David Pell in a post at NPR worries that information overload leads many to miss broader issues. His point of departure is a recent Time magazine cover image of a young Afghan woman mutilated by the Taliban. After being put off by the editorial decision to use such a grim photo, he pinged some colleagues […]
Read more...Wow, the efforts to find and discredit strategic defaulters and other types of mortgage borrower reprobates appear to be picking up steam at the New York Times. Let’s be clear: there are not doubt more than a few people who bought more house than they could afford who had out of control spending habits. But […]
Read more...If all politicians were this entertaining, the public might start sitting up and taking notice of what happens in DC.
Read more...Stress will bring out an organism’s or an organization’s defenses, and the beleagured Obama administration is looking mighty defensive these days. The great unwashed public isn’t buying its PR about its supposed accomplishments, such as the disgrace that it misbrands as financial reform (which 80% are skeptical will prevent a future crisis) and health care […]
Read more...By Yves Smith and Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive Update and correction 4:45 PM: We owe an apology to readers and to Louise Story of the New York Times, for an apparent error in our analysis. We have been informed that, remarkably, there were two separate Pyxis vehicles which were issued in […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal seems truly mystified that with headline unemployment at 9.5% and U6 at 16.5%, some employers are nevetheless having trouble filling jobs. But this shouldn’t seem all that strange when you consider that workers are not an undifferentiated mass, but have particular skills and experience, and live in particular places, and they […]
Read more...Gretchen Morgenson is often a target of heated criticism on the blogosphere, which I have argued more than once is overdone. While her articles on executive compensation and securities litigation are consistently well reported, she has an appetite for the wilder side of finance, and often looks a bit out of her depth. Typically, she […]
Read more...There are a lot of bad things you can say about Fannie and Freddie: that they were part of the oversubsidization of housing in America, that they’ve had an overlarge side business of funneling cash to friendly politicians, that some of their “innovative” practices, like requiring the use of the electronic mortgage registration system, MERS, […]
Read more...Thought I’d make a very crude effort to assess how much interest there is in strategic default, via looking at how often it comes up in Google searches versus other hot topics. Be sure to look at the left scale. Not surprisingly, strategic defaults is a new subject of interest: Some old and new pet […]
Read more...It occurred to me that this story might not get all that much mainstream air time in the US, for reasons that will become obvious. We’ve been having an inquiry into the background to the Iraq war over here. There was another enquiry back in the Blair era, Hutton, summarised by wikipedia: On 18 July […]
Read more...This post first appeared on May 6, 2007 I’m certain you’re familiar with the expression “death wish.” I am beginning to wonder whether America has a banana republic wish. The country has been taking steps towards being a small-minded, elite-dominated, sham democracy. Mind you, I am pointing to a tendency, not an established fact. The […]
Read more...If only it was that easy. First sentence: “Pick up a piece of text and start reading and it usually becomes clear pretty quickly whether you’re reading a nonfictional news story or a fictional novel.” They lost me right there. Hat tip to Alea.
Read more...By Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive and Yves Smith A common fallacy is to assume that situations are polar: win/lose, black/white, hot/cold, heads/tails. But more often, given A, “not A” is not the opposite of A. Conventional wisdom in the financial media is that the settlement announced by the SEC over its […]
Read more...For those who did not catch wind of it, the Peterson Foundation, which has long had Social Security and Medicare in its crosshairs, held a bizarre set of 19 faux town hall meetings over the previous weekend to scare participants into compliance and then collect the resulting distorted survey data, presumably to use in a […]
Read more...I want the word “reform” back. Between health care “reform” and financial services “reform,” Obama, his operatives, and media cheerleaders are trying to depict both initiatives as being far more salutary and far-reaching than they are. This abuse of language is yet another case of the Obama Adminsitration using branding to cover up substantive shortcomings. […]
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