Taxes on top earners are the lowest they’ve been in nearly three generations, yet their complaints about the prospect of an increase to a level that is still awfully low by recent historical standards is remarkable. In my youth, if someone complained much about their taxes, it was taken as a sign that they either […]
Read more...Francine McKenna is shocked that investigations in the UK have revealed that major auditors were told to make wobbly banks look healthier than they were. Specifically, they issue “going concern” opinions because they were told the banks would be backstopped. One can only assume the accountants were brought in the loop with the aim of […]
Read more...The media has been so preoccupied with acute symptoms of the debt crisis – sliding home prices, foreclosure abuses, ongoing Euromarket bank/sovereign debt stress, ongoing battles over financial regulation implementation, unhappiness over the Fed’s QE2 – that lingering problems are not getting the attention they deserve. High on the list is the how the weak […]
Read more...By Matt Stoller, a blogger-turned Congressional staffer. He was a policy advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson on financial policy issues. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0. A lot of people forget that having debt you can’t pay back really sucks. Debt is not just a credit instrument, it is an instrument of political and economic […]
Read more...Grit TV interviews Chris Hedges about his new book, The Death of the Liberal Class: “We have a choice,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges. “You can either be complicit in your own enslavement or you can lead a life that has some kind of integrity and meaning.” Hedges argues for moral responsibility […]
Read more...Yves here. The idea that Social Security is in trouble is very much in dispute (although you’d never know that reading the MSM). Even to the extent that fixes are required, some simple ones (one of the biggest, raising the ceiling on payroll taxes, plus an increase in retirement age) would do the trick. This […]
Read more...Marshall Auerback, who lived in Japan during its early post bubble years, sent this e-mail: Today’s New York Times reports on how the Saudis warned the US about the planned parcel bomb attack emanating from Yemen. Buried in the story was this line: “The German magazine Der Spiegel told The New York Times it would […]
Read more...By Nauro F. Campos, Saul Estrin, and Eugenio Proto, first posted at VoxEU Conventional wisdom says that corruption hurts the economy because it taxes investment and weakens public services. This column presents evidence from interviews with CEOs in Brazil. It argues that corruption acts as a barrier to entry, with potential entrants put off by […]
Read more...As I’ve mentioned from time to time, I lived in Sydney for two years, from 2002 to 2004, long enough to get a decent sense of the culture. Australian policies are intriguing. They are either brilliant or stupid, there seems to be perilously little middle ground. For instance, they’ve done away with the penny, a […]
Read more...The Alice Through the Looking Glass practices, of at best adherence to the mere appearance of legality, increasingly appears to pervade the nether world where financial players go in search of money they think might be due to them. And the big problem is the word “might”. Banks proceed as if there right to collect […]
Read more...Several regular readers were kind enough to send congratulatory e-mails on our New York Times op-ed, which appears in the Sunday edition. I hope you enjoy it. The text follows: In Congressional hearings last week, Obama administration officials acknowledged that uncertainty over foreclosures could delay the recovery of the housing market. The implications for the […]
Read more...It’s astonishing to see how Americans have been conditioned to think that political action and engagement is futile. I’m old enough to have witnessed the reverse, how activism in the 1960s produced significant advances in civil rights blacks and women, and eventually led the US to exit the Vietnam War. I’m reminded of this sense […]
Read more...I’ve harbored the sneaking suspicion that JP Morgan Chase is the worst behaved of the big US retail banks, based on a couple of experiences with them a bit more than two years ago. Not to bore readers with details, but basically, bank staff lied to me persistently regarding the terms of various products. Of […]
Read more...From an alert reader: The United States of America in one short scene, from Politico: MILITARY OFFICERS TOUR JPMORGAN — JPMorgan Chase yesterday hosted about 30 active duty military officers (across all branches and agencies) from the Marine Corps War College in Quantico, Va. The officers met with senior executives, toured the trading floor and […]
Read more...I suspect some readers will take issue with the US being ranked as high as it is, 22 out of 178 nations, in an annual survey of public sector corruption by Transparency International. However, it fell from 19 the year prior, so the trajectory at least is correct. The New York Times provided a brief […]
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