An important little post by Amanda Reed at WorldChanging reveals how conventional measures of carbon emissions give consumers a free pass and ignore the greenhouse gas production resulting from global sourcing of consumer goods. John Barnett of the Stockholm Environment Institute gave a presentation based on his work in the UK and 40 local governments […]
Read more...If you think America is a nation of laws, remember that some people think laws exist merely to be circumvented. One example that has remained below the radar is creditors seizing Social Security and other public benefits which by law are beyond their reach. The peculiar, and permitted abuse is that banks are not required […]
Read more...Brad DeLong points out that Ronald Reagan was far more concerned about unemployment than Team Obama (or Washington generally) is, and also took far more aggressive measures to combat it. From The Week (hat tip reader Marshall): By the start of 1983, labor unions were frantically giving back previously-promised wage increases and offering wage cuts […]
Read more...By Bob Goodwin, a medical device entrepreneur Yves here. Bob’s post highlights a shift in attitudes that is entirely logical and is the inevitable result of financial firms, taking an increasingly predatory posture toward their customers. Borrowers are responding in kind, by taking a cold-blooded and legalistic look at their agreements with lenders. Banks may […]
Read more...As previous posts on this blog have discussed, trying simultaneously to shrink total private sector debt levels and government debt levels at the same time, absent very aggressive currency depreciation or other measures to increase net exports, is likely to result in a fall in GDP and deflation. Ironically, that means overly aggressive measures to […]
Read more...One of the odd things I observe is the way some posts or issues regularly elicit heated reactions. For instance, early in the days of euro wobbliness, some readers in Europe would go a bit off the deep end at the suggestion that the Eurozone has serious structural weaknesses. It wasn’t so much that these […]
Read more...By Mirco Tonin and Michael Vlassopoulos, lecturers in economics at the University of Southampton; cross posted from VoxEU Aside by Yves; I have very mixed feelings about publishing this article. First, any study that reaches men v. women generalizations has to be viewed with a lot of skepticism. For groups as large as men and […]
Read more...By L. Randall Wray, a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who writes at New Economic Perspectives WASHINGTON, 7 NOVEMBER 2017*. Yesterday Speaker of the House Dennis Kucinich was sworn in as President, replacing President Jeb Bush, who had fled to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, aboard Air Force One seeking asylum in his […]
Read more...From an employee of a New Orleans community clinic, via reader Doug: I wanted to write to tell you how appreciative (though not surprised, of course) I was to see that your boss made a trip down to the Gulf to see the complete disaster that has unfolded here. We, and especially our partners in […]
Read more...Wow, the Obama Administration is less than a year and a half old, and it’s already twiddling with the record. I was gobsmacked to see this section in a post by Felix Salmon today, on a new book by Jonathan Alter and a New York Magazine cover story by John Heilemann: Both Alter and Heilemann […]
Read more...You have to hand it to Grayson, this is a very clever way to get the issue of “why is defense spending a sacred cow” the attention it warrants.
Read more...Simon Schama tonight warns in the Financial Times that revolutionary rage is close to the boiling point in Europe and the US : Historians will tell you there is often a time-lag between the onset of economic disaster and the accumulation of social fury. In act one, the shock of a crisis initially triggers fearful […]
Read more...When the SEC filed its civil suit against Goldman, the firm and its stalwarts argued that the firm would come through with its reputation intact. Anyone who watched Goldman over the last decade had reason to doubt that cheery view. The firm has undergone a remarkable change, from one that was notoriously aggressive but had […]
Read more...Bloomberg has a detailed story up on its website about a pending Department of Justice suit that charges that municipalities were not simply played for fools by big financial firms and sold down the river by their supposed advisers. Sadly, that is all too common. What is noteworthy here is that the advisers engaged in […]
Read more...At first blush, Greece’s prime minister George Papandreou statement that he is looking into litigation against banks that worsened the country’s financial woes sounds like pandering to his electorate. From Bloomberg: Papandreou said the decision on whether to go after U.S. banks will be made after a Greek parliamentary investigation into the cause of the […]
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