The Myth of Maximizing Shareholder Value
So many of the assertions made about “maximizing shareholder value” are false that they should be assumed to be a lie until proven otherwise.
Read more...Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class
Why Germans Should Stop Mowing Their Own Lawn
Yves here. I’m featuring this post in part as a development exercise to Cliff, a German economist who has been blogging off and on since 2011 and plans to post on a more consistent basis. He has been warned that the NC readership can be rough. His thesis: “Home production may be a popular or cultural preference, economically sensible it is not.”
Read more...Gaius Publius: `Wall Street & the Security Apparatus Want a Real SOB… Chris Christie`
So now we know why the Republicans have been going to such extreme lengths to try to preserve embattled New Jersey governor Chris Christie as a national figure…
Read more...The Robots are Coming for White Collar Jobs
Yves here. Bad enough having to worry about offshoring eating into your employment prospects and compensation level. Alan Blinder, in Senate testimony in 2007, had argued that up to 29% of US jobs were “offshorable,” including many service industry positions. And now this….
Read more...Debunking the Idea that “Structural Reforms” Reduce Unemployment
Both the IMF and the ECB call for “structural reforms” which are code for further weakening labor protection as beneficial to “competitiveness” and job creation. Does this claim stand up to scrutiny?
Read more...How Big Money Keeps Populism at Bay
Why you can be sure Obama’s talking up progressive issues, like minimum wages, is another effort to re-entice (and re-deceive) the left-leaning voters that voted him in in 2008.
Read more...Obama Lame Duck Watch: House Democrats Stymieing Trade Deal “Fast Track;” Silicon Valley Surveillance Payoff Language Published
As we discussed earlier, even though there’s abundant evidence that the Administration’s plans to push through its trade deals, the Trans Pacific Partnership and the Transstlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, are in trouble, the official messaging has been to keep pretending that the pacts are still moving forward smartly.
Read more...Wolf Richter: “This Chart Is A True Representation Of The Employment Crisis In This Country”
Yves here. Wolf’s latest post gives a crisp overview of how bad things are in job land. Among other things, he highlights the catastrophically high unemployment levels among young people, and how financially stressed older workers are hanging on to jobs much more than they used to in the past.
Read more...Frigid Weather Puts Homeless at Risk
Yves here. Although the current spell of nasty cold weather isn’t unusual by the standards of three decades ago, in the intervening years we’ve also had a big increase in homelessness, which means a lot more people are at risk of freezing to death.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Why Reinhart and Rogoff are Wrong About the Eurozone’s Debt Structure and the Costs of Debt Mutualisation
Yves here. I don’t know whether to be relieved or annoyed to see Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff retreat from their pro-austerity stance and endorse debt restructuring, since their prior view (that budget-cutting was necessary and productive) served to justify considerable and unnecessary pain being inflicted on periphery Eurozone countries to preserve the illusion of health of French and German banks.
But as Yanis Varoufakis points out, although Reinhart and Rogoff are retreating from much of their erroneous thinking, they haven’t renounced all of it.
Read more...The Three Card Monte of Generational Warfare
Stock speculator Jay Gould remarked, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” That, sports fans, is the real foundation of the generational warfare propaganda effort.
Read more...How Beer Explains 20 Years of NAFTA’s Devastating Effects on Mexico
Mexico is doing badly at feeding its own people, thanks to 20 years of NAFTA.
Read more...The Student DebtCropper System: Even the Destitute Hounded by Debt Collectors
As most people who have passing familiarity with student debt in the US know, it’s a millstone that is brutally difficult to remove. But it turns out that even the limited ways out are often not available in practice thanks to the hyper-aggressive conduct of a key government contractor.
Read more...“Honey, I Shrunk Killed the Middle Class”
A new Bloomberg story, Americans on Wrong Side of Income Gap Run Out of Means to Cope, is a zeitgeist indicator: the normally-well-insulated-from-realty investing classes have noticed that large swathes of what was once the middle class aren’t just downwardly mobile but are struggling.
Read more...Wolf Richter: Next Shoe To Drop In Broke California’s Lopsided ‘Recovery’
f you come to San Francisco or Silicon Valley and look around, you’d arrive at the conclusion that California is booming, that companies jump through hoops to hire people, that they douse them with money, stock options, and free lunches. But in the rest of the state, the picture isn’t that rosy.
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