A tangible sign that the issue of income inequality is taking hold in the American psyche: Tyler Cowen has made a patently ridiculous effort to try to change the topic, and Megan McArdle is dutifully amplifying it.
Read more...Yves here. I’m featuring the key portion of a post by Varoufakis, which is his rough reconstruction of the conclusion of an unscripted talk before the Caledonian Club in London on “Global and European Recovery: What Will it Take?”
Read more...The tone of media reports is that things are getting better after the storm, which is no doubt largely true, but there are still a lot of people in distress and discomfort.
Read more...Around the anniversary of the official birth of Occupy Wall Street, a host of bank affiliated financial reporters used the occasion to designate the movement a failure in surprisingly strident terms. Why the need to kick a dead horse?
Read more...The spectacle of failure being rewarded during the financial crisis while the rest of us suffered in the resulting economic downdraft has led even people who are cautious about regulation in goods markets to acknowledge that finance is different and needs vigilant oversight. The fact that Elizabeth Warren took her job as the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel seriously produced a huge win for the public. And that is the sort of thing you’d expect if we had more tough-minded regulators 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
Obama intends to begin to unravel the safety net (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) to convince the Republicans to enter into this Faustian bargain. Just as only a conservative Republican could visit “Red” China, only a Democrat can begin the destruction of the safety net. The difference, of course, is that normalizing relations with China was a good thing while unraveling the safety net is a terrible thing.
Read more...It’s peculiar to have been in the midst of the superstorm and have suffered pretty much nada in the way of immediate effects.
Read more...It’s been remarkable to witness the public complacency in the face of the certain-in-trajectory, less-clear-in-details “Grand Bargain” that Obama and Romney are determined to foist on the hapless middle class and poor in this country. One part of the deficit equation that has gotten comparatively little attention: the fact that the military appears likely to be spared the budget axe.
Read more...One of the rationales generally regarded as a knockout among center-left types in the “who is less terrible, Romney or Obama” debate, is the idea that Presidents nominate Supreme Court justices, and Romney’s picks would be further to the right than Obama’s, particularly as far as their position on social issues like reproductive choice and gay rights are concerned. However, the power to nominate is not the same as the power to appoint. It’s disingenuous for Democratic party operatives and their allies in the punditocracy to act as if the move of the court to the right is solely the doing of evil Republicans.
Read more...By Michael M. Thomas, who figured out Wall Street was not all it was cracked up to be before most of you were born
More than any other forum, Naked Capitalism consistently suggests and proposes new ways to bridge what I consider the abyss that will one day sink us all if Koch brothers-style politics and capitalism have their way: the chasm that lies between what we need to know and what we have been (and will be) allowed to know.
Read more...It was stunning when the news first broke that Rajat Gupta, former head of McKinsey, and member of blue chip boards, most notably, Goldman Sachs, Proctor & Gamble, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was charged with insider trading. Why would someone who was already rich, and more important, already had the most important commodities can buy, namely status and access, think he needed more?
Contrast Gupta’s behavior with that of the highest profile conviction after America’s last financial crisis, Richard Whitney.
Read more...If you thought the US was a police state, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
Read more...Last year, around this time, NC held its first fundraiser. You helped show that Naked Capitalism was a valuable place for honest discourse, a corner of the world where we could peer into the abyss, together. It worked. Your generosity helped us upgrade the site’s infrastructure, bring in a series of guest bloggers, and in a host of ways large and small, aid us in ruthlessly describing the destructive impact of growing power of elite finance in the US and abroad.
As we move toward the elections, I’m going to ask all of you to join me once again.
Read more...Felix Salmon did an admirable takedown of a “CEOs [sic] Deficit Manifesto” in the Wall Street Journal. It’s yet another entry in the long-running, dishonest campaign funded by billionaire Pete Peterson to pretend that all right thinking people (and of course CEOs believe they have the right to think for everybody else) should be all in favor of trashing the middle class and the economy through misguided deficit cutting.
Read more...The French government has been flailing about to counter economic trends that started while Nicolas Sarkozy was still president. And one of the most bandied-about catchwords these days is “competitiveness”—entailing the cherished and untouchable 35-hour workweek, equally untouchable wages, and sky-high employer-paid payroll taxes and social security charges. An explosive mix.
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