Mark Naison: The last time we had an extended period of profits rising while wages stagnated was the 1920′s – many historians view this as the most significant underlying cause of the Great Depression.
GOP Revives Housing-Bubble Hucksterism in Promoting “Mitt-Mentum”
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Randy Shaw: The same folks who “sold” the Iraq invasion and the housing bubble are all in on the “Mitt-mentum” theme, but this time the voters are not buying.
The Romney Campaign’s Situational Demagoguery
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Joseph Palermo: Worse than Swift Boating, worse than Willie Horton, Mitt Romney is running the most craven, dishonest, and hypocritical campaign we’ve seen in contemporary American politics.
David Brooks’s Anti-Poverty Program: “Bourgeois Paternalism”
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Joseph Palermo: After telling his readers he isn’t going to blame the poor for being poor because of their bad behavior, