Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class

Walmart Continues to Deny it Has a Staffing/Stocking Problem After E-mail Deluge to Bloomberg

After NC got its own mini comment deluge on our post yesterday about devolution and cost-cutting gone rabid leading to declines in service, with Walmart as the featured example, Bloomberg has a follow up story on customer complaints about Walmart stock levels.

Bill Greider on Why Paul Krugman Was So Wrong

A good piece in the Nation by Bill Greider, which focuses on Krugman’s long standing support of free trade, and how, contrary to his predictions, the results were not positive for ordinary American workers.

Barack Obama’s Economic Legacy: The Billionaire-Boosting Big Four on His Wish List

By Gaius Publius. Follow him on Twitter @Gaius_Publius. Cross posted from AmericaBlog

I’ve been writing about Obama’s Legacy Tour (sorry, his second term) from time to time without focusing on the legacy itself. So this post will lay down a marker — in brief, what’s on Obama’s economic legacy list, and what will he get if he succeeds?

Wolf Richter: The Stunning Differences In European Costs Of Labor – Or Why “Competitiveness” Is A Beggar-Thy-Neighbor Strategy

By Wolf Richter, San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Cross posted from Testosterone Pit.

The ominous term, “competitiveness” has been bandied about as the real issue, the one that causes European countries, in particular some of those stuck in the Eurozone, to sink ever deeper into their fiasco. To fix that issue, “structural reforms,” or austerity, have been invoked regardless of how much blood might stain the streets. And a core element of these structural reforms is bringing down the cost of labor. But productivity, infrastructure, transportation costs, corruption, training and education, etc. all figure prominently into this equation. Cost of labor is not the only factor.

Free Trade and Unrestricted Capital Flow: How Billionaires Get Rich and Destroy the Rest of Us

Yves here. This post highlights an issue that gets far too little attention: how the “free trade” agenda has been used to promote a capital mobility agenda, and why that works to the detriment of ordinary citizens. It focuses on the real economy side of the free-flowing capital experiment; we’ll discuss next week how the Trans-Pacific Partnership is an alarming advance in this process of grinding down what is left of the middle class to benefit of the rich.

Michael Hudson Explains How Deficit Hysterics Target the Wrong Type of Debt

I was at the Atlantic Economy conference the week before last, and Michael Hudson got in one of the best quips: “Helicopter Ben has taken off and has been dropping money all over Wall Street. But he hasn’t dropped any on Main Street.” He has an informative talk with Paul Jay of Real News Network on why the fixation on public debt is wrongheaded, and we should worry about private debt instead.

Will Cyprus Be Contained? (Updated)

In March 2007, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said that he thought the impact of losses on subprime mortgages was likely to be contained. It took five months for events to start proving him wrong. August 2007 marked the onset of the first acute phase of the global financial crisis, when the asset backed commercial paper market seized up.

Last week, in a press conference, Bernanke indicated that he thought the likelihood of the crisis in Cyprus having larger ramifications was limited, and avoided using the “c” word. But the message was similar to that of March 2007.

So are we likely to see the sort of delay between the assessment and the onset of trouble, as we did in 2007, or is Cyprus a nothingburger, as the Troika and many investors contend?

Bill Black: O’Donnell Thinks Krugman is “A Lonely Voice Opposing Austerity” Because he Listens to MSNBC

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. Jointly posted with New Economic Perspectives

MSNBC persists in running a pro-austerity line by falsely presenting Paul Krugman as a isolated opponent of economic malpractice.

Wolf Richter: Housing Bubble II – But This Time It’s Different

We have seen it for several years: foreclosure sales have become the hunting grounds for investors with two goals: hanging on to these homes until the Fed’s flood of money drives up their value, and renting them out. Thousands of smaller investors have piled into the game. And so have the giants. But now the second half of the equation is collapsing.

Cyprus’ Bank Deposit Bail-in

Ed Harrison here. I haven’t been on NC in a while now but Yves asked me to cross-post this one because the issue is important. Let me note here that Tyler Cowen asks some troubling questions on this. And Ed Conway raises some good issues as well. I recommend reading those posts too. Below is […]

As Dow Sprints to New High, the Middle Class and Manufacturing Languish

It’s hard to fathom the celebratory mood in the US markets, save that the moneyed classes are benefitting from a wall of liquidity reminiscent of early 2007, when risk spreads across virtually all types of lending shrank to scarily low levels. Then the culprit was not well understood, although Gillian Tett discerned that CDOs were a huge source of leverage, and in April 2007, an analyst, Henry Maxey at Ruffler, LLC, did an impressive job of piecing together how levered structured credit strategies were driving market liquidity.

Now it’s a lot easier to see what is afoot.