Paul Ryan has become a lightening rod for controversy, both for his aggressive plans to cut Medicare and Social Security and for questions surrounding suspicious-looking trades in financial stocks that were September 18, 2008, the same day Congressional leadership was briefed about the crisis by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.
The Real News Network interviewed Tom Ferguson to parse out history from hype on both issues.
Read more...By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
We know that the supporters of austerity simultaneously urge us to reject “European socialism” while adopting the key European strategies that drove Europe into recession – twice. American conservatives assume that Europe must epitomize stringent financial regulation. The opposite is true. Europe adopted “light touch” financial regulation pursuant to neo-liberal economic theory. Its embrace of the three “de’s” – deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization was far more extreme than the United States. The City of London “won” the regulatory race to the bottom with the U.S. European’s adopted the full Basel II reduction in capital requirements without the minimum gearing ratio that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insisted upon. The FDIC prevailed over the intense, but fortunately unsuccessful opposition of the Federal Reserve economists who were the principal architects of Basel II’s disastrous reduction in capital requirements. The result was that European Union banks had roughly twice the leverage of U.S. banks and faced no meaningful regulatory restraints. The result was far larger real estate bubbles in several European nations (as a percentage of GDP) than in the U.S., multiple financial crises, and a Great Recession that reached depression levels in several nations.
Read more...By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.
Eduardo Porter began by studying physics but decided not to complete his studies and pursue a career in that field in favor of becoming a journalist. He worked for the Wall Street Journal before joining the New York Times, where he writes a periodic column. His primary interest is now economics. I was intrigued by a recent column he did entitled “The Folly of Attacking Outsourcing.”
I reviewed a number of Porter’s NYT columns to get a feel for his views. Defending outsourcing and minimizing the criticisms of undocumented immigrants are his twin passions. He has written roughly a dozen columns on each of these topics. Porter’s starting point is neo-liberal economics. As I will show, he does so despite knowing that neo-liberal economics dogma has proven disastrously wrong.
Read more...An interview on Real News Network with James Henry of the Tax Justice Network covers his newly released report “The Price of Offshore Revisited” in which he estimates the size of the “offshore” market as somewhere between $21 and $32 trillion as of December 2010. Note that this total includes only financial assets, and thus omits real assets (real estate, gold, artwork, yachts) that are held via trusts or corporate entities in tax havens.
If you are in finance, the broad outlines of this story are familiar.
Read more...This section from Michal Kalecki’s 1943 Essay on Politics and Ideology is so clear and relevant that it needs to be read widely. Thanks to New Economic Perspectives for flagging it.
Read more...By Connor Kilpatrick, the managing editor of Jacobin magazine. Cross posted with The eXiled
Calling yourself a libertarian today is a lot like wearing a mullet back in the nineteen eighties. It sends a clear signal: business up front, party in the back.
Read more...A raise in the minimum wage is smart economics and beneficial to society. So what are we waiting for?
Read more...Romney may be determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of a possible victory. Business Insider reports that the newest addition to the list of possible VP candidates is…Florida’s Pam Bondi
Read more...By Matt Stoller, a political analyst on Brand X with Russell Brand, and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller
This is probably the least important Presidential election since the 1950s. As an experienced political hand told me, the two candidates are speaking not to the voters, but to the big money. They hold the same views, pursue the same policies, and are backed by similar interests. Mitt Romney implemented Obamacare in Massachusetts, or Obama implemented Romneycare nationally. Both are pro-choice or anti-choice as political needs change, both tend to be hawkish on foreign policy, both favor tax cuts for businesses, and both believe deeply in a corrupt technocratic establishment.
So while the election lumbers on like the death rattles of the wounded animal known American democracy, no one on either side is asking what the plan is for the next term.
Read more...By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.
This column was prompted in part by reading RJ Eskow’s column, which alerted me to Anne Applebaum’s September 13, 2010 column celebrating Britain’s embrace of austerity and the Conservative Party.
I was already planning a piece responding to Applebaum’s Washington Post column about the consequences of European austerity published on July 25, 2012 (her birthday) and the contrast to a Wall Street Journal news story that same day announcing that austerity had, as we predicted, thrown Britain back into recession when I read Eskow’s column.
She reveals her real target – she wants to destroy the social programs that have improved the lives of the working class.
Read more...By Lynn Parramore, a contributing editor at Alternet. Cross posted from Alternet
So far, there’s not a whole lot known about James Eagan Holmes, the 24-year old whom police say fatally shot 12 people and injured dozens more in a suburban Denver movie theater during the premiere of the new Batman film “The Dark Knight Rises.” As the nation grieves for the families of the victims, questions about the alleged perpetrator are swirling.
What we do know paints a picture of a young man who might have reasonably harbored high expectations of a successful life.
Read more...Although there is no shortage of victims of the financial crisis, one group that has generally been missed is the middle aged and elderly. Yes, there are reports of people in their 40s and 50s moving in with their children or other relatives, but for the most part, this cohort does not get much attention.
Yet it isn’t hard to see how grim their prospects are.
Read more...By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil
In the first part of this piece we looked at the Thatcher government’s monetarist experiment in the early 1980s. It did not end well. So we must ask: did the Thatcher government and the monetarists believe in what they were doing or were they cynically using monetarist policy as a device to destroy large parts of British industry in order to destroy the trade union movement?
Read more...This Real News Network segment tackles the ugly topic of whether the deterioration of public education in the US is by design. You might also want to see the earlier shows in this series, the first on Obama’s educational policies, the second on Romney’s.
Read more...There was rending of garments and wearing of sackcloth last week when the jobs report came in at only 80,000 new jobs created in June, the third disappointing report in a row. Pundits looked to find cheer despite the disappointing outcome. For instance, the number of hours worked rose, and 25,000 temps were added, which the optimists used to contend that employers saw more demand, but weren’t quite confident enough to make permanent hires. Citigroup’s Tobias Levkovich argued that more firms are planning to add jobs. The gloomsters pointed out that global manufacturing output is weakening, and new orders in particular are signaling contraction. And John Hussman noted (hat tip Scott):
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