Yearly Archives: 2012
Barney Frank: Obama Rejected Bush Administration Concession to Write Down Mortgages
Here’s Barney Frank, in an exit interview recently in New York Magazine, revealing unwittingly that Obama during the transition rejected a Bush administration concession to write down mortgages. Here’s what Barney said.
Read more...The mortgage crisis was worsened this past time because critical decisions were made during the transition between Bush and Obama. We voted the TARP out. The TARP was basically being administered by Hank Paulson as the last man home in a lame duck, and I was disappointed. I tried to get them to use the TARP to put some leverage on the banks to do more about mortgages, and Paulson at first resisted that, he just wanted to get the money out. And after he got the first chunk of money out, he would have had to ask for a second chunk, he said, all right, I’ll tell you what, I’ll ask for that second chunk and I’ll use some of that as leverage on mortgages, but I’m not going to do that unless Obama asks for it. This is now December, so we tried to get the Obama people to ask him and they wouldn’t do it.
All Eyes Turn to Spain
By Delusional Economics, who is horrified at the state of economic commentary in Australia and is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.
The news from Europe was all Spanish overnight as the country continues to struggle to find traction on any plan that will lead it away from the need for external help:
Spain backtracked on a plan to use government debt instead of cash to bail out Bankia, as Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy struggles to shore up the nation’s lenders without overburdening public finances.
Read more...
Links 5/30/12
Greening the desert
By lambert strether
I should have put this up yesterday, but I was outside gardening, instead of inside, meta-gardening. So herewith, the famous “Greening the Desert” permaculture video with some discussion and links. (The video is from Geoff Lawton, who you may remember from a beautiful video about edible forests here a few months ago.)
Read more...Drug Warrior and Pro-Drone Democratic Congressman Silvestres Reyes Goes Down Hard
Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller
Yesterday, we hit a turning point in the war on drugs. Pro-legalization Democratic Congressional candidate Beta O’Rourke defeated eight term Democratic incumbent Silvestre Reyes in a bitterly fought and exceptionally vicious primary yesterday in a Texas border district, where the war on drugs was a central issue.
Read more...Randy Wray: MMT Without the JG?
By L. Randall Wray, a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His book,
Lambert here. As MMT increasingly gains mainstream popularity and some traction in policy-making circles, some MMT popularizers, both advocates and detractors, have found a policy prescription put forth by MMTers — the Jobs Guarantee (Mitchell; Mosler; Kelton) — problematic. Wray’s post adddresses their concerns.
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The contentious issue is this: can one adopt MMT while rejecting the JG?
Read more...The Julian Assange Show: Occupy Movement (E7)
By lambert strether
Certainly more interesting than Meet the Press! But alas, no glass table…
Read more...False dawn in Greece
By Delusional Economics, who is horrified at the state of economic commentary in Australia and is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.
European markets were lead by Greek equities which were up 6.8%, attempting a bounce last night on the news that:
Read more...Greece’s conservatives have regained an opinion poll lead that would allow the formation of a pro-bailout government committed to keeping the country in the euro zone, a batch of new surveys showed on Saturday.
Links 5/29/12
Satyajit Das: The Great Pretender – India’s Economic Past & Future, Part 3: Political Atrophy
By Satyajit Das, derivatives expert and the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011). Jointly posted with Roubini Global Economics
In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, optimists hoped that the BRIC (Brazil Russia India China) would drive the global economic engine. But China’s economic growth has slowed to its lowest rate in three years. Brazil’s economic growth has fallen from around 7.5% to under 3%. Russia’s economy is heavily dependent on oil and energy prices. India also has stalled. This 3-part paper looks at the development and future trajectory of the “I” in the “BRIC”. The third part looks at the India’s inability to confront its current problems.
Read more...War document: “Straight to Hell,” Track 12, From Here to Eternity, The Clash
By lambert strether
For Memorial Day Weekend, I thought I’d curate a few documents on war. Here’s the third, and last:
Read more...Bill Black: Embedded Examiners always married the Natives, but now their Bosses Do Hook Ups
Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.
Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Ben Protess have written an extraordinarily important column for the New York Times about embedded examiners at JPMorgan.
Embedded examiners’ are federal regulators whose normal work station is a desk at the bank. We only embed examiners for systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) – banks so large that they pose a systemic risk to global economy.
Read more...Links Memorial Day
Satyajit Das: The Great Pretender – India’s Economic Past & Future, Part 2: “A Sea of Troubles”
By Satyajit Das, derivatives expert and the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011). Jointly posted with Roubini Global Economics
In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, optimists hoped that the BRIC (Brazil Russia India China) would drive the global economic engine. But China’s economic growth has slowed to its lowest rate in three years. Brazil’s economic growth has fallen from around 7.5% to under 3%. Russia’s economy is heavily dependent on oil and energy prices. India also has stalled. This 3-part paper looks at the development and future trajectory of the “I” in the “BRIC”. The second part looks at the India’s current problems.
Read more...