By Nanea, a private equity insider, and Yves Smith
Private equity practitioners, including most famously Mitt Romney, often depict their sector as the epitome of private enterprise. These claims are false. Private equity firms not only depend directly and substantially on government support, they have also actively cultivated links to the state.
Read more...We are in the midst of a sea change in terms of the relationship of ordinary Americans to the housing market. Policymakers are not only in denial as to its magnitude, but are actively enabling courses of action that are likely to prove destructive.
Read more...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
Every day a growing crescendo of housing cheerleaders posit the end of the foreclosure crisis. We’re flipping our way out of the mess that we flipped ourselves into, is their usual line of reasoning. I’ve looked at national data, local data, and even data on my own block here in Florida. I tried to make the evidence prove the market has found a genuine, sustainable bottom. There are clearly gimmicks giving a temporary boost, a great PR campaign that may or may not be coordinated, and some foreclosure flippers that may do well, until they don’t. But the evidence is overwhelming: home prices are anything but stable.
Read more...By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil
The influence that mathematics has had on neoclassical economics is obviously quite profound. However, when looked at in detail it appears that a certain type of modern mathematics was in fact highly suited to the direction many in the economics profession took after the work of Leon Walras – the Frenchman who founded modern neoclassical economics – appeared on the scene. So, it should not be thought that it was simply the formal tools of mathematics that transformed neoclassical economics into the obscurantist doctrine it is today. Instead it should be understood that its obscurantist skeleton was ready and waiting for its mathematical flesh.
Read more...On the one hand, the dismal failure of the Administration’s cosmetic responses to the foreclosure mess is so evident that the New York Times is willing to acknowledge it, via a first page article titled, “Cautious Moves on Foreclosures Haunting Obama.” On the other, what the story offers is a whitewash, not an analysis.
Read more...Yves here. The discussion of tribal allegiances in economics in this post helps illustrate why it is so difficult to push back against failed ideas when they are dear to the mainstream. It is also a useful ethnographic guide.
By Michael Hoexter. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives
I drafted the “Mixed Economy Manifesto” as one attempt to create a common basis for anti-austerity economists and non-economists to argue against, in the clearest terms possible, the waves of government spending cutbacks that are advocated by misguided elites, by the right-wing and by right-leaning neoclassical economists.
Read more...Yves here. While Marcy starts with the most obvious misrepresentation in a New York Times hagiography of Michigan governor Rick Snyder, the most troubling parts come later in her post. She illustrates how the Times airbrushes out Synder’s anti-labor, anti-democracy stance.
By Marcy Wheeler. Cross posted from emptywheel
Granted, it pertains to my right-wing governor, so it’s personal.
Read more...Occupy Tampa is preparing for the Republican convention. As I understand it, they will be allowed to use the Voice of Freedom park and are hosting the Food Not Bombs World Gathering starting tomorrow. You can follow them on Twitter at fnbsouthflorida.
Read more...By Sell on News, a global macro analyst. Cross posted from MacroBusiness
A question that has been asked, but not nearly often enough, is why did the complex risk defrayal methods fail so completely during the global financial crisis?
Read more...Furzy mouse highly recommended this Discovery documentary. I’ve only looked at the beginning, but the comments about it at YouTube (as opposed to the ones arguing related historical issues) are very positive. And sadly, as the world moves in a more authoritarian direction, it becomes more and more necessary to study history if we are to have any hope of preventing extremists from putting a new social order in place.
Read more...Ponzi growth happens when unsustainable capital flows, wilfully predicated upon funding schemes that Reason knows to be fraudulent, give rise to large spurts of economic activity.
Ponzi austerity, in contrast, is what happens when unsustainable spending cuts, wilfully predicated upon funding schemes that Reason knows to be fraudulent, cause significant drops in economic activity.
It is an incontestable fact that Europe’s Periphery shifted from Ponzi growth to Ponzi austerity some time after the Crash of 2008.
Read more...
