The anniversary of Occupy Wall Street is September 17. While there will be public events in New York, it’s likely that number of people that will be involved will not be large enough to impress the punditocracy (multi-citi militarized crackdowns have a way of discouraging participation), leading them to declare OWS a flash in the pan.
That conclusion may be premature.
Read more...Bloomberg has developed a more detailed approach to looking at “misery” than the traditional “misery index,” which looked only at unemployment and inflation. They took their more granular method and used it to rank states in the US. This looks like a reasonable and useful metric, so I wish they had written a story detailing their approach and publishing the full ranking, but this TV clip gives the high points.
Read more...The economics discipline has for the most part managed to ignore the 800 pound gorilla in the room: that of the role that the financial services industry has come to play. Astonishingly, even though the reengineering of the world economy along the lines preferred by mainstream economists resulted in a prosperity-wrecking global financial crisis and a soft coup by financiers, the discipline carries on methodologically as if nothing much had happened. And one of its huge blind spots is its refusal to acknowledge the role of banking and finance in modern commerce.
Read more...Steve Waldman at Interfluidity today has an important post on what he calls “rational astrologies” or when it makes sense to hew to widely accepted belief systems, even when you know following them won’t necessarily produce the best outcomes. You really must read his post in full; I think the first part is terrific but have some quibbles when he tries extending his observation.
Read more...This interview with Chris Hedges on TVO, Ontario’s answer to the BBC, does not appear to have gotten the play it deserves in the US. Hedges discusses Occupy Wall Street from both a strategic and tactical perspective, discussing the conditions that affect the progress and success of revolutions, what he sees as the “no demands” canard, and his criticisms of Black Bloc tactics.
Read more...By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, and author of “The Bubble and Beyond,” which is available on Amazon.
The pace of Wall Street’s war against the 99% is quickening in preparation for the kill.
Read more...By Stephanie Kelton, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.
My Twitter followers are constantly asking me if I think more spending would really help the economy recover. I understand their skepticism.
Read more...While our prolonged economic downturn is concentrating power and wealth in fewer and fewer hands, it is also stimulating efforts to create more democratic business models.
Read more...Every week, it seems there’s another tragic story about a suicide or murder-suicides linked to foreclosure trauma. Some of the more spectacular murder-by-foreclosure stories the past few years have been collected by a blog called “Greenspan’s Body Count”—others, myself included, have been writing about these terrible stories of class warfare being waged by the only side fighting it, and winning it, as Warren Buffett rightly said.
Before the 2008 crisis, the media paid little attention to the death toll taken on Americans by the decades-long class warfare waged against the 99%. Now they’re impossible to ignore.
Read more...Since I can’t get worked up enough about the latest Fed minutes (short story: Mr. Market is unhappy because he wants his QE and doesn’t see evidence that it is imminent), it might instead be worth examining something quite curious: that Ambercrombie & Fitch is having trouble making sex sell.
Read more...By Michael Hoexter. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives. Part 1 of this post is available here
United as they are in their critique of neoclassical economics, it would be a mistake to portray post-Keynesians as united among themselves, a further complication for the emergence of any unified message from anti-austerity economists.
Read more...Yves here. While Marcy starts with the most obvious misrepresentation in a New York Times hagiography of Michigan governor Rick Snyder, the most troubling parts come later in her post. She illustrates how the Times airbrushes out Synder’s anti-labor, anti-democracy stance.
By Marcy Wheeler. Cross posted from emptywheel
Granted, it pertains to my right-wing governor, so it’s personal.
Read more...Occupy Tampa is preparing for the Republican convention. As I understand it, they will be allowed to use the Voice of Freedom park and are hosting the Food Not Bombs World Gathering starting tomorrow. You can follow them on Twitter at fnbsouthflorida.
Read more...Furzy mouse highly recommended this Discovery documentary. I’ve only looked at the beginning, but the comments about it at YouTube (as opposed to the ones arguing related historical issues) are very positive. And sadly, as the world moves in a more authoritarian direction, it becomes more and more necessary to study history if we are to have any hope of preventing extremists from putting a new social order in place.
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. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
We know that the supporters of austerity simultaneously urge us to reject “European socialism” while adopting the key European strategies that drove Europe into recession – twice. American conservatives assume that Europe must epitomize stringent financial regulation. The opposite is true. Europe adopted “light touch” financial regulation pursuant to neo-liberal economic theory. Its embrace of the three “de’s” – deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization was far more extreme than the United States. The City of London “won” the regulatory race to the bottom with the U.S. European’s adopted the full Basel II reduction in capital requirements without the minimum gearing ratio that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insisted upon. The FDIC prevailed over the intense, but fortunately unsuccessful opposition of the Federal Reserve economists who were the principal architects of Basel II’s disastrous reduction in capital requirements. The result was that European Union banks had roughly twice the leverage of U.S. banks and faced no meaningful regulatory restraints. The result was far larger real estate bubbles in several European nations (as a percentage of GDP) than in the U.S., multiple financial crises, and a Great Recession that reached depression levels in several nations.
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