The campaign to “move your money” has gotten a groundswell of support. Having greater impact would be to “move our money”—move our local government revenues out of Wall Street banks into our own publicly-owned banks. Continue reading
To borrow a metaphor from the medical sciences, an effective cure requires a sound diagnosis. Yet, in the face of the current plague of unemployment, the Keynesian economists issue all kinds of passionate prescriptions to remedy the problem of joblessness without paying necessary attention to its root causes. Continue reading
Although more than one million Pennsylvanians are members of labor unions, and the state has a long history of worker exploitation and union activism, neither of the two largest university systems has a labor representative on its governing board. Continue reading
The postmaster general’s not-so-bright idea has managed to put the Postal Service on the chopping block with a first whack of $3 billion in cuts that affect first class “one day” mail for the first time in 40 years. But that’s not all . . . Continue reading
What follows is a shockingly revealing interview conducted by James J. Puplava CFP, President and Chief Investment Strategist at PFS Group in San Diego. On his radio show, Financial Sense Newshour, he speaks with broker Ann Barnhardt, who pillories Jon Corzine for his unprecedented theft of MF Global investor accounts. She claims, and rightly so, that Corzine committed the most egregious financial crime when he comingled client monies with company monies in high-risk investments, without informing clients, literally stealing their money. This occurred while the Chicago Mercantile Exchange [the “Merc” duh] looked on and did nothing. Continue reading
On November 27, Bloomberg News reported the results of its successful case to force the Fed to reveal the lending details of its 2008–09 bank bailout. In 29,000 pages of documents, the Fed revealed that by March 2009, it had committed $7.77 trillion in below-market loans and guarantees to rescuing the financial system; and that these nearly interest-free loans came without strings attached. The Fed insisted that the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, but the banks reaped a $13 billion windfall in profits; and “details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.” Continue reading
“To some people, the European Central Bank seems like a fire department that is letting the house burn down to teach the children not to play with matches.” So wrote Jack Ewing in the New York Times last week. Continue reading
On November 25, two days after a failed German government bond auction in which Germany was unable to sell 35% of its offerings of 10-year bonds, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble said that Germany might retreat from its demands that the private banks that hold the troubled sovereign debt from Greece, Italy, and Spain must accept part of the cost of their bailout by writing off some of the debt. Continue reading
When Americans who are the most victimized by our cruel economy still believe in something that is demonstrably no longer true, they are deeply delusional. They desperately want to believe in something once great about American society. The reality is that upward economic mobility has been destroyed, replaced by widely observable downward mobility. Some of the mostly younger jobless that have embraced the Occupy Wall Street and related Occupy efforts know the truth. Continue reading
Capitalism has come a long way since Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital. And so has the language in which it’s spoken: economics. Left behind are those early languages by Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes that for awhile were lingua franca . . . branching out in many languages now transformed into cults followed by schools of economists which comprise a spectrum ranging from high liturgy to voodoo rituals, the latter better described as trickle-down economics, the language of choice for Ronald Reagan and every conservative in American politics since his inauguration in 1981. Continue reading
The Keynesian view that the government can fine tune the economy through “appropriate” fiscal and monetary policies to maintain continuous growth at or near full employment is based on the idea that capitalism can be controlled by the state and managed by professional economists from government departments, that is, capitalism run by “experts” in the interest of all. Economic policy making according to this view is largely a matter of technical expertise or economic know-how, that is, a matter of choice. Continue reading
Henry Ford purportedly said, “It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” Continue reading
Feeling angry about being betrayed by a corrupt government owned by rich and corporate elites has driven the Occupy Wall Street movement. Emphasizing how the top one percent has prospered incredibly while the bottom 99 percent have been screwed royally is supported by countless data. New data show this is a global phenomenon and that even in the worst of economic times the wealthiest make out like the bandits they are, and there are a lot more of them than one percent. Continue reading
Among the demands of the Wall Street protesters is student debt forgiveness—a debt “jubilee.” Occupy Philly has a “Student Loan Jubilee Working Group,” and other groups are studying the issue. Continue reading
Stripped from the fancy (and mystifying) jargon, quantitative easing (QE) simply means increasing the quantity of money supply, or easing credit conditions—in the hope of stimulating the stagnant economy. This is usually done by having central banks inject a pre-determined quantity of money into the coffers of commercial banks in return for the purchase of their financial assets, which consist largely of government bonds. Although it is typically done electronically, or on paper, its practical effect is the same as printing money. Continue reading
