The Grey Lady tonight, in true “newspaper of record” fashion, has an article that manages to acknowledge some of the effects of ocean acidification, and its links to global warming, while sidestepping how grim the implications are.
Read more...A New York Times profile of Ina Drew, the former head of the JP Morgan Chief Investment Office, almost certainly produced high fives in the bank’s corporate communications office. This piece is the best sort of PR you can get: it treats the trading losses as yesterday’s news, of interest only as point of entre into the downfall of a heretofore unknown but once hugely successful and personally appealing trading manager.
Read more...Long-standing readers have noticed an increase in the amount of trolling in the comments section. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. As traditional broadcast media are becoming less important, both advertisers and PR firms are seeking to influence opinion and popular tastes through social media and blogs. Since I prefer to take a more hands-off approach to the comments section that other bloggers do, it puts me in a bit of a quandary. But the increase in orchestrated efforts to attack certain posts leaves me with no choice but to intervene more heavily.
The post last week from Project S.H.A.M.E. on Megan McArdle is an illustration.
Read more...We are delighted to post the latest offering of Project S.H.A.M.E., a media transparency initiative led by Yasha Levine and Mark Ames.
Read more...Memo to Andrew Ross Sorkin: if you are going to try to discredit someone, it’s more effective if you are less obvious about it.
Read more...We first posted on the suspicious death of Sunny Sheu in June 2011. Our brief overview of the situation:
Read more...Today, Joseph Smith, the official monitor for the Federal-state mortgage settlement entered into earlier this year with five major servicers, released a glossy initial report on program progress. Needless to say, my cynicism was piqued both by the glossy format of the document and the decision to release it well before the required date of second quarter 2013.
But the distressing part is the way the settlement is playing out according to script.
Read more...Ezra Klein demonstrated how far he’s has to descend into the Humpty Dumpty world of words meaning just what he chooses them to mean in order to defend failed Administration policies.
Read more...By Lynn Parramore, a contributing editor at Alternet. Cross posted from Alternet.
Team Romney wants you to believe Ryan didn’t really profit from privileged information. Don’t buy it.
Read more...By 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
We know that the supporters of austerity simultaneously urge us to reject “European socialism” while adopting the key European strategies that drove Europe into recession – twice. American conservatives assume that Europe must epitomize stringent financial regulation. The opposite is true. Europe adopted “light touch” financial regulation pursuant to neo-liberal economic theory. Its embrace of the three “de’s” – deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization was far more extreme than the United States. The City of London “won” the regulatory race to the bottom with the U.S. European’s adopted the full Basel II reduction in capital requirements without the minimum gearing ratio that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insisted upon. The FDIC prevailed over the intense, but fortunately unsuccessful opposition of the Federal Reserve economists who were the principal architects of Basel II’s disastrous reduction in capital requirements. The result was that European Union banks had roughly twice the leverage of U.S. banks and faced no meaningful regulatory restraints. The result was far larger real estate bubbles in several European nations (as a percentage of GDP) than in the U.S., multiple financial crises, and a Great Recession that reached depression levels in several nations.
Read more...Marcy Wheeler put up a useful post yesterday morning, based on a Reuters article describing the efforts of Standard Chartered to combat the damage done by its making illegal transfers on behalf of Iranian banks.
Marcy picked up on how the article revealed the techniques used by big banks to escape suffering meaningful consequences of their misdeeds:
Read more...I have to confess I’m really enjoying the dust up between the New York Superintendent of Financial Services, Benjamin Lawsky, and his opponents, namely, his target, Standard Chartered, and the flummoxed Federal regulators that he is showing up as so deeply captured that they genuinely can’t tell regulatory theater from the real thing.
Read more...We are delighted to post the latest offering of Project S.H.A.M.E, a media transparency initiative led by Yasha Levine and Mark Ames.
Adam Davidson graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in religion, and began his public radio career selling airtime and doing sponsor outreach. He then became an on-air radio personality, filing pro-Iraq War dispatches as Marketplace’s Middle East correspondent, and recently transformed himself into an effective propagandist for the banking industry. Over the years, Davidson has whitewashed the occupation of Iraq, praised sweatshop labor, attacked the idea of regulating Wall Street and argued for “squeezing the middle class”–all while taking undisclosed money from banking interests. No wonder Davidson shamelessly credited Wall Street for providing “just about anything that makes you happy.”
Read more...Neil Barofsky continues to take issue with the Administration’s efforts to depict itself as the friend of ordinary Americans when its real loyalties are to banks. In a Reuters op-ed, he took on the hypocrisy of the Administration and its allies in their “fire DeMarco” messaging. If you are late to this row, Ed DeMarco, head of Fannie’s and Freddie’s regulator, the FHFA, nixed the idea of having his wards make principal reductions on mortgages, despite the fact that top mortgage industry analyst Laurie Goodman has ascertained they are far more successful than mods that don’t lower principal balances.
As various commentators, including yours truly, have pointed out, the criticism of DeMarco is sheer scapegoating.
Read more...It’s hard to add much to the many fine obituaries of Gore Vidal, although I will say I envied his skill in kneecapping hypocrites, his erudition, and his wonderfully theatrical speaking style. Below are links and videos.
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