By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland
Question: what on earth has Bill Gross been reading? Gross has long been an acolyte of Hyman Minsky, or so he says. But his recent piece in the Financial Times entitled ‘Zero-Based Money Risks Trapping Recovery’ has a lot of people scratching their noodles.
Read more...By Michael Olenick, founder and CEO of Legalprise, and creator of FindtheFraud, a crowd sourced foreclosure document review system (still in alpha). You can follow him on Twitter at @michael_olenick
Fallout continues from the ProPublica/NPR story “Freddie Mac Bets Against American Homeowners,” though probably not the sort ProPublica expected.
Many in the blogsphere who work on finance and housing finance issues, including myself and Yves Smith, didn’t find the piece to be convincing. In a rebuttal Yves, who like me is anything but a cheerleader for the GSEs, explained Freddie’s practice is, in reality, only slightly more nefarious than clearing snow from the parking lot. That is, of all the awful decisions Freddie Mac makes, this isn’t one of them.
Read more...The powers that be are in the process of seeing how they can burnish their “tough on bank crime” credentials while not ruffling anyone really important. And the case featured in the Wall Street Journal, “U.S. Plans Charges on Bond Fraud,” illustrates the sort of enforcement theater we are likely to see over the coming months.
Wow! Charges! Better yet, criminal charges! Finally the Administration is getting tough on crime.
Right. It’s tough on crime against banks.
Read more...A new ProPublica story, “Freddie Mac Betting Against Struggling Homeowners,” treats the fact that Freddie Mac retains the riskiest tranche of its mortgage bond offering, known as inverse floaters, as heinous and evidence of scheming against suffering borrowers.
The storyline in this piece is neat, plausible, and utterly wrong. And my e-mail traffic indicates that people who are reasonably finance savvy but don’t know the mortgage bond space have bought the uninformed and conspiratorial ProPublica thesis hook, line, and sinker.
Read more...By Douglas K. Smith, author of On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We In An Age Of Me
Earlier this month, Matthew Yglesias of Slate tweeted “EXCLUSIVE: The activities of individual business executives have no relationship to the level of economy-wide employment.”
It’s hard to choose what is most ridiculous here…
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The intense debate precipitated by a post on this site, “How Ron Paul Challenges Liberals,” and follow up posts by Glenn Greenwald and here serve to prove their simple yet frequently misrepresented thesis: that Ron Paul’s anti-war, anti-Fed positions expose fault lines among those traveling under the “liberal” banner.
Anyone who read comments on NC prior to this debate would have noticed some sympathy for Paul, ranging from the more common “he’s batshit and I’d never vote for him, but his opposition to our Middle East adventurism and the lack of accountability at the Fed is refreshing” to some making a stronger case for him. That shouldn’t be surprising given the point often made here and in the few lonely “progressive” outposts on the blogosphere (“progressive” is in the process of being co-opted in the same way “liberal” has been): that the Democratic party has been so deeply penetrated by the neoliberal/Robert Rubin/Hamilton Project types that it isn’t that different from the right on economic issues.
It should not be controversial to point out that the Democratic party uses identity politics as a cover for its policy of selling out the middle class to banks and big corporate interests, just on a slower and stealthier basis than the right. And we’ve seen the identity card used in a remarkably dishonest manner in this Ron Paul contretemps.
Read more...Although I endeavor to treat high dudgeon as an art form, it is difficult to find words adequate to convey the level of ridicule and opprobrium that Adam Davidson’s latest New York Times piece, “What Does Wall Street Do for You?” deserves. I had the vast misfortune to come across it late last week, and have gotten an unusually large volume of incredulous reader e-mails about it. Ms. G’s e-mail headline “NYT – Not a Parody” was typical:
Read more...This one is so bad, even for NYT, I’m wondering if the paper wasn’t secretly sold to Murdoch, Bloomberg & the Fed Reserve sometime in the past few days.
Although lots of technology-related sites are correctly up in arms about the Stop Online Piracy Act, the MSM has given it short shrift, and the financial blogosphere has not paid much attention (cross posts of some of George Washington articles being a welcome exception).
Read more...Adam Davidson has an article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, “The Other Reason Europe is Going Broke,” that manages the impressive feat of making you stupider than before you read it. It misrepresents most of the few facts it contains in appealing to American prejudices about our cultural, or in this case, economics superiority, to sell worker bashing.
