Yearly Archives: 2012

Wolf Richter: A Revolt Against Corporate Welfare Programs For Multinationals In France

“Paradox” is what the New York Times called France’s ability to attract more foreign investment than any country other than China and the US. A paradox because it shouldn’t. Investors should be scared off by labor laws, tax rates, the cost of labor, and mud-wrestling bouts over nationalizing some industrial plants. But turns out, multinational corporations pay practically no income taxes in France. And it has reached the boiling point.

Don’t Fall for the Shale Boom Hype – Chris Martenson Interview

By James Stafford, editor of Oil Price of Oil Price. Cross posted from Oil Price

In part 1 of our 2 part interview Chris discusses:

• Why we shouldn’t talk about energy independence
• What the media is failing to report about the “massive” Shale discoveries
• How oil analysts are getting the economics wrong
• Why we could see $200 a barrel Oil in the Near Future
• The relationship between energy and the economy
• Why peak oil is not a defunct theory
• Why electric vehicles are the future
• Why natural gas should be a bridge to a new energy future
• Why Washington just doesn’t get it

An Open Letter to David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, from Mrs N Turner

NC readers can find some of the background on Nikki Turner’s story here. 18 months later, five years after her own business was destroyed, and a full decade after the very beginning of the HBOS fraud story, she is still waiting for the police investigation to lead to a prosecution. Mrs Turner’s open letter was […]

Links 12/18/12

Neil Barofsky Meets with Occupy Wall Street

Neil Barofsky met with several Occupy Wall Street working groups Sunday for nearly two hours. Barofsky is relaxed, thoughtful, and direct a Q&A format.

One of his major themes was that the unwillingness to mete out meaningful punishments to miscreant banks means that the authorities are providing incentives to engage in criminal activity.

Philip Pilkington: Economics as Machine – The Nature and Folly of the Forecasters

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil

Too large a proportion of recent “mathematical” economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.

– John Maynard Keynes

The Probability of Greek Exit, Revisited

Fears of an imminent Greek exit from the Eurozone have subsided, for now. This column attempts to measure the probability of a Greek exit, finding that the changing fortunes of Greek political parties, and the possibility of an early election, mean that the risk of a Greek exit may actually be quite high. It suggests that, despite investors’ efforts to measure political risk, a persistent sense of unease about the Eurozone’s future is set to continue into 2013 and that Eurozone financial assets will thus continue to embed significant risk premiums in the coming years.

Where is Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy on Big Bank Crimes and Obama?

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

Last week’s big revelation on banking is that it is now official Department of Justice policy under Obama that big banks and their executives are above the law.

Links 12/17/12

Afghanistan: An Army Prepares

Graveyard of empires, “USA! USA!” edition:

Systemic Risks in Global Banking: What Available Data Can Tell Us and What More Data Are Needed?

By Eugenio Cerutti, Stijn Claessens, and Patrick McGuire. Cerutti is a Senior Economist at the Research Department of the IMF;
Claessens is Assistant Director in the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund, Professor of International Finance Policy at the University of Amsterdam and CEPR Research Fellow;
McGuire is senior economist in the Financial Institutions section, Bank for International Settlements. Originally published at VoxEU.

The starting point for systemic risk analysis for a single-country is typically the banking system¹. A systemic risk analysis involves the use of disaggregated national bank data, including information on the composition of banks’ asset and liabilities, maturity and currency mismatches, and other balance sheet and income metrics. These national-based analyses then attempt to capture systemic risks stemming from common exposures, interbank linkages, funding concentrations, and other factors that may have a bearing on banks’ income, liquidity and capital adequacy conditions. Examples of such quantitative approaches are Boss et al (2006) for Austria and Alessandri et al (2009) for the UK.

Links 12/16/12

By lambert strether of Corrente

The Green Revolution: Raj Patel, Author, Activist, Economist

This is a super presentation by Ray Patel for Michael Pollan’s class at Berkeley, Edible Education 103. The presentation and the question period together come to about an hour, so don’t listen to Morning Edition — if you ever did or even still do — listen to this!