It now looks like the big media and leaders in both parties are no longer focusing on the Government Shutdown crisis, but are now moving on to the notion that the shutdown is melding with the upcoming probable breaching of the debt limit to create a combined mother of all fiscal crises. Don’t be fooled.
Read more...From time to time, I remarked that the summer had a 1914 feeling about it in the context of military action against Syria. It may turn out the feeling was still correct but I was looking in the wrong place.
Read more...At the risk of self-promotion, allow me to point you in the direction of a piece by me running today in The New Republic. It’s about a proposed update to the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, and how the financial services industry, along with members of both parties, are working to stop it. An excerpt:
Read more...Now it may seem churlish to take on a prominent former government official making a star turn to publicize one of the most pressing social and political problems in America, namely, our ever widening levels of inequality. But in fact, Reich is not only selling the equivalent of patent medicine as the remedy but he’s even getting commissions from some of the snake-oil manufacturers.
Read more...Is it merely a coincidence that the troika rode its Trojan horse into Athens again on the very day Angela Merkel went awfully close to an absolute majority in German elections? I’m sure it is. But it’s still very bad news for the Greeks, who now have their perhaps last chance to throw out the international financial system and decide their own fate, before most of their valuables have been sold off to foreign interests. Greece is where democracy started, and the way things are going, it may be where it will end as well.
Read more...On Rolling Jubilee’s failure to live up to its plan of action and promises of transparency, and how they reacted when we asked them some pointed questions about that.
Read more...Yves here. Notice how American retailers for the most part continue to put profit over lives.
Read more...Here we go again. Washington, and to a lesser degree, Mr. Market are all a twitter over the display of macho in the latest round of the Team Dem versus Team Republican professional wrestling bout budget battle.
Read more...Yves here. I’ve not weighed in on the second anniversary of the start of the Occupy Wall Street anniversary because, truth be told, the movement has gone so local and has so many different faces that I’m not certain it’s possible to make good generalizations without doing a lot of investigation.
This short interview seeks to address one of the expectations for OWS, that it become a political force, and why it was never met
Read more...Yves here. This piece provides an intriguing analysis and a lot of detail to support its thesis that Egypt’s inability to generate the income needed to make payments on IMF loans means the country is likely to have its assets stripped.
Read more...Yves here. It is all too easy to goad libertarians, since their ideas are internally conflicted and they get prickly when you point out the flaws in their dogma.
Read more...With media and technology becoming faster and more pervasive at a rapid clip, it shouldn’t perhaps be a big surprise to see the ease with which war-mongering news flashes come to dominate the story of the day. But maybe this should be received with an increasing dose of skepticism…
Read more...It’s odd to be going about one’s vacation and, like stepping on a rake and having it whack you in the face, stumble into a vignette that apostrophizes how much young people have internalized the fallen state of the American worker.
Read more...Yves here. It almost seems quaint to think that someone (in reality, large swathes of the investor and orthodox economics community) thinks the US economy will someday bear a passing resemblance to its former bubble-stoked vigor.
Read more...I’ve said this before in other venues, but this really is the chart that explains modern America:
