Yearly Archives: 2010

Obama’s Problem Simply Defined: It Was the Banks

By James K. Galbraith, the author of The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. He teaches at The University of Texas at Austin. Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0, this post originally appeared at Common Cause. Obama must break his devil’s pact with the banks in order to succeed. […]

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Hands, burnt fingers, and American mortgages

Terry Guy Hands has lost his lawsuit against Citigroup, wherein he accused Citigroup of defrauding his private equity group, Terra Firma Capital Partners, by lying about the number of competing bidders during the auction of the record company EMI, for which Terra Firma paid $6.8 Billion. This was one of those top-of the market deals […]

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Links 11/5/10

Dear patient readers, I am out of town and bandwidth challenged (plua bizarre problems like inability to send mail, and yes I could use my webmail account, but the interface stinks. I am trying to view this as some sort of lesson in patience, which, needless to say, is not my long suit). Richard Smith […]

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The Irish Mess (IV)

The domestic politics of Ireland are still on a tightrope. Their coalition government, which had has been studiously ignoring three empty parliamentary seats, has now been told by the Supreme Court to get on with it and hold by-elections for one of them, which has been unoccupied for a scandalous 18 months.  The by-election is […]

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Guest Post: Corruption as a Barrier to Entry

By Nauro F. Campos, Saul Estrin, and Eugenio Proto, first posted at VoxEU Conventional wisdom says that corruption hurts the economy because it taxes investment and weakens public services. This column presents evidence from interviews with CEOs in Brazil. It argues that corruption acts as a barrier to entry, with potential entrants put off by […]

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“Rules of Our Society Should Not Be Bought and Sold”: Roosevelt Election Roundup

Round-up of verdicts on the US elections by the New Deal 2.0 team, assembled by  Lynn Parramore, Editor of New Deal 2.0 and Media Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute In the wake of a Democratic loss not seen in the House since 1938, upended Senate seats, and Republican gubernatorial wins, Roosevelt Institute Fellows weigh in. […]

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Links 11/4/10

Boa Constrictors Can Have Babies Without Mating, New Evidence Shows ScienceDaily (hat tip reader John M) Gut bacteria change the sexual preferences of fruit flies Discovery Magazine (hat tip reader Foppe) Twitter Bot Auto-Debates Climate Change Critics Mashable (hat tip reader Francois T) Microcredit ‘death trap’ for Bangladesh’s poor BBC (hat tip reader May S) […]

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Bernanke Versus Pimco’s Mohamed El-Erian on QE2

Not only did the Fed announce its controversial $600 billion QE2 program today, but Ben Bernanke felt compelled to defend it in a Washington Post op-ed tonight. For the normally oracular Fed to feel it has to sell its program in a non-financial media outlet says Bernanke must recognize that he is staking on thin […]

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Guest Post: Another Nobel Economist Says We Have to Prosecute Fraud Or Else the Economy Won’t Recover

→ Washington’s Blog As economists such as William Black and James Galbraith have repeatedly said, we cannot solve the economic crisis unless we throw the criminals who committed fraud in jail. And Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof has demonstrated that failure to punish white collar criminals – and instead bailing them out- creates incentives […]

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Guest Post: Currency Wars and Emerging Markets

By Richard Portes, Professor of Economics at London Business School and President of CEPR, first posted at VoxEU The threat of a currency war between the US and China is one of the main concerns for the G20 ahead of this month’s meeting in Seoul. This column say that while policymakers appear to grasp some […]

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Fed Statements Side By Side

The Fed seems to have decided to split a loaf on the conservative side, coming in with less QE than the market’s hopes, at $600 billion, but one might cynically surmise above the low end expectation of $500 billion. Side by side comparison of this FOMC statement with the next most recent courtesy Andrew Horowitz […]

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Links 11/3/10

Bird-mimics steal meerkats’ food BBC Liver Hormone Is a Cause of Insulin Resistance Science Daily For the First Time, the TSA Meets Resistance Atlantic (hat tip reader Crocodile Chuck) How much oil is there, how much more will we use and at what price? PhysOrg (hat tip reader Robert M) The Rally to Restore Journalism […]

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Is the US Taking Too Much of the Brunt of the Crisis Aftermath?

Before readers throw brickbats at me, I’m just acting as the messenger for two articles, one by Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff, the other by the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf. Each points out that the US is taking a proportionately bigger hit than other big economies post crisis, particularly in terms of unemployment. And this is actually […]

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Konczal: Make Your Voice Heard with a Comments Submission for the Volcker Rule

By Mike Konczal, a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute who writes at New Deal 2.0. You may not be a lobbyist, but you can still make a difference in FinReg. Just a reminder: this Friday, November 5th, 2010, is the last day to submit comments on the Volcker Rule. Here is the website for this, […]

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