MIT Lecture by Charles Ferguson on the Financial Crisis
Hat tip Paul Kedrosky. And if you haven’t seen Ferguson’s movie Inside Job, you really need to.
Read more...Category Archives: Social values
Is a Tainter-Style Collapse in Our Future?
Gloom, doom, and apocalyptic musings seem to be a permanent feature of modern society. But we’ve had more in the way of dystopian movies and talk of imperial decline in the last ten years than in the preceding ten.
Quite a few readers have taken to mentioning Joseph Tainter’s classic, The Collapse of Complex Societies, in comments, a sign it might be worth discussing formally.
Read more...Inside Job’s Charles Ferguson on the Corruption of Academic Economics
Readers may have seen the movie Inside Job (if you haven’t, you really need to) or a clip from the movie that got quite a bit of attention on finance blogs, that of director Charles Ferguson grilling former Federal Reserve vice chairman Frederic Mishkin on a dubious, sponsored paper he wrote touting Iceland as a well run banking center not long before its implosion.
Read more...US Follows Japan: The Rise of Freeters, aka Temps
One of the post-bubble era trends in Japan that has caused consternation within the island nation is the rise of an employed underclass. The old economic model was lifetime employment, even though that was a reality observed more at large companies than in the economy overall. Nevertheless, college graduates could expect to find a job without much difficulty and look forward to a stable career if they performed reasonably well.
In the new economic paradigm, wages are compressed among full-time salaried workers (meaning seniority/managerial based pay differentials, which were not all that great in Japan to begin with, have narrowed). And even worse from a societal standpoint is the rise of “freeters” or workers hired into temporary jobs.
Read more...Are Banks Afraid to Foreclose on the Rich?
I got this report from an attorney who is doing work in one of the top five foreclosure states. I’m relying this account in a somewhat sanitized form; he provided far more in the way of specifics.
One of his colleagues has a monthly mortgage payment considerably above $20,000 a month. He has not made a single payment in over 18 months. He has also not received a foreclosure notice or even as much as a call from his servicer.
Read more...Banana Republic Watch: New York City More Unequal Than Chile
A newly released report, “Grow Together or Pull Further Apart? Income Concentration Trends in New York,” by the Fiscal Policy Institute (hat tip reader Thomas R) gives a picture of how New York City is now at Latin American levels of income disparity.
Read more...Dylan Ratigan on Get America Working
Dylan Ratigan is leading town hall events in various cities to help spur the establishment of a job creation movement. The goal is to push for policies that foster higher employment than the ones we’ve seen over the last thirty years, which instead promoted financialization, the use of consumer debt to paper over lack of wage growth, asset inflation and speculation, and increasing income and wealth disparity.
Ratigan wants to create a dialogue among key political groups, including ordinary citizens, investors, small business operators, and corporate leaders. His sessions will focus on four issues, as he outlined in in the Huffington Post:
Read more...Auerback/Wray: Liberals need not fear Obama’s tax deal: Why a payroll tax holiday actually helps support tomorrow’s retirees
Yves here. As much as Auerback’s and Wray’s argument does describe the reality of government fiscal operations accurately, I see their political reading as wildly optimistic. Given that disproven ideas like “trickle down economics” still hold considerable sway, I think the concerns about how a payroll tax holiday will serve as a wedge to cut Social Security benefit are valid.
By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager, and L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.
The commentary in the aftermath of President Obama’s announced tax deal with the GOP has been both predictable and, for the most part, misconceived….
Read more...Lesley Hazleton Explores the Koran
I have no doubt many readers will regard this as off topic, but it’s a great little talk. Its tag line at YouTube is “Lesley Hazleton explores the Koran and finds much that is quite different from what is reported in commonly cited accounts.”
Read more...The 1677 Statute of Frauds: History We Neglect at Our Peril
Have you ever signed a document disposing of something valuable, like a house or your estate? Did you find you needed to get it witnessed, and that the witnesses couldn’t be family members, and had to put their addresses on the document too? Then it may surprise you to learn that you are following legal precepts established by a long dead Welshman; this one, in fact:
[caption id="attachment_14376" align="alignnone" width="631" caption="Sir Leoline Jenkins (hat tip Wikipedia)"]
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whose tomb is at Jesus College, Oxford; oddly, no more than ten minutes’ amble from where I am sitting, carving out this post. I like the way his “Llewellyn” has been semi-Englished to “Leoline”. Right now, he is probably spinning, at a fair clip, for he is the originator of the Statute of Frauds.
Read more...Servicer Distrust as an Obstacle to Mortgage Mods
Before we get the usual objections to mortgage modifications, I need to remind readers that in the old fashioned days of banking, when bank kept the loans they made, it would be unthinkable NOT to modify a mortgage or any other loan when a borrower got in trouble, assuming the borrower was viable. “Viable” means that the borrower still has enough income to pay enough that the bank still comes out ahead by modifying the loan rather than other recovery strategies, which for a mortgage loan means foreclosure.
This isn’t charity, it’s good business sense.
Many commentators have pointed out that mortgage servicers are the big reason mods aren’t happening.
Read more...More Evidence That the Deficit Hysteria is Misguided and Destructive
The drumbeat of press in favor of visibly failed austerity programs is simply astonishing. We have compelling evidence that they backfire in countries with heavy debt load, with Ireland and Latvia the poster children. By contrast, Iceland, with the mind-numbing debt to GDP ratio of 900% (some have put it at even higher levels at […]
Read more...Matt Stoller: End This Fed
By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor for Rep. Alan Grayson. His Twitter feed is @matthewstoller We probably know more about tribes in the Amazon jungle than we do about the real nature of power in the United States. Neither political science, nor history, nor economics do very well on this. Tom Ferguson, Professor […]
Read more...How Virtual is Your Holiday Season?
I’m clearly a hopeless old fart. In my youth, the hot joke gift was a Pet Rock. No kidding, it sold millions and made someone very rich. But then Pet Rock 2.0 was Tamagouchi, the electronic pet that responded to how much care you gave it. Distressingly like a real pet, it would die of […]
Read more...Jim Quinn: Lies Across America
Yves here. While Quinn has a deliberately (some might say overly) provocative style and I quibble with some of his supporting arguments, his overarching observation, that America is wedded to an economic model past its sell by date, and that model has damaging social and political consequences, is one I believe will resonate with many […]
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