Hope you enjoy this segment. I think I can speak for Taibbi in saying we had a good time with Moyers.
For those who prefer viewing the program on a bigger screen, it runs in NYC and DC on Sunday at 6:00 PM. The staff is trying to organize a Twitter Q&A at that time (6:00 to ~6:40 EDT). I haven’t gotten confirmation that this is a go, but I’ll let you know in tomorrow’s Links (and they’ll be providing a hashtag).
Read more...By Satyajit Das, derivatives expert and the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011)
Jonathan Fenby (2012) Tiger Head, Snake Tails: China Today, How It Got There and Where It is Heading
Robert Frank (2011) Who Repo’d My Jet: the manic millionaires, and why they’ll lead us to the next boom and bust
John Coates (2012) The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust
Personal – relating to an individual or what serves the interest of that individual. Personality – distinctive assemblage of qualities which defines an individual, frequently in modern life conflated with celebrity. These three books deal with the ‘personal’ and ‘personality’ in the financial world.
Read more...Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has thrown a spanner in the works of the efforts to extradite him to Sweden by seeing asylum in the Ecuadorian ministry in London. This Real News Networks interview looks into how this gambit might play out.
Read more...Cathy O’Neil, a quant, looks at the key question raised by a recent paper by Donald Mackenzie on the Gaussian copula model: why do flawed models become widely accepted?
Read more...By Michael Hudson and Jeffery Sommers, a distinguished professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee respectively, who have both advised members of Latvia’s government on alternatives to austerity. They are also contributors to the forthcoming book by Routledge Press: The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-Economic Costs of the Neoliberal Baltic Model. Cross posted from the Financial Times by permission of the authors
Austerity’s advocates depict Latvia as a plucky country that can show Europe the way out of its financial dilemma – by “internal devaluation”, or slashing wages. Yet few of the enthusiastic commentators have spent enough time in the country to understand what happened.
Read more...Cleaning up New Zealand’s register of companies: how’s it going?
Read more...Here’s the Bloomberg story on one of today’s regulatory theater announcements:
Read more...Yves here. Mr. Market is in a tizzy today over, per Bloomberg, “concerns over the slowdown of growth”. Cynics might note that journalists have to attribute motives to market moves, when their waxing and waning often defies logic. Nevertheless, we’ve had disappointing reports out of China, a bad Philly Fed manufacturing report, a less than stellar initial jobless claims report, and not so hot housing data this AM, and more and more signs of inability to bail out the sinking Titanic of the Eurozone (a meaningless announcement compounded by continued focus on ongoing German court challenges to more aggressive support of rescues. Even if these cases lose, any uncertainty and delay has the potential to accelerate the ongoing bank run out of periphery countries).
This post from VoxEU is a good short form summary of how the Eurozone got into this fix.
Read more...A Wall Street Journal article tonight (hat tip Joe Costello) has the whiff of disinformation about it. It dutifully reports that oil regulators have retreated in a serious way from requiring more disclosure of oil market transaction. The article never offers an explanation for the change in stance and focuses attention on actors who are highly unlikely to be the moving force.
Read more...We taped earlier today and the subject was the JP Morgan hearings as a window into the role of banks in politics and the economy.
Read more...A serious simmering dispute involves China versus the rest of the world on rare earths. As most readers know, rare earths are essential to the manufacture of many high tech, defense, and “green energy” products, such as smartphones, lasers, and hybrid batteries. Even though rare earths are not rare, their extraction is an environmentally nasty business, and China, which has less than 30% of world reserves, now accounts for over 90% of global production. That is a stranglehold that China has decided to exploit.
Read more...Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him on Twitter athttp://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller
Recently, Barack Obama announced a laudable new policy position on immigration. His administration will no longer deport undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country as children by their parents, as long as they don’t get in trouble with the law. These are people who are essentially Americans without citizenship, and the risk of deportation to a country they don’t really know is a terrifying and unfair. Aside from this serving the cause of justice and human decency, this is a long overdue move to reward a constituency group, happening in an election year. It’s worth understanding how this policy change came about, so that one can get a sense of the incentives that animate the White House policy shop.
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