Yearly Archives: 2012

By lambert strether.

The words that have never been spoken and perhaps can never be said.–Anonymous

If the Presidential campaign seems vacuous to you, that’s because it is. Here are some questions that “we” — by which I mean the legacy party campaigns, their enablers, and our famously free press — can’t seem to bring ourselves to ask during the campaign. So, I’m going to ask them now:

1. How did 8% nominal unemployment become the new normal? Here’s last month’s version of the most frightening chart in the world from Calculated Risk:

Real News Network’s Paul Jay interviews Léonce Ndikumana, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachussets – Amherst. He is the Director of the African Policy Program at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). Originally published at RNN.

A comment in today’s Financial Times is by a former Morgan Stanley trader, Douglas Keenan, confirms a passing comment in the Economist, that Libor manipulation goes back for more than 15 years. In fact, this piece makes it clear that is the time frame exceeds 20 years. From the Financial Times:

By Dan, who lives in northeast Ohio. Originally published at Pruning Shears.

Lambert here. Fracking (“hydraulic fracturing”) is an interesting public policy issue to me, for several reasons. Anti-fracking activism — happening in the swing states of CO and OH, as well as in PA, NY, and WI — goes unremarked by both legacy parties and our famously free press. Leaving aside the implications of fracking for health, water, energy usage patterns, and climate change, coming to grips with a new extractive economy in our own back yards raises issues of corporate accountability, local sovereignty, the nature of private property, and neighborliness. In other words, the future political economy of the North American continent is being fought out on the terrain of fracking county-by-county in the flyover states, just as much as it has been in more storied settings like Manhattan, Montreal, or Oakland.

* * *

On Tuesday the town of Hiram held a public meeting with representatives of the company Mountaineer Keystone (MK). MK, a subsidiary of First Reserve Corporation, is set to begin fracking operations in Hiram next month. The company is a bit of an enigma; for one, it does not appear to have a web site, just a generic landing page at First Reserve. Also, according to Business Week it was founded in 2010 and lists no Key Executives. So who exactly the public was meeting with was something of a mystery.

[Originally published at Washington’s Blog]

Banking Titans Call for Break Up of “Too Big to Fail”

The following bankers are calling for the big banks to be broken up:

Robert Shiller of Yale University talks to Romesh Vaitilingam about his book, Finance and the Good Society, in which he argues that even after the crisis, rather than condemning finance, we need to reclaim it for the common good. Robert Shiller is Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics, Department of Economics and Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University, and Professor of Finance and Fellow at the International Center for Finance, Yale School of Management. Romesh Vaitilingam is a writer and media consultant, and a member of the editorial board of Vox. Originally published at VoxEU.

Lambert here. I note that Shiller gives the following examples of “great advances in the technology of finance that have helped society to develop”: CDOs, Obama’s JOBS Act, the “benefit corporation,” and the “social impact bond.” The last three are all only a couple of years old, so, “jam tomorrow.” Other than that, all I can say is… More cowbell!