bloomberg’s sweep of Zuccotti Park (although getting it wrong on how utterly successful such sweeping would be), Shteyngart proposed the idea of instant, real-time and broadcast credit ratings.
Read more...Last week Obama began to make threats regarding a new college ranking system and its connection to federal funding. Here’s an excerpt of what he was talking about, from this WSJ article:
Read more...The president called for rating colleges before the 2015 school year on measures such as affordability and graduation rates—”metrics like how much debt does the average student leave with, how easy is it to pay off, how many students graduate on time, how well do those graduates do in the workforce,” Mr. Obama told a crowd at the University at Buffalo, the first stop on a two-day bus tour.
The pitch-perfect parody of the year goes to The Onion for their editorial from CNN.com’s managing editor (whose actual name was used in the story), “Let Me Explain Why Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance Was Our Top Story This Morning.”
It goes on from there, basically defining the phenomenon of click-bait, where websites run deliberately titillating stories with little or no redeeming value in a desperate stab for attention.
I think yesterday counts as the first-ever clickbait lawsuit, filed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
Read more...Not that we needed additional evidence, but the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has found more fraud and theft inside the nation’s mortgage servicing operations. CFPB has examiners in both bank and non-bank servicers; this is the first time non-bank servicers have faced such scrutiny. And their new report on Supervisory Highlights for the summer shows that extremely little has changed, despite a gauntlet of settlements that were supposed to end this conduct (OK, not really).
Read more...Normally I’d relegate a good job of news spadework to the daily Links feature, but Bloomberg caught out Attorney General Eric Holder in such an egregious lie that this failed con job merits ample, widespread publicity and well-deserved derision.
Read more...The private equity firm Mortgage Resolution Partners looks to be well on its way to getting the good uses of eminent domain torpedoed by getting some not-too-swift municipalities to sign up for its self-serving scheme. One indicator of how dubious the MPR program is that investors who have been complacent in the face of all sorts of abuses by originators and servicers, have roused themselves to act in a unified manner and push back against the MRP plan, in the form of a suit filed in Federal court in California on Wednesday.
Read more...Just as government corruption and private sector looting have exploded in the last thirty years, so too have police shakedowns. Iin some places, such as a stretch of road in East Texas, civil forfeiture is a mechanism for local cops to separate people with out of state or rental license plates from their jewelry and cash. In other places, cars and even homes are the objects of the official seizures.
Read more...Even more so than most cities, Chicago has had the best government money can buy. In this case, the money is willing to engage in a scorched-earth policy of crushing local investors and wrecking the city budget to achieve its end of taming unions and making Chicago even easier pickings for looting via infrastructure sales.
Read more...Eliot Spitzer, now the top contender to be the next New York City Comptroller, has said he wants to use the office to pursue financial reform. He has a ready, obvious, and comparatively easy target: the private equity industry.
Read more...Michael Hudson was so incensed by what he called a “Blairesque” speech by Obama on Wednesday that he took it upon himself to comment on its all-too-frequent sleights of hand and outright fabrications
Read more...By lambert strether of Corrente.
Obama’s career transition from selling hope and change to selling insurance seems to be, at least so far, a wee bit rocky. Kudos to WaPo’s Sarah Kliff and Sandhya Somashekhar for breaking the story of the newest #FAIL, which required them to process 600 pages of dense HHS prose on July 5; a classic Friday document dump, with bonus points for the holiday weekend, and super double bonus sparkle pony points for following hard on the heels of another huge #FAIL, Obama’s triage of the employer reporting mandate (chirped White House apparatchick Valerie Jarrett: “We are full steam ahead for the Marketplaces [exchanges] opening on October 1.” Right onto the rocks, Val!). Kliff and Somashekhar write:
Read more...When union members demand decent pay levels and work conditions, they are charged with featherbedding and overmanning or the new neoliberal catchall, “demanding uncompetitive wages”. But when the upper crust loots institutions, the mainstream media is typically missing in action.
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.
Read more...For those immune to Apple lust or otherwise unwilling to cut the Cupertino giant slack just because it has sleek products and cool stores, a new article by tax maven Lee Sheppard at Forbes gives a layperson-friendly overview of how Apple managed to keep $44 billion of revenues out of the hands of the tax men.
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