Yearly Archives: 2013

Mirabile Dictu! Bank of America Found Guilty of Fraud for “Hustle” Mortgage Lending Program

Don’t get too excited.

Links 10/23/13

Obama’s Remarks on the ACA Rollout Debacle: From Selling Hope and Change to Hawking Insurance

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Obama’s “remarks” are a sales pitch. WaPo’s MoDo, Dana Milbank: “Not since the Ginsu knife cut through an aluminum can and still sliced a tomato has America seen a pitch quite like the one President Obama delivered.” Much more importantly, Jon Stewart: “When did the President of the United States turn into Gill from the Simpsons?” The Wordle tells the story; let’s break out the color coding magic markers:

Ken Rogoff Loses It, Calls Criticism of Errors in Debt Paper a “Witch Hunt”

Ken Rogoff has just shown how out of touch he is with reality and basic standards of professional accountability, as demonstrated in an interview published in the Frankfuerter Allgemeine, which is best thought of as a center-right New York Times. He’s come as close as Serious People do to foaming at the mouth, accusing those who criticized the discovery of errors in a widely cited austerity-supporting paper he wrote with Carmen Reinhart as being on a “witch hunt” and engaging in an “orchestrated attack…as in the 1950s under McCarthy.”

Us Versus Them

By Gerald Minack, a former global equity strategist for Morgan Stanley. Cross posted from MacroBusiness

Rising political polarisation in the US has gone hand-in-hand with rising income inequality, falling top-end tax rates, lower taxes on business, rising leverage and higher asset prices. These trends may be coincidental, but they seem to reinforce each other.

The BLS Jobs Report Covering September 2013: End of Summer, No Improvement

By Hugh, who is a long-time commenter at Naked Capitalism. Originally published at Corrente. A complete archive of Hugh’s reports can be found here.

The short version:
The government shutdown is over, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics has belatedly released its jobs report for September 2013. The seasonally adjusted numbers were little changed. Unemployment dropped a tenth of a percent to 7.2%. The real story is on the unadjusted side. September marks the end of summer and the beginning of the school year. The labor force declines as people leave or their jobs end. The official unemployment declines too as the unemployed leave as well. However, real unemployment (~12.4%) and real disemployment (~17%) remain high, and little changed.

Links 10/22/13

The Ridiculous “Jamie Dimon as Victim” Meme on the Pending JP Morgan Mortgage Settlement

Nothing like having a credulous, leak-dependent media to carry your messages.

The Rise of an American Debtcropper System for the Young

Readers have often been using the term “neofeudalism” to describe the outlines of the new economic order, in which the uber wealthy and a thin cadre of their advisors, managers, and other elite professionals do well, with a network of less lofty managers helping oversee and orchestrate the provision of services to the broad base of the public, and they struggle to eke out a meager existence.

Debt appears to be the “one ring that rules them all” of this emerging order.

French Officialdom Now Discussing Eurozone Exit

Just because a taboo has been broken does not necessarily mean that more radical action is in the offing. But the flip side is that, while we’ve been busy following debt ceiling and budget hijinx in the US, there are some surprising developments on the other side of the pond. One is that, as anti-Euro candidate Marine Le Pen is leading in polls in France, respected members of its ruling bureaucracy are deeming the Euro as a failed experiment and presenting detailed plans as to how an breakup could be executed.

Mind you, the Eurozone has been limping from crisis to crisis for so long that it’s hard to take new signs of trouble seriously.

The Fed’s Exit Problem: Symptom of Paradigm Breakdown?

Yves here. This Real News Network interview with Yilmaz Akyüz, chief economist at the South Centre and former director and chief economist at UNCTAD, focuses on the conundrum of the Fed’s need to exit from QE from an international perspective, and layers in the further complication that China is not going to keep up its investment spending at the same level. Akyüz argues that “….we have problems at the end of the crisis which are as big as the ones during the crisis, and these problems are largely due to mismanagement of the crisis, particularly in the U.S. and Europe.”

But I’m not sure it’s as simple as mismanagement.

Links 10/21/13

What If We Thought of ObamaCare as a New Model for Future Government Programs?

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

What if I haven’t been nearly cynical and paranoid enough?

The European Crisis: Lessons from the 1920s, the Gold Standard, and Historical Trilemmas

Yves here. This post by Michael Bordo and Howard James finds significant parallels between the 1920s and the economic and policy conflicts facing the Eurozone, which does not speak well for them being resolved tidily.