The YouTube video of 12-year-old Victoria Grant speaking at the Public Banking in America conference in April has gone viral, topping a million views on various websites. Continue reading
Sections
-
Recent Posts
The YouTube video of 12-year-old Victoria Grant speaking at the Public Banking in America conference in April has gone viral, topping a million views on various websites. Continue reading
The sobs we have in mind are neither short, audible gasps of breath of those who are invested in Facebook stock, nor are they intended as a bastardly reference of those who, inside and/or outside of the company, put together and took to fruition this much-awaited IPO (Initial Public Offering). These mnemonic sobs we have in mind represent simply Shares-Of-Bubbly-Stock. For that’s what those 421.2 million shares of Facebook were: Overpriced, bubbly stock. Continue reading
According to both the Mayan and Hindu calendars, 2012 (or something very close) marks the transition from an age of darkness, violence and greed to one of enlightenment, justice, and peace. It’s hard to see that change just yet in the events relayed in the major media, but a shift does seem to be happening behind the scenes; and this is particularly true in the once-boring world of banking. Continue reading
The US financial system and, probably, the financial system of Europe, like the police, no longer serves a useful social purpose. Continue reading
Last week, the city of Philadelphia’s school system announced that it expects to close 40 public schools next year, and 64 schools by 2017. The school district expects to lose 40% of its current enrollment, and thousands of experienced, qualified teachers. Continue reading
Dear Mr. CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Mr. Jamie Dimon: There you are sitting with egg on your face and $2 billion plus going deep into the red on bad bets. You, the guy who fought for less and not more regulation is now in the middle of a major mess. You, the guy who hates the Volker rule named after ex-Fed Chief, Paul Volker, and says it went too far and that “if you want to be trading, you have to have a lawyer and a psychiatrist sitting next to you determining what ‘was your intent’ every time you did something.” That was some expensive exaggeration, wouldn’t you say? Continue reading
“Systems often hold longer than we think, but they end up by collapsing much faster than we imagine.” In those few words, the former chief economist of the IMF International, Kenneth Rogoff , sums up the situation of the global economy. As the Governor of the Bank of England, he asserts that “the next crisis may be worse than 1930” . . . Continue reading
“The Social Security program . . . represents our commitment as a society to the belief that workers should not live in dread that a disability, death, or old age could leave them or their families destitute.”—President Jimmy Carter, December 20, 1977. Continue reading
I have always looked at government subsidies with suspicion . . . trying to identify whether they are designed to assist (those in need) or to render support (for a cause). And looking at housing subsidies has been no different. Continue reading
The Goldman Sachs coup that failed in America has nearly succeeded in Europe—a permanent, irrevocable, unchallengeable bailout for the banks underwritten by the taxpayers. Continue reading
Here we go again. Another round of the game we call Congressional Creep. After months of haggling and debate, Congress finally passes reform legislation to fix a serious rupture in the body politic, and the president signs it into law. But the fight’s just begun, because the special interests immediately set out to win back what they lost when the reform became law. Continue reading
Even the world’s most resource-rich country has now been caught in the debt trap. Its once-proud government programs are being subjected to radical budget cuts—cuts that could have been avoided if the government had not quit borrowing from its own central bank in the 1970s. Continue reading
Growing up Protestant in a small town in upstate New York, the commemoration of Lent was not as major an event as it would be in, say, a Catholic household. We didn’t give up chocolate or gum or anything else for those forty days between Ash Wednesday and Easter, nor did most of the grown-ups we knew forsake any of their particular pleasures or bad habits. Continue reading
Small business owners and working people constitute the core of the American electorate. They share the same origins and have far more in common than the major political parties would have them believe. Their shared political, social and family needs are being ignored by both parties, as they are cynically played one against the other. Expressing their discontent as Tea Partiers and Occupiers, they are no longer silent, nor can they be ignored. Continue reading
The “toxic culture of greed” on Wall Street was highlighted again earlier this month, when Greg Smith went public with his resignation from Goldman Sachs in a scathing op-ed published in the New York Times. In other recent eyebrow-raisers, LIBOR rates—the benchmark interest rates involved in interest rate swaps—were shown to be manipulated by the banks that would have to pay up; and the objectivity of the ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) was called into question, when a 50% haircut for creditors was not declared a “default” requiring counterparties to pay on credit default swaps on Greek sovereign debt. Continue reading
