Author Archives: Matt Stoller

In this interview, Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks and Matt Stoller discuss how Congress worked in 2009-2010, and why an audit of the Federal Reserve was able to get through a dysfunctional political system. It’s a long interview, with some echoing at the beginning, but it’s the most comprehensive discussion of how the fight actually […]

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

Barney frank threw a little noticed temper tantrum in early August, intervening in a California Democratic primary between two incumbents, Brad Sherman and Howard Berman. Every ten years, lines for Congressional districts are redrawn, which sometimes throws sitting Congressmen into the same district. This is the case with Berman and Sherman, who hilariously sound alike and both have a similar hawkish posture on Israel. Berman chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, and is a part of Democratic leadership. Sherman is a very senior member of the Financial Services Committee, and is generally seen as an iconoclast. The support of someone like Barney Frank can make a difference in such a primary, so his bitter attacks on Sherman suggest something more than your standard pique is at work here.

Frank, never one to mince words, said while he’d already endorsed Berman in the race, he’d planned on staying mostly uninvolved until Sherman claimed that he’d “had more to do with” the Dodd-Frank bill to regulate Wall Street “than anyone except Dodd and Frank,” and that he’d forced a major change in the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The former Financial Services Committee chairman and author of the Dodd-Frank scoffed at both claims.

“They are both appallingly off the mark, they are fantasies. I am a great admirer of Howard Berman. I am not an admirer of Brad Sherman’s approach, I think it’s superficial and headline-hunting,” he said Tuesday afternoon. “This is unfortunately what he does — makes things up to enhance his role, and there’s no basis for it.”

Frank pointed out that Sherman had voted against TARP both times when it came on the House floor, and said he’d had little to do with the Wall Street reform regulation.

This series is by Patrick Sahr, a Naked Capitalism reader and a former debt collector. Sahr is a graduate of Buffalo State College’s Print Journalism Program.

[Matt here]: This series is running because it’s important to understand the culture of debt collectors, who are increasingly a form of policing in our society. One in seven Americans is currently being pursued by a debt collector.

Debtors:  From Credit Enthusiasts to Cleaned Out in Seven Years

Debtors are different today than they were in 2004.  In 2004, debtors were generally, in conversation, wildly arrogant and optimistic.  Many were wise enough to know that paying a “charge-off” sometimes adversely affects a credit score and others bragged about securing additional lines of credit despite having others in default.  The type of debtor you speak with is contingent on the product you are collecting.  The recently charged-off sub-prime portfolio, in 04, was filled with arrogant knuckleheads who bought the bank’s program of wealth transfer hook, line and sinker ignoring their modest wages and assets.  They leveraged everything they owned to the max just like the banks.  The defaulted amex black card portfolio contained penny-ante corporate villains and upper-middle class people at the beginning of an unpleasant journey, a titanic professional and financial storm.  Letting go of your credit cards is the recommended first step when you batton down the hatches in preparation for that storm.

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

One of the reasons I loved Neil Barofsky’s book Bailout is because it is a clear explanation of the incentive structures in our political system. One element of his story that you might find surprising is how rarely elections actually come up among policymakers. Careerism, intellectual capture, subtle forms of bribery, institutional embarrassment, intimidation, bureaucratic jujitsu – all of these have a massive impact on policy outcomes. But elections? Yes, they matter as well. But they aren’t that important. And if you read Bailout, or really just pay attention, what you’ll find is that policy simply didn’t change when Obama took over from Bush, which is a fundamental challenge to our notion of democracy, perhaps even more so than corporate money flooding into our elections.

That is, the idea that all politicians want to do is get elected, and therefore they are worth despising, is actually untrue. If it were true, then you would find politicians constantly proposing and implementing popular policies, like free universal health care, high taxes on corporations, jail for Wall Street bankers, and higher minimum wages. But they don’t do this. The reason, as I wrote in June of 2011 in Beyond Elections – the Hedging Theory of Political Elites, is that political actors are only interested in winning elections to the extent that strategies for winning don’t jeopardize their place in the political class.

This series is by Patrick Sahr, a Naked Capitalism reader and a former debt collector.

[Matt here]: This series is running because it’s important to understand the culture of debt collectors, who are increasingly a form of policing in our society.

Mixed Messages: High Turnover is bad, but it’s Music To the Collection Agency Owner’s Ears

Collection agencies are filled with a variety of people from different backgrounds like any other occupation.  Many are decent and hard-working.  Despite the popular conception that only the hateful and unpleasant seek employment as a debt collector, there are many in the industry who are honorable and kind.  They are capable of eking out a fair living under difficult circumstances in a local economy of dwindling opportunity.

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

Neil Barofsky’s new memoir Bailout, is not just a great read, it’s also a very important story about what happened after the financial crisis. Barofsky, who was the Special Inspector General for TARP, was in a vantage point to view the entirety of the Obama policy apparatus, from the use of TARP to pad bank balance sheets to Treasury’s PPIP program to the reorganization of the auto industry to the housing crisis. And he doesn’t disappoint, packing the story full of flashy anecdotes which give more than any book I’ve read a sense of what it’s like to be in DC in a powerful position where your goal is not to get along with the actors controlling the status quo. The book paints the atmosphere in DC’s melange of agencies, bureaucracies, and Congressional halls as a mix between the drudgery and petty bureaucracy of Office Space and the world-cleaving tension of Too Big to Fail. As a Congressional staffer, I worked a bit with Barofsky’s office, so I’m going to give a slightly different perspective on the book than what you might have read elsewhere. You see, what very few have picked up on, even those who liked this book, is that it’s essentially a story about the importance of Congressional oversight in reigning in corruption, and the problems of our imperial Presidency.

This series is by Patrick Sahr, a Naked Capitalism reader and a former debt collector.

Admittedly, my perspective on the Great Recession is especially negative.  My excuse is that I’m from Buffalo, the nation’s third poorest city, where I’ve set fire to my career in the miserable business of debt collections.  I have no future business plan in place other than avoiding the grim, dull and brutal world of third party debt collection.    The whole experience has given me a seemingly incurable case of existential paralysis, where the future appears bleaker than the past and the past was pretty bleak.   From this vantage point, while shopping for careers, it appears the entire economy has adopted the characteristics of the collection agency: rude, short-sighted, greedy, corrupt and pathetic.

The clipped nature of customer relations, the constricting focus on short-term profits and the sarcastic vulturing of remaining wealth have long been features of the collections industry in good times and bad.  Now we see these features in the “race to the bottom” with cost-cutting regional airlines and in the arbitrary fees assigned to our cable and electric bills.  Is it only in a recession where these features of corporate behavior divine themselves in other industries?

We are in national political convention season, a strange time where fifteen thousand media, political insiders, and protesters descend on two different cities without any formal reason for doing so. Delegates aren’t going to choose anything of substance – the party platforms are irrelevant and the candidates are selected beforehand. There’s no news being made, […]

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.

As reported on MB last week Moody’s slapped Italy with another downgrade noting the following factors:

Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and a political analyst on Brand X with Russell Brand.  You can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller.

Every election cycle, Americans are greeted with a bevy of condescending lectures from well-heeled political elites about the importance of voting.  It’s your duty.  People died for right to vote.  And so forth.  This year, a far more compelling message about democracy is coming from miners in Spain, who, beset by austerity measures imposed by both political parties, are shooting at riot police with homemade rockets and slingshots.