Yearly Archives: 2012

Links 4/18/12

Guest Post: Giant Banks Now 30% Bigger than When Dodd-Frank Financial “Reform” Law Was Passed

Size of Banks Killing Economy … But Giant Banks Have Only Gotten Bigger Since Financial “Reform” Enacted

The 2012 Election and the Inequality Narrative

One of the least-recognized and most common electoral strategies by the Republican Party is to run elections around left-wing themes. For instance, in 2010, much of the ad spending by outside GOP-aligned groups, as well as explicit party communications, focused on health care. The Republican attack ads didn’t center for the most part on the […]

Corruption Is Why You Can’t Do Your Taxes in Five Minutes

Happy tax day! Cross-posted from Republic Report.

Here’s a chart of Intuit’s lobbying expenditures in Congress, courtesy of Open Secrets. I suspect that some of that nine million dollars of lobbying by that company since 2008 has gone to making it more annoying for you and me to file our taxes.

Unknown or Disliked: Eric Schneiderman At Negative Approval Rating in New York

About a month ago, I met an extremely liberal and political couple from upstate New York. I asked the wife whether she likes New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, expecting to hear something along the lines of “Yeah he’s great” or something like that, the way that traditional partisans act. I had spent a bit of time at New York City Democratic events, and most people there respect Schneiderman because of his work getting that task force on financial fraud announced. I thought I’d hear something similar. Instead she said, “Oh is he the guy who is sending my husband scary letters about his nonprofit?”

Mark Ames: Death By Foreclosure Killings and Staff Sgt. Roger Bales

By Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine. Cross posted from Consortium News.

This past Thursday, a Modesto, California, man whose house was in foreclosure shot and killed the Sheriff’s deputy and the locksmith who came to evict him from his condominium unit. Modesto authorities responded by sending 100 police and SWAT snipers to counter-attack, and it ended Waco-style, with the fourplex structure burning to the ground with the shooter inside.

Links 4/17/12

Dirk Bezemer: Creating a Socially Useful Financial System

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Here’s more material from this iNet “Paradigm Lost” conference in Berlin (from which Yves has just returned). Hat tips to readers BT and JurisV for suggesting it.

Bill Black: Romney’s Lead Economist Urges Policies that will Cause the Next Financial Crisis

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.

Presidential nominees of either U.S. party can secure economic advice from any economist in the world. This makes it all the more amazing and sad that they choose economists with track records of disastrous policy advice. Bill Clinton chose Robert Rubin, George W. Bush chose Gregory Mankiw, Obama chose Lawrence Summers, and Mitt Romney chose Mankiw. Rubin and Summers led the Clinton administration’s efforts to gut financial regulation. Mankiw led the efforts under Bush. Collectively, these efforts created the criminogenic environment that produced endemic financial fraud (“green slime”).

Mortgage Settlement Enforcement Monitor Claims Bank Leaders Are Lying to Him

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

I was listening to Bloomberg surveillance this morning and they were discussing the problem of skyrocketing rents mixed with tight credit for mortgages and increasing foreclosures. One of the hosts said that “everyone was waiting for the 49 state mortgage settlement” as a go signal to start foreclosures again. That’s what the mortgage settlement really is, a cultural, legal, and political signal of “all clear”. How exactly a new wave of foreclosures is supposed to help the housing market is still something of a puzzle, but it does show that the administration and most settlement pushers really do believe that the market needs to clear via foreclosures before it can reset. I guess we’ll see.

Gerd Gigerenzer: On How Decisions are Really Made, Versus How Economists Say They Should Make Decisions, and Why the Folks in the Real World Often Have it Right

This is a bit of a sleeper of a presentation from the recent INET conference. It was from a session titled “What Can Economists Know?” which might cause willies among non-economists as being too much about epistemology and not enough about issues that might give insight, say, into why the overwhelming majority of economists in early 2007 thought a global financial crisis was impossible.

This talk by Gerd Gigerenzer is about heuristics, and why they are often superior to the more formal methods of analysis and decision-making fetishized by economists.

Murder, Inequality, Corporate Profits, and Free Trade Go Together

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

Here’s the President on Sunday on a new trade deal with Colombia.

Obama says US trade deal with Colombia has strong protections for workers and the environment….
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Links 4/16/12