Archive for November, 2009
WTO Says Brazil Can Saction US Over Cotton
The World Trade Organization has ruled that Brazil may impose trade sanctions against a variety of U.S. exports in a 9-year old complaint about U.S. government subsidies for cotton farmers. From the wires: The formal move at the WTO’s dispute settlement body (DSB) brought Brazil one step closer to retaliating against the United States, the ...Read more.
A Better Way to Regulate Financial Markets
From sometime D&S author Thomas Palley, in the Financial Times‘s Economists’ Forum series: A better way to regulate financial markets: Asset based reserve requirements By Thomas Palley | November 10, 2009 There is widespread recognition that the financial crisis which triggered the Great Recession was significantly due to financial excess, particularly in real estate lending. ...Read more.
The Worst Is Yet to Come (Nouriel Roubini)
From RGE Monitor and yesterday’s NY Daily News, Nouriel Roubini tells the unemployed to “hunker down”: The Worst is yet to Come: Unemployed Americans Should Hunker Down for More Job Losses Nouriel Roubini | Nov 15, 2009 Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening. While the ...Read more.
Sustainability and Horsesh*t
Here are two items related to climate change that read well next to each other. One is from a magazine called Tin House—an article by Curtis White skewering the idea of sustainability. A taste: For environmental, business, and political organizations alike, the term that has come to stand for the hope of the natural world ...Read more.
Maybe We Were a Tad Premature
…in our choice of the next bailout candidate. And this one surely needs watching in the longer-term. It’s the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp (PBGC). From Calculated Risk:Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation Deficit Increasesby CalculatedRisk on 11/14/2009 11:58:00 AM The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) is the federal agency that guarantees pensions for 44 million Americans. The ...Read more.
Next Bailout Candidate
And the winner is…The Federal Housing Administration (FHA)! Lest it be forgotten, as the article duly notes: The FHA and the government-sponsored housing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac currently provide about 90 per cent of all new mortgages in the US housing market. From The Financial Times:Defaults pose risks to US housing agencyBy Saskia ...Read more.
Yves Smith on Krugman on Jobs
From the fantastic Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism: Krugman on the Need for Jobs Policies Paul Krugman has a good op-ed tonight on how Germany has fared versus the US in the global financial crisis. Recall that there was much hectoring of Germany early on, for its failure to enact stimulus programs. German readers were ...Read more.
'Politicization' of the Fed (Dean Baker)
There’s an interesting article in today’s New York Times about how Ben Bernanke has had to learn politicking, now that some in Congress are eager to provide more oversight of the Federal Reserve. The article discusses Ron Paul’s bill that would allow the Government Accountability Office to audit the Fed: Mr. Paul’s bill would require ...Read more.
The Public Purpose of Banking
Maybe Goldman Sachs should have used some of its bonus money to hire better P.R. folks—the company has really been taking a beating, and not just because it is “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” as Matt Taibbi put it ...Read more.
Change Wall Street can believe in (Holly Sklar)
Hat-tip to Mike P. By Holly SklarDistributed by McClatchy Tribune News Service, 11/6/09Copyright 2009 Holly Sklar Wall Street is doing to America what private equity firms did to Simmons Bedding and many other productive companies. Taking control with borrowed money, stripping assets, slashing jobs and cashing out. Taxpayer bailouts saved Wall Street from choking on ...Read more.