One of the great economic myths is that markets are rational. Not a day passes without this myth being disproved scores of times, but the myth persists. Continue reading
Today (March 9, 2012), the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that 227,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs were created by the economy during February. Is the government’s claim true? Continue reading
Public sector banking is a concept that is relatively unknown in the United States. Only one state—North Dakota—owns its own bank. North Dakota is also the only state to escape the credit crisis of 2008, sporting a budget surplus every year since; but skeptics write this off to coincidence or other factors. The common perception is that government bureaucrats are bad businessmen. To determine whether government-owned banks are assets or liabilities, then, we need to look further afield. Continue reading
Facts are stubborn things, said founding father John Adams, a basic truth Ronald Reagan famously mangled at the Republican National Convention in 1988, when he tried to quote Adams and declared, “Facts are stupid things,” before correcting himself. Continue reading
Just a few months after public outrage forced Bank of America to drop a planned $5 fee for using debit cards to make purchases, the financial institution is at it again. Continue reading
Seventeen states have now introduced bills for state-owned banks, and others are in the works. Hawaii’s innovative state bank bill addresses the foreclosure mess. County-owned banks are being proposed that would tackle the housing crisis by exercising the right of eminent domain on abandoned and foreclosed properties. Arizona has a bill that would do this for homeowners who are current in their payments but underwater, allowing them to refinance at fair market value. Continue reading
In an article titled “Still No End to ‘Too Big to Fail,’” William Greider wrote in The Nation on February 15: “Financial market cynics have assumed all along that Dodd-Frank did not end ‘too big to fail’ but instead created a charmed circle of protected banks labeled ‘systemically important’ that will not be allowed to fail, no matter how badly they behave.” Continue reading
The United States government and its NATO puppets have been killing Muslim men, women and children for a decade in the name of bringing them democracy. But is the West itself a democracy? Continue reading
Watching what’s happening to our democracy is like watching the cruise ship Costa Concordia founder and sink slowly into the sea off the coast of Italy, as the passengers, shorn of life vests, scramble for safety as best they can, while the captain trips and falls conveniently into a waiting lifeboat. Continue reading
Once, many years ago, in a land far away between two oceans, with fruited plains, amber waves of grain, and potholes on its highways, there lived a young man named Sam. Continue reading
Last Friday the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the first month of this new year 243,000 jobs were created and the unemployment rate (U.3) fell to 8.3 percent. This good news is a mirage. It is due to faulty seasonal adjustments and to the BLS birth/death model. In a prolonged downturn, seasonal adjustments and the birth/death model produce nonexistent employment. Continue reading
Last Friday (January 27) the US Bureau of Economic Analysis announced its advance estimate that in the last quarter of 2011 the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.8% in real inflation-adjusted terms, an increase from the annual rate of growth in the third quarter. Continue reading
The Wall Street Journal reported on January 19 that the Obama administration was pushing heavily to get the 50 state attorneys general to agree to a settlement with five major banks in the “robo-signing” scandal. The scandal involves employees signing names not their own, under titles they did not really have, attesting to the veracity of documents they had not really reviewed. Investigation reveals that it did not just happen occasionally but was an industry-wide practice, dating back to the late 1990s; and that it may have clouded the titles of millions of homes. If the settlement is agreed to, it will let Wall Street bankers off the hook for crimes that would land the rest of us in jail—fraud, forgery, securities violations and tax evasion. Continue reading
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and the international conglomerate EGT Development came to a tentative agreement on Monday to resolve their long simmering labor dispute. The agreement was announced in a statement released by Washington Governor Chris Gregoire, who convened the discussions that ultimately lead to the settlement. Continue reading
A decisive struggle promising to shape the fate of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), West Coast dockworkers, and all organized labor is swiftly nearing a climax in Longview, Washington. Continue reading
An electronic database called MERS has created defects in the chain of title to over half the homes in America. Counties have been cheated out of millions of dollars in recording fees, and their title records are in hopeless disarray. Meanwhile, foreclosed and abandoned homes are blighting neighborhoods. Straightening out the records and restoring the homes to occupancy is clearly in the public interest, and the burden is on local government to do it. But how? New legal developments are presenting some innovative alternatives. Continue reading
The following report is based on the work of statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com. Continue reading