Jamie Dimon has finally managed the difficult feat of making Lloyd Blankfein look good.
When Blankfein said Goldman was “doing God’s work,” as offensive and laughable as that sounds, it’s an arguable position.
Read more...In an article in the Telegraph, “How the Fed triggered the Arab Spring uprisings in two easy graphs,” Andrew Lilco argues that ” the Fed seems very clearly to have achieved more in the Arab world in six months than the Pentagon achieved in decades.” (hat tip Richard Smith):
Read more...I’m sick of the free pass given the libertarian blather, “The state is the only source of coercive power.” I doubt that many non-libertarians buy that assetion, but they too often remain silent because most libertarians are rabid on that issue and arguing with them is like talking to a wall. But since that bogus assertion has been showing up increasingly in comments here as right-wing plants are becoming more common, I might as well do a quick shred, since it does not take much effort to show this claim is nonsense.
Let’s look at some simple empirical examples of why this pet argument just ain’t so.
Read more...There’s a sad little story in the “NY/Region” section of the New York Times, which illustrates a not often enough discussed sort of wreckage resulting from the housing mess: that of deaths resulting from foreclosures.
Think I’m exaggerating? There have been cases of suicides, or murder/suicides of people losing their homes. But that can’t necessarily be attributed to foreclosure per se, but of personal financial disaster, with the foreclosure being the literally fatal blow. So while one can attribute their deaths to the financial crisis and therefore to the reckless behavior of major financial firms, it’s hard to pin it on foreclosures per se.
But there are some deaths that can, indisputably, be blamed on foreclosures or more specifically, the negligent management of foreclosed properties.
Read more...Yves here. Black’s post discusses a turning point that is not as well known as it ought to be. Thanks to reader John M for bring this post to my attention.
By Bill Black, an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is a white-collar criminologist, a former senior financial regulator, and the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
August 23, 2011 will bring the 40th anniversary of one of the most successful efforts to transform America. Forty years ago the most influential representatives of our largest corporations despaired. They saw themselves on the losing side of history. They did not, however, give in to that despair, but rather sought advice from the man they viewed as their best and brightest about how to reverse their losses. That man advanced a comprehensive, sophisticated strategy, but it was also a strategy that embraced a consistent tactic – attack the critics and valorize corporations!
He issued a clarion call for corporations to mobilize their economic power to further their economic interests by ensuring that corporations dominated every influential and powerful American institution. Lewis Powell’s call was answered by the CEOs who funded the creation of Cato, Heritage, and hundreds of other movement centers.
Read more...There is a very peculiar article by Steven Davidoff up at the New York Times: “As Wall St. Firms Grow, Their Reputations Are Dying.” It asks a good question: why does reputation now matter for so little in the big end of the banking game? As we noted on the blog yesterday, a documentary team was struggling to find anyone who would go on camera and say positive things about Goldman, yet widespread public ire does not seem to have hurt its business an iota.
Some of Davidoff’s observation are useful, but his article goes wide of the mark on much of its analysis of why Wall Street has become an open cesspool of looting and chicanery (as opposed to keeping the true nature of the predatory aspects of the business under wraps as much as possible).
Read more...While the report in the Financial Times, that Dodd Frank “say on pay” rules appear to be producing a reduction in 2010 pay versus 2009 levels, this change may well fall into the “one robin does not make a spring” category.
Read more...Posts will probably be thin tonight because I lost a big chunk of the afternoon getting to and from and then doing a filming session for a French TV documentary on Goldman Sachs to be broadcast in the fall. The focus is whether the firm is too dangerous and powerful. They are interviewing some of the other logical suspects on this topic, such as Nomi Prins, John Carney, and Anat Admati. The session was fun even though it put me behind the eight ball.
One amusing tidbit: they were desperately pumping me to put them on to anyone credible who would say something positive, or even mixed, on camera about Goldman. They have been unable to find anyone independent of even moderate stature who will defend the firm.
