Former banking regulator and white color criminologist Bill Black gives an unvarnished view of the behavior of Apple and other technology companies in dealing with suppliers in China. He does not buy the idea that the US is powerless to do anything about work condition in China and provides some concrete suggestions.
Read more...One more post today, this time on Europe. I wrote this outline for Italy in November before the ECB’s Italian job. I didn’t and still don’t see an Italian exit or default as a baseline. However, a Greek exit for the eurozone has been my baseline for a number of months. Citigroup’s Willem Buiter has […]
Read more...Many writers tend to depict the effects of austerity in purely economic terms: loss of wealth and income, lesser income/social mobility. But depressions and accompanying changes in social norms can and do have more serious consequences.
A story in Bloomberg illustrates how the combination of budgets slashed thanks to austerity policies leads directly to deaths. The Wall Street Journal described last year how distress in the Greek economy had produced a significant increase in suicides. A new Bloomberg story recounts how severe cutbacks in hospital staffing have enabled superbugs that is hard to combat even under normal circumstances to inflict even more fatalities than usual in Greek hospitals.
Read more...As readers may know by now, 49 of 50 states have agreed to join the so-called mortgage settlement, with Oklahoma the lone refusenik. Although the fine points are still being hammered out, various news outlets (New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal) have details, with Dave Dayen’s overview at Firedoglake the best thus far.
Read more...Wired’s Joel Johnson has written a stunning bit of PR for Foxconn, now-controversial supplier to the consumer electronics industry, duly wrapped in credibility-enhancing guilt over Western materialism.
The article, “1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?” pretends to be about Foxconn’s factories. But Johnson admits he’s a tech toy writer who apparently has no knowledge of manufacturing. Yet he’s remarkably uninhibited in using his fantasies and abject ignorance as a basis for making sweeping generalizations about the Taiwanese powerhouse. For instance:
Read more...Investors have been remarkably passive as banks and servicers have taken advantage of them. We’ve heard numerous reports of servicer fee abuses that amount to stealing from investors (remember, if you overcharge a stressed borrower and that borrower loses his home, the money in the end comes out of pension funds and 401 (k)s when the excessive fees are deducted from the proceeds of the sale of the home). Investors can even see suspicious patterns in investor reports. We’ve also pointed out that they are guaranteed even more pain, since $175 billion of losses that have already recorded on loans in MBS pools have not yet been allocated to the related bonds.
Read more...Rod Hill and Tony Myatt are Professors of Economics at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John and Fredericton (respectively). Their new book, The Economics Anti-Textbook is available from Amazon. They also run a blog at www.economics-antitextbook.com.
Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington
Philip Pilkington: I think it was Joan Robinson who said something along the lines of “while we may have to teach a limited amount of material, we could at least teach that which is useful”. I’ve often encountered economics students who, frankly, seem to me to have a very tenuous grasp of the important aspects of economics. I recall one in particular who graduated from a very prestigious university not understanding what I meant when I said that I thought the chronic unemployment in Ireland was due to a lack of effective demand triggered by the bursting of the housing bubble.
In your experience do you find that students leave mainstream economics courses equipped to deal with real world issues?
Read more...By Douglas K. Smith, author of On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We In An Age Of Me
Earlier this month, Matthew Yglesias of Slate tweeted “EXCLUSIVE: The activities of individual business executives have no relationship to the level of economy-wide employment.”
It’s hard to choose what is most ridiculous here…
Read more...Live stream, hat tip reader Deontos:
Read more...By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
A shorter version of this article in German will run in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung on January 28. 2012
The inherently symbiotic relationship between banks and governments recently has been reversed. In medieval times, wealthy bankers lent to kings and princes as their major customers. But now it is the banks that are needy, relying on governments for funding – capped by the post-2008 bailouts to save them from going bankrupt from their bad private-sector loans and gambles.
Yet the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the United States.
Read more...By Lynn Parramore. Cross posted from Alternet.
Representing the twin evils of ruthless capitalism and government corruption, the GOP candidates are bringing core Occupy issues to the fore.
Read more...By dint of news flow, we are having a private equity fest tonight. David Stockman, the former Reagan budget director, made a cogent case against the idea that being at the helm of a private equity firm has much to do with knowing how to run a business on Dylan Ratigan. I thought readers would enjoy this segment, not simply due to the content but also because Stockman is a compelling and blunt speaker.
Read more...It’s perverse that it takes a Mitt Romney presidential bid to shed some long-overdue harsh light on the private equity industry.
It was not as hard as you might think to do well in the private equity business in the 1990s. Rising equity markets lift all boats, and PE is levered equity. A better test of the ability to deliver value is how they did in more difficult times.
The Financial Times reports on a wee study it commissioned to look into who reaped the fruits of private equity performance. Its findings:
Read more...A New York Times story, “How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work,” uses an Obama dinner with Silicon Valley titans to frame its tale of why the US middle class should roll over and die. I am of course exaggerating for effect. But not by as much as you might think. The story by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher does a very good job of explaining why Asia, and China in particular, has come to dominate consumer electronics manufacture, using the iPhone as focus.
The problem with using the microcosm to illustrate the macrocosm is you need to choose the right microcosm.
Read more...Real News Network highlighted a foreign broadcast on Spain’s “indignados,” and the way they have been providing advice to other anti-neoliberal movements around the world. I’m not sure it has gotten the attention it warrants, but the people that were involved in Occupy Wall Street early on conferred a good deal with seasoned protestors in Spain and Egypt.
Read more...