Davidson uses the spectacle of Europe going into an economic nosedive to claim that one of the big things wrong with Europe is its spoiled workers. The piece is anchored in a glaring, fundamental misrepresentation. It argues that Americans are much better off than Europeans because we have a higher GDP per capita (more on that in due course) and asserts that that is because Europeans are not able to compete in world markets:
Read more...By Ian Fraser, a financial journalist who blogs at his web site and at qfinance. His Twitter is @ian_fraser.
I was surprised and disappointed when I opened my copy of The Economist on Friday morning.
The magazine is running a feebly-argued propaganda piece headlined “Save the City” as its cover story. The piece vaunts the “skills” that are to be found in the City of London and seeks to persuade us that having a powerful financial sector is critical to the future health of the UK economy and that the “Square Mile” must therefore be cherished and preserved at all costs. The cover image harps back to the Blitz, as if Hitler’s Lufwaffe is once again poised to carpet bomb a key part of our heritage.
Outside PR puff sheets like HBOS’s absurd “Deal Leaders” of 2005-08 and the Pravda-style advertorials inserted into newspapers and magazines to launder the images of evil dictatorships, I’ve rarely read such a farcical or misleading article.
Read more...By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland
Working as a journalist and as an opinion writer each have their charms. Journalists have the pleasure of discovery and revelation: uncovering new facts, talking to people, sometimes acting as a catalyst to move events forward.
Opinion writing, aside from being a comfy way to make a living, gives the writer greater stylistic freedom, and the challenge and opportunity of making a dent in readers’ views. The problem is that you have a limited amount of space and, often, an easily distracted readership. Now, that’s fine for something like, say, an observation about an upcoming election or the loutish behavior of a major sports figure but it is a patently awful format from which to raise Big Questions.
The normally sound Clive Crook fell into this trap in an opinion piece at Bloomberg, “A Crisis of Leadership, Not a Crisis of Capitalism.” Bluntly, this article is a train wreck.
Read more...Yves here. We cross posted a piece by Mark Ames on a massacre of Kazakh oil workers striking against KazMunaiGaz, a company “owned” by the son-in-law of the Kazakh president for life. Its American JV partners are led by Chevron.
The story got a surprising amount of pushback here and on Ames’ site, and some of reaction did not look organic. That led Ames to do further digging, and the resulting piece below gives a window into how big corporations go about neutralizing embarrassing news coverage. The more the public knows about the modus operandi of people like Foust, the faster they will be forced to seek more honorable lines of employment.
In this blogger’s humble opinion, this piece is a gold standard takedown of a truly deserving target.
Read more...Most people who have seen the work of Adam Curtis, say his BBC series The Century of the Self, or The Trap, or All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, are struck by his ability to read how mass opinion has been shaped by media and the officialdom.
It would seem hard to convey much in the way of insight on the topic of Rupert Murdoch in a mere five minutes, yet Curtis pulls it off in this short film.
Read more...Maureen Tkacik is (now) a writer living in Washington, DC. You can follow her on Twitter at @moetkacik
I was at the Georgetown library the other day flipping through old bound volumes of the Ramparts magazine for reasons entirely unrelated when I came upon a brief story from a 1972 issue about “increasing speculation within the intelligence community that the CIA has struck up a direct relationship with police forces in major cities.” Said speculation had been triggered by a $30 million grant from the Ford Foundation to endow a new nonprofit formed to research “best practices” in policing or something along those lines. And Richard Helms’ former executive assistant had recently left the Agency after 17 years to join, and another bigger deal CIA guy was somehow also involved.
I jotted down some notes because the official description of the Ford Foundation project in question reminded me of the alleged purpose of the organization I’d read about hosting conference calls to discuss “best practices” for cracking down on Occupy Wall Street.
Read more...The New York Times (hat tip Mary B) took note of a seamy JP Morgan effort at brand burnishing:
In a gambit to promote its charitable work — and maybe polish its image, which has suffered since the financial collapse in 2008 — JPMorgan Chase is financing and sponsoring the “American Giving Awards,” which will be televised by NBC on Saturday night. The two-hour show, with Bob Costas as host, will profile recipients of Chase donations, will be book-ended by Chase commercials and will regularly remind viewers that the whole event is “presented by Chase.”…/
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