Presently, one has the net impression that today’s governments, both in Europe and in the United States, have their fingers plugging the holes in the financial dike, but fear that that the entire dam could collapse in the not too distant future with dire economic consequences. Continue reading
Publicly-owned banks were instrumental in funding Germany’s “economic miracle” after the devastation of World War II. Although the German public banks have been targeted in the last decade for takedown by their private competitors, the model remains a viable alternative to the private profiteering being protested on Wall Street today. Continue reading
The US rose to eminence by producing value, and by a fair percentage of citizens sharing the wealth. The further the nation has been corrupted from the stability of fairness, the faster our rate of decline. Runaway greed, lust for power, and raw capitalism have reversed our national trajectory so insidiously that not just we, but even Earth’s biosphere, are in free fall. Is it more than simple coincidence that such comprehensive decline so closely parallels our prohibition of hemp? Continue reading
China, the hope of the global economy, is headed for a hard crash, as it experiences some of the hard truths about capitalism, in a series of economic bubbles that are set to pop. Continue reading
Martin Luther King said in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. You may well ask: ‘Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” Continue reading
Why did gold and silver stocks just get hammered, at a time when commodities are considered a safe haven against widespread global uncertainty? The answer, according to Bill Murphy’s newsletter LeMetropoleCafe.com, is that the sector has been the target of massive short selling. For some popular precious metal stocks, close to half the trades have been “phantom” sales by short sellers who did not actually own the stock. Continue reading
If I told you that federal lawmakers are about to forward a bill to the floor of Congress that would empower a government agency to go into towns all over the country and say to small businesses, “We are taking the land you are on and selling it to a large corporation, which spent millions of dollars lobbying to get this land, so that they can build a business that is needed more than yours,” would you be angry? Continue reading
At the Wall Street protest, a young woman carried a sign, “REVOLUTION IS FUN,” and I don’t doubt that she was having a great time, because it can be exhilarating to engage in a just and noble fight, and to feel that you are an agent of change, a participant in history even, and not just one of its faceless victims, as is the common lot. So fun, yes, at least for her, and at least up to that moment, until the violence explodes, as nearly always happens in anything approaching a political revolution. Continue reading
Economic policy in the United States and Europe has failed, and people are suffering. Continue reading
The issue of tax has never held such widespread public attention. Following the global financial crisis in 2008, tax issues that had been campaigned on at the margins for decades suddenly became the subject of high-level intergovernmental deliberations. Global tax regulation has turned into a priority in the G20 agenda, while global forms of tax are today the subject of major civil society campaigns. At the same time, direct action groups such as UK and US-Uncut are taking the call for tax justice onto the high street. And now the billionaire investor Warren Buffett has forced the issue of tax code loopholes into the political mainstream. But there is another side to the not-so-gritty subject of taxation that lends itself less readily to the popular imagination, even though it remains critical to poverty eradication in developing countries – the issue of domestic tax collection. Continue reading
AB 750, California’s bill to study the feasibility of establishing a state-owned bank that would receive deposits of state funds, has passed both houses of the legislature and is now on the desk of Governor Jerry Brown awaiting his signature. Continue reading
“War! Good God, ya’ll. What is it good for? Absolutely nothin’!” Continue reading
North Dakota has had the nation’s lowest unemployment ever since the economy tanked. What’s its secret? Continue reading
Good luck, Lloyd. You’ve had a hell of a run. Should I remind readers that this story was reported in the LA Times? I’ll remind them also that Goldman Sachs and the other big investment banks got $1.2 trillion in easements in 2008 and that profits soared subsequently, along with bonuses. In short, we the people rescued the same guys that crashed the system and did practically nothing for the homeowners who were gamed and lost their homes and money and are still suffering foreclosure. Continue reading
What just happened in the stock market? Two weeks, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose or fell by at least 400 points for four straight days, a stock market first. Continue reading
I prefer the Spanish word “perogrullada” to its English equivalent: truism or platitude. During my youth, we had something closer in meaning to perogrullada when we would confront someone expressing the obvious, saying “no kidding, Dick Tracy!” (Dick Tracy was then a very popular comic strip detective and crime solver.) Continue reading
I like to ask friends about the oddest summer job they ever had. One talks about how he used to don a rubber suit every morning at a Sylvania electronics plant in Syracuse, NY, and climb into a tank, where he dipped television tubes into some sort of mercury solution. He now moonlights as a thermometer. Continue reading
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