Given the extreme measures the Obama Administration has gone to to keep the pending trade deal known as the TransPacific Partnership under wraps, it’s hard to be certain where things stand. But like the Administration’s failed effort to have the US intervene in Syria, this has the potential to be one of those rare cases where the interests of ordinary citizens prevails.
Read more...Yves here. Even though Yanis Varoufakis has savaged the Trokia’s austerity policies that are driving Greece and other periphery countries into economic and social distress as well as fueling the rise of extreme right wing parties, some readers of this blog have criticized him for advocating reforms to pull the Eurozone out of its nosedive […]
Read more...To the extent that middle class and more affluent people think about poverty in America, they likely have blurry, partial images due to distance and lack of direct experience. Their remedies might include better education and training, higher minimum wages, more affordable housing.
New Scientist thinks otherwise. Its headline for a blistering editorial: Want to fix US inequality? Begin with worming tablets.
Read more...Yves here. I’m a big fan of economic history (and mystified that contemporary economists so rarely take interest in it). Pilkington describes an illuminating and oft-neglected chapter.
Read more...If you managed to be late to the Volcker Rule party, you can learn a great deal of what you’d need to know via the revealing contrast between two reasonably detailed accounts, one at Huffington Post by Shahien Nasiripour, the other by Matt Levine at Bloomberg. If you didn’t know better, you’d wonder if they were talking about the same rule.
Read more...Lambert here, a proposition: Unwillingness to own the externalities of one’s own consumer fetish correlates highly with intensity.
By Laurent Bouton, Assistant Professor of Economics, Georgetown University, Paola Conconi, Associate Professor at ECARES and CEPR Research Affiliate, Francisco J Pino, Postdoctoral Researcher in Economics at ECARES, Université Libre de Bruxelles, and Maurizio Zanardi, Reader in Economics, Lancaster University Management School. Originally published at VoxEU.
Despite support from around 90% of US citizens, expanded background checks for gun purchases failed in the US Senate. This ‘gun-control paradox’ can be explained by the fact that the intensity of voters’ preferences differs across policy issues, and voters only have one vote with which to hold politicians accountable on a bundle of issues. A model incorporating these features predicts Senate voting behaviour very well. Senators closer to re-election are more likely to vote pro-gun, and only Democrats ‘flip-flop’ on guns.
Read more...Some suggestions for fixing known issues and a request for further input!
Read more...Lambert here: Nice to see an organization sponsored by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales calling for financial criminals to be prosecuted. And here’s who Victoria Chick is. I wish she’d come over here and smack the weasels at Justice around.
By Ian Fraser, a financial journalist who blogs at his web site and at qfinance. His Twitter is @ian_fraser. Originally published at his website
Read more...On Facebook an otherwise innocuous comment, that it is “undeniable there is an equity-efficiency tradeoff” really leapt off the screen at me.
Read more...By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
The key point to remember in all discussions of ObamaCare is that neither it, nor indeed the entire private health insurance “industry,” should exist. They are rent-seeking parasites, economic tapeworms. One does not improve a tapeworm; one removes it.
Read more...Reuters has a new article, Insight: A new wave of U.S. mortgage trouble threatens, which is simultaneously informative and frustrating. It is informative in that it provides some good detail but it is frustrating in that it depicts a long-standing problem aided and abetted by regulators as new.
Read more...What worries me most about the world today, in the last weeks before Christmas and New Year’s Day 2014, is that all the plans we make for our futures and more importantly our children’s futures are DOA.
Read more...Last week, Crain’s Business Daily and Fortune reported that a whistleblower has provided the SEC with evidence of massive, ongoing violations of securities laws, specifically, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, by several unnamed private equity firms.
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