It may seem perverse to use a particularly strong piece by Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, who even on his rare less than stellar days is reasoned and readable, to illustrate a deep rooted problem even for critical thinkers in the mainstream media, namely, that certain ways of framing issues are simply off limits. […]
Read more...Morning all. A spot of short term cover for Yves, who will be back later today after a mini-epic, with the head of Medusa maybe. In Euroland, Ireland (on which more later if I have time), Portugal (whose banks turned out to need still more funding help from the ECB in August) and Greece (where […]
Read more...By Kalpa, who blogs at big picture agriculture. Kalpa’s formal education was in medicine, science, and the humanities. Having seen the destruction that industrial agriculture has done to the biosystem of the Midwestern Plains, where she grew up, she writes on the comprehensive picture of economics in agriculture, ag science, ag policy, food security, energy, […]
Read more...When analysts and commentators go through their laundry list of what ails the hopelessly overpriced US health care system, one of the most commonly cited reasons is the cost of “defensive medicine” meaning both the cost of medical malpractice policies to doctors, plus the costs of extra tests and procedures to provide doctors with cover […]
Read more...By William C. Black, Associate Professor of Economics and Law, University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One On February 6, 2010 I wrote an open letter to Dr. Walter E. Massey, who was then Chairman of the Board of Directors of Bank of […]
Read more...A question for readers: in many lines of commerce, large firms often enjoy significant cost and/or revenue advantages relative to smaller players. Over time, these industries tend to evolve to a format where many of the most successful enterprises are very large organizations. These firms typically wield considerable power relative to players smaller than they […]
Read more...In case you’ve managed not to notice, the old saw, “the best government money can buy” increasingly applies to our legal system. In ECONNED, I describe briefly how a well funded “law and economics” movement which had corporate backing, including from the extreme right wing that was systematically trying to move America to the right, […]
Read more...Normally, I don’t report on anecdotes from my immediate circle, but a set of conversations in less than a 24 hour period suggests that even those comparatively unaffected by the crisis are bracing themselves for the possibility of sudden, large-scale, adverse changes. And that sort of gnawing worry seems to be growing in New York […]
Read more...I think we all know the answer to the question in the headline, courtesy F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The rich are different than you and me.” And the fact that they have more money means their defaults are couched as pure business decisions. But mere homeowners, told to view their house as an investment, are now […]
Read more...Yves here. Doug Smith, the author of On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We In An Age Of Me, raised some interesting questions about how the debate about recovery is being framed. The most common approach is to look it in terms of GDP, and look at various indicators to see is progress towards […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and fund manager who writes at New Deal 2.0 Hint: it’s not Republicans. Social Security remains one of the greatest achievements of the Democratic Party since its creation 75 years ago. Although Republicans have historically fulminated against the program (Ronald Reagan once likened it as something akin to “socialism”), […]
Read more...Even though a strike at a Honda factory and suicides at Foxconn garnered world wide attention and led to significant pay increases, at this remove, the hubub about them seemed overdone (“China faces wave of strikes after Foxconn pay rise“). China is still very much an authoritarian country, the Honda strike was approved officially, and […]
Read more...The sudden departure of HP’s CEO Mark Hurd didn’t add up. Ethical lapses by CEOs demonstrating at least adequate performance get buried unless unfavorable media coverage won’t go away, or the internal damage is so great that his authority is impaired. Neither seemed to be the case with Hurd. I hadn’t given the Hurd case […]
Read more...David Pell in a post at NPR worries that information overload leads many to miss broader issues. His point of departure is a recent Time magazine cover image of a young Afghan woman mutilated by the Taliban. After being put off by the editorial decision to use such a grim photo, he pinged some colleagues […]
Read more...Wow, the efforts to find and discredit strategic defaulters and other types of mortgage borrower reprobates appear to be picking up steam at the New York Times. Let’s be clear: there are not doubt more than a few people who bought more house than they could afford who had out of control spending habits. But […]
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