Read more...By William Hogeland, the author of the narrative histories Declaration and The Whiskey Rebellion and a collection of essays, Inventing American History who blogs at http://www.williamhogeland.com. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0
The father of the founding debt may have been most concerned with his wealthy friends, but his ideas spawned the liberal view of government.
At FrumForum, Kenneth Silber has posted a funny interview with Alexander Hamilton, deploying actual Hamilton quotations in order to suggest how our first Treasury Secretary, the founding architect of U.S. finance policy, might advise us in the current debate on national debt.
Read more...I trust readers don’t mind that we are a bit heavier than usual on the political-related postings tonight, since this is a slow news week. But that may be useful, given that the big new subtexts at the INET Conference were the importance of “political economy” (three years ago, that expression was seen as having a decidedly Marxist color to it) and the rising wealth and power of the top 1%.
One nagging question is how the increased concentration of income and wealth in the top strata came to pass. The story that this group and their hangers-on would have us believe is that it is all the result of merit and hard work. Two offerings raise doubts about that line of argument.
Read more...By Satyajit Das, the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (Forthcoming September 2011) and Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2006 and 2010)
John Quiggin (2010) Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us; Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford
R. Christopher Whalen (2011) Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream, John Wiley, New Jersey
Michael E. Lewitt (2010) The Death of Capital: How Creative Policy Can Restore Policy, John Wiley, New Jersey
“Mortmain”, derived from medieval French meaning “dead hand”, refers to legal ownership of property in perpetuity. Jurisprudence, to varying degrees, has sought to prohibit the control of property by the “dead hand”. Unfortunately, economic thinking seems to be controlled by dead economists or as John Quiggin, himself an economist, argues – “living dead” economists.
Read more...The urban legend that Eskimos the Inuit have more words for snow than the rest of us nevertheless has intuitive appeal. A population might indeed develop a richer vocabulary to describe phenomena its members consider to be important. Consider how oenophiles make a show of describing the flavor of wines in ways that elude mere mortals. And it turns out the Sami, the natives inhabiting the arctic zones of the Scandinavian countries, do have hundreds of words for snow.
In keeping with underlying logic of the Eskimo snow words theory, as propaganda has become a more prevalent part of our culture, the terminology to describe it has also grown.
Read more...By Thomas Ferguson, Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is the author of many books and articles, including Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0
This just in: big oil companies and government ministers had discussions one year before invasion.
Read more...By William Hogeland, the author of the narrative histories Declaration and The Whiskey Rebellion and a collection of essays, Inventing American History who blogs at http://www.williamhogeland.com. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0
Hamilton is revered for putting America on sound financial footing, but he couldn’t have done it without federal taxation.
The annual drop-dead moment when Americans must file tax returns or face unpleasant consequences has become an opportunity for the Tea Party, protesting what it sees as crippling taxation and overactive federal government, to rally its supporters. Extending this year’s filing deadline from April 15 to today, April 18, the IRS gave Tea Partiers a big weekend, and all over the country, tax-day events hymned unregulated markets, excoriated federal programs like the health-insurance reform bill, and defended anti-labor governors. Anti-Obama leaders from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump urged the faithful to oppose evils summed up for them in the annual requirement to file federal tax returns. For the Tea Party, “Tax Day” represents all that’s gone wrong with America since the founding.
So as we stand on long lines at the post office hoping to avoid the midnight axe, we might spare a moment to consider the father of federal taxes, Alexander Hamilton.
Read more...Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times in his weekly op ed discussed the use of humor in protests in Serbia and Egypt, as well as in changing attitudes on teen smoking. Funny that he did not mention UK Uncut, which has staged large scale rallies over the fact that many major corporations pay little in the way of tax when they are showing record profits yet ordinary citizens are expected to pay more in taxes and suffer large reductions in social services. Its US sister is starting to get a foothold, as a video of a protest at Bank of America in San Francisco attests.
And before you defend the current bias in our tax regime toward individual versus corporate taxes, consider this discussion from Richard Wolf in the Guardian (emphasis his):
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