Yearly Archives: 2012

Bill Black: Ryan Talks Jobs and Exposes the Lies about the 47%

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 Monday, I posted an article entitled: “Let’s test Romney’s claims about the 47% by offering the unemployed jobs.”

The article explained that Romney, Ryan, and Charles Murray claim that 47% of Americans receive governmental assistance because they are morally defective and shiftless. It goes through why Romney and Ryan know that they are lying when they use the 47% figure to slander Americans as refusing to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives” and as failing to pay taxes. The article points out the obvious – the vast majority of the 47% cannot work because they are (1) minor children, (2) the profoundly disabled and sick, and (3) the elderly. The article reminds readers that the disabled (except when they were profoundly disabled even as children) and the elderly had typically borne substantial federal, state, and local taxes, often for over forty years. Romney and Ryan cannot possibly be claiming that the members of these three groups refuse to take personal responsibility. (There is also the small fact that the elderly frequently vote for Republicans, so Romney and Ryan are slandering their own voters.)

Attack of the Blob: How Professional Democrats and Professional Republicans Ran America Into the Ground

There’s a slate of important books coming out by reformers this year on what it was like to fight, and lose, for better policy during the financial reform fight. Neil Barofsky talked about facing the administration and Wall Street in Bailout, Sheila Bair has written about her experience at the FDIC, and now former Senate chief of staff for reform Senate Ted Kaufman, Jeff Connaughton, has provided his own memoir. Connaughton is not a rube, and doesn’t pretend to be shocked by DC corruption. His whole career is an anomaly, an idealist turned corporate super-lobbyist in the 1990s turned unlikely reformer in 2009. As such, he is uniquely positioned to describe how our political leaders, and which political leaders, think and act.

One anecdote in his new book Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins really gets at when the failsafe mechanisms for our financial system were in the midst of collapsing. The crisis of 2008 was when the dam broke, but the actual structural weaknesses appeared long before, in the 1970s, and accelerated in the 1990s. Connaughton was a player in [both] the period of accelerating weakness, in the 1990s, and in the collapse itself.

Links, 10/03/2012

Global PMIs shuffle on

By Houses and Holes, cross-posted at MacroBusiness.

September was a better month for global manufacturing, though hardly rosy. The J.P.Morgan global PMI rose from 48.1 to 48.9:

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Bill Black: Robert J. Samuelson tries to create a moral panic about deficits

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.

The Washington Post leads the pack when it comes to generating what scientists term a “moral panic” about budget deficits. As part of that effort they generated the series of myths that Paul Ryan was “serious,” “courageous,” and “expert” about “solving” the “deficit crisis.” The newspaper’s theme is that anyone who doesn’t fall for their effort to create a moral panic is not “serious” and should be ignored. The paper runs a column by Robert J. Samuelson that is devoted to generating a moral panic about the deficit. Like Ryan, his central targets are imposing austerity and cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

PricewaterhouseCoopers Paid $1 Billion as Consultant on Mortgage Settlement

Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller.

Francine McKenna has a useful column in American Banker about the 50 state AG mortgage settlement.

On Tech Woes

Yes, dear readers, we know the site is not performing well for some of you. I’m hoping you will bear this with some patience once I give you the background.

Links, 10/02/2012

Schneiderman Suit Against JP Morgan: A Rehash of Other Lawsuits, Likely to Produce Meager Settlement

It looks like Eric Schneiderman is living up to his track record as an “all hat, no cattle” prosecutor. Readers may recall that he filed a lawsuit against the mortgage registry MERS just on the heels of Obama’s announcement that he was forming a mortgage fraud task force. The MERS filing was a useful balm for Schneiderman’s reputation, since it preserved his “tough guy” image, at least for the moment, and allowed his backers to contend that he had outplayed the Administration.

By contrast, we were skeptical of the suit, both in timing and in substance, and thought it had substantial hurdles to overcome. Indeed, despite invoking an impressive-sounding $2 billion in lost recording fees and other harm, the suit settled for a mere $25 million.

Schneiderman has churned out another lawsuit that the Obama boosters and those unfamiliar with this beat might mistakenly see as impressive.

Mirabile Dictu! Schneiderman Files Fraud Suit Against JP Morgan Over Bear Stearns MBS

Wellie, on schedule, we have our October surprise.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Eric Schneiderman has filed against JP Morgan for mortgage securitizations created and sold by its Bear Stearns subsidiary. I don’t yet have a copy of the claim and will update the post when I get it.

The article indicates that the Bear suit will serve as a template for other mortgage-securitization-related litigation against major originators.

Links 10/01/2012

Philip Pilkington: Three Reasons Why Endogenous Money Matters

By Philip Pilkington, an Irish writer and journalist living in London. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil

There’s been a bit of confusion of late in blogland about whether endogenous money really matters all that much. Endogenous money is, of course, the theory that, contrary to what mainstream economics would have you believe, private banks in modern capitalist economies actually create money out of thin air. In my experience, theoretical economists grasp very quickly how much of an impact such a theory would have if it were accepted as true. Less theoretically inclined commentators who are generally more interested in policy and practical matters, however, often express confusion over what exactly all the fuss is about. “Does endogenous money really matter?” they ask.

In what follows I will lay out the three leading reasons why endogenous money does, in fact, matter.

Why I Remain Irritated at the Sierra Club

By lambert strether. A version of this post appeared at Corrente. This post has with new material added that applies in part to fracking.

So here’s the deal, and linky goodness will be lacking today (and a lot of this is what activists have put together in discussion, so links are lacking anyhow. And as the great Peggy Noonan once said: “It would be irresponsible not to speculate!”)

Michael Hoexter: Deficit Hawks (Obama, Romney, Bowles, Boehner) Plan to Shrink YOUR Economy – Part 1

Michael Hoexter is a policy analyst and marketing consultant on green issues, climate change, clean and renewable energy, and energy efficiency. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives.

Lambert here: This is a fine exposition of the views and proclivities of the three major schools of thought on ZOMG!!! Teh debt: Deficit hawks, deficit doves, and deficit owls. Some may find the material at the end on “Racism, Anti-Racism, and Austerity” obvious; others may find it controversial. For myself, I don’t find it a useful exercise to try to work out an individual’s motivations — say, Obama’s — from afar. Beyond finding a collective desire in our elites to inflict suffering on others in great numbers (“shock doctrine”; “austerity”; “grand bargain”), I don’t think we can go very far with psychologizing.

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Most of the US political class has been infected with the “mind virus” of austerity that suggests to them that either virtue or necessity consists of cutting government spending and government programs. Under the influence of this “folk economics” with no evidentiary support, the equivalent of economic superstition, politicians seem prepared to slash vital supports to the economy despite the ability of monetarily sovereign governments, like the US federal government, to afford continued spending on current and even expanded government programs.