Bloomberg News is continuing with the thankless task of pushing forward with FOIA requests relative to the Fed’s lending programs, and once it eventually gets its troves of documents, having to slog through them to see what they reveal.
Bloomberg has a long article up on its site about its latest findings. And the bottom line is everybody close to the process lied like crazy.
Read more...Australian economist Steve Keen minces no words during this BBC interview, calling our downturn a depression and calling for radical measures, namely large scale debt writedowns. I can’t imagine a discussion like this getting airtime on a US mainstream media outlet.
Read more...Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns There is a flurry of activity going on in Euroland this weekend. I have a number of stories up on different proposals in the offing. Clearly, European policy makers have got religion about saving the euro. Expect some kind of announcement soon. According to Austrian daily Der Standard, Italy is to […]
Read more...After telling readers that the Eurozone leadership looks to be suffering from “dulled reaction times…so out of line with market events that even if they were to snap our of their stupor now, it would be too late,” news reports suggest that they have finally roused themselves.
Or have they?
Read more...I’m a bit stymied in my desire to get moving on a site redesign. It is not the dearth of reader input in the comments section (you’ve been generous on that front) so much as quite a bit of the input is one-offish in nature. There are some feature changes that are clearly needed….
Read more...Things are only going from bad to worse in Europe.
Read more...This Real News Network interview with economist Bob Pollin of the Political Economy Research Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts focuses on the deficit cutting impasse in Washington and what is needed to create jobs.
Read more...Yves here. This post from MacroBusiness points to a development that has (predictably) gone largely unreported in America, namely, that life expectancy is declining. The article discusses some of the probable causes and implications. It interestingly omits rising income disparity as a culprit. We quoted Michael Prowse on this topic in early 2007:
Read more...Those who would deny a link between health and inequality must first grapple with the following paradox. There is a strong relationship between income and health within countries. In any nation you will find that people on high incomes tend to live longer and have fewer chronic illnesses than people on low incomes.
Yet, if you look for differences between countries, the relationship between income and health largely disintegrates.
The cynic in me has to note that PBS Newshour decided to cover the issue of why no banksters have gone to jail on what has to be one of their lowest traffic days of the year. And I have a sneaking suspicion I got the call to go on the show because it was not exactly easy to find people willing to be taped late in the afternoon on the day before Thanksgiving.
Read more...Americans roll from a holiday that has come to be about overeating to a day where merchants hope to seduce customers into an orgy of overspending.
In an interesting bout of synchronicity, Michael Thomas just sent me a link to this George Carlin video.
Read more...I hope US readers had safe travels and are enjoying the day with friends and family.
Thanksgiving has become a day of food and sports bacchanalia for many Americans. It is too often forgotten that only half of the passengers of the Mayflower lived through the first winter in Plymouth harbor. Ironically, it is probably closest to its historical roots, a day of gratitude for surviving brutal conditions, for those who are enduring physical or financial hardships but manage to get some respite and personal cheer today.
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