Category Archives: Social values

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)"](h/t Wikipedia)[/caption]

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.

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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.

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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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Tax Hikes, Status Competitiveness, and Social Stratification

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 […]

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Were US Auditors Told to Fudge Opinions of TBTF Banks?

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 […]

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Is Student Debt the Next Front in the Consumer Debt Crisis?

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 […]

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Stoller: A Debtcropper Society

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 […]

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Chris Hedges: Death of the Liberal Class

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 […]

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Guest Post: Open Letter To Alan Simpson & Erskine Bowles Chairmen Of The U.S. Deficit Commission – Regarding Proposed Changes To Social Security »

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 […]

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The US Becoming More Like Japan: Controlled Press Edition

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 […]

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Guest Post: Corruption as a Barrier to Entry

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 […]

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