Free Trade in Rhetoric, Not in Practice
The gap between the posturing and practice of free trade.
Read more...Author Archives: Yves Smith
Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin: Corporate Fraud With a Body Count
Yves here. Some of the facts in this article are stunning. For instance, more Americans die from opoid overdose than from car accidents. And this article gives only a partial tally of Purdue Pharma’s predatory conduct. The drugmaker targeted overly-busy, not very well trained general practitioners in communities which were likely to have high incidence […]
Read more...Americans Increasingly Angry With Corporate Desertions via Tax Inversions
Tax inversions damage the already low credibility of Corporate America.
Read more...Links 5/25/16
Where Did the Bernie Sanders Movement Come From? The Internet.
How the digital divide explains where Sanders did well, and not as well.
Read more...Unsealed Documents Reveal Former White House Officials Violated Fannie/Freddie Conservatorship Rules, Apparently to Advance Bank-Enriching “Reforms”
The Administration has refused to turn over over 12,000 documents in a lawsuit against how the government operated Fannie and Freddie in their conservatorship. The major bone of contention is that Treasury stripped them of all profits, which damaged the remaining private shareholders. But the unsealing of a small batch of government records shows why […]
Read more...Reader Note on Strikes in France: “Pass the Popcorn”
Transportation unions and airport workers are joining strikes in France to protest new labor laws,….right before the Euro Cup and tourist season.
Read more...The Pentagon’s Budgetary War on Accountability
Why the Pentagon always has the money it needs, and a lot more too.
Read more...Helicopter Money: The Illusion of a Free Lunch
Does helicopter money come with a hidden price tag?
Read more...Links 5/24/16
SEC Official Defends Weak, Selective Enforcement When Agency Records Show Private Equity Firms Thumb Nose at Agency
Yesterday, we looked at a section of a Stanford Law School conference at the end of March. The panel on pre-IPO funding included the SEC/s head of enforcement, Andrew Ceresney. In the question and answer section, Ceresney and a member of the audience, Marc Fagel, the former regional director of the SEC’s San Francisco office, […]
Read more...Neoliberalism’s Press Gangs: How Markets Raise Costs
Neliberalim’s press gangs – forcing citizens to participate in capitalism when even it produces worse outcomes than public ownership would.
Read more...The 7 Biggest Myths and Lies About Social Security
An antidote to Peterson Foundation anti-Social Security Kool Aid.
Read more...SEC Conference Features Former Official Calling for Fraudsters to be Protected from Career Harm
No matter how bad you think things are at the SEC, you routinely find out that they are worse, as a recent conference revealed.
Read more...Inflation Targeting and Neoliberalism, Part 3
Yves here. In a bit of synchronicity, this post continues the theme of Dipherio’s podcast over the weekend on NAIRU, describing how other central banks around the world look at the issue of what inflation rate to try to achieve and why. I’m a little surprised that Epstein did not mention how the Fed kept […]
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