Yearly Archives: 2012

Michael Olenick: Textbooks – Predatory Business Practices, by the Book

By Michael Olenick, creator of NASTIACO, a crowd sourced foreclosure document review system (still in alpha). You can follow him on Twitter at @michael_olenick or read his blog, Seeing Through Data

Textbooks are the latest abuse in predatory consumer business. As the economy remains mired, both young people and middle-aged workers have returned to school in record numbers. What they find, in the form of textbook pricing, is enough to shock a subprime mortgage broker.

Debunking the “It’s China’s Fault That American Worker Real Wages are Falling” Myth

Even in the cases where the outsourcing cost savings were significant, the idea that American wages were way out of line with Chinese wages and the only future for American workers was grinding wages lower and lower to compete with China has been oversold.

Links 9/16/12

Local DAs Allowing Debt Collectors to Use Their Letterhead, Split Fees from Shakedown

It’s one thing for the officialdom to sit back and allow financial services industry chicanery to go un or inadequately punished, quite another to get in bed with them to perpetrate a scam.

Yanis Varoufakis on the Crisis in Greece

In this interview with Max Keiser, Yanis Varoufakis gives a vivid account of conditions on the ground in Greece and why he is still pessimistic for the prospects for the eurozone.

Dan Kervick: Shamanistic Economics

By Dan Kervick, who does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

The Fed did something on Wednesday: it announced a new program of open-ended quantitative easing, and it announced that it likely won’t pull back on the new round of monthly asset purchases once the economy begins to recover more strongly, but will keep the purchases going for some indefinite period of time afterward.

This announcement has greatly pleased all of those people who have been calling for the Fed to do something….

Links 9/15/12

Marcy Wheeler: Lanny Breuer Admits That Economists Have Convinced Him Not to Indict Corporations

Yves here. Marcy’s find reads like an account from an alternative reality. Unfortunately, it’s increasingly the one we live in.

By Marcy Wheeler. Cross posted from emptywheel

I’ve become increasingly convinced that DOJ’s head of Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer is the rotting cancer at the heart of a thoroughly discredited DOJ.

Income Inequality and the Death of Trickledown

By Hugh, who is a long-time commenter at Naked Capitalism. Originally published at Corrente.

(Income inequality 1967 – 2011 by quintile)

Links 9/14/12

The Fed’s QE3: No Exit

The Fed’s launch of QE3 looks more than a tad desperate. If you believe the central premise of the Fed’s action, that propping up asset price gains would have enough effect on consumptions to lift the economy out of stall speed, it would seem logical to sit back a bit and let the recent stock market rally and the (supposed) housing market recovery do their trick. But the Fed has finally taken note of the worsening state of the job creation in an already lousy employment market and has decided it needed to Do Something More.

Automatic Weapons for Fun and Profit

Yves here. This may seem like a “now for something completely different” post, but this story about Blackwater and a much smaller miscreant is yet another window into our American two tier justice system. Plus you will learn something about gun laws.

Yanis Varoufakis: Europe’s Modern Titanomachy – How Europe’s Future is Being Shaped by Large Battles on Seemingly Small Matters

Yves here. I’m taking the liberty of starting with the second post of a three post series by Yanis Varoufakis. This is the starting point:

They sound technical and minor when projected against the great scheme of Europe’s extraordinarily rich history. Will there be conditionality attached to the ECB’s bond purchases? Will the bonds that it purchases be treated on a pari passu basis in relation to bonds held by private institutions? Will the ECB supervise all banks or just the ‘systemic’ ones? These are questions that ought to be of no genuine interest to anyone other than those with a morbid interest in public finance. And yet, these questions (and the manner in which they are answered) will probably prove as important for the future of Europe as the Treaties of Westphalia, of Versailles, of Rome even. For these are the issues that will determine whether Europe holds together or succumbs to the vicious centrifugal forces that were unleashed by the events of 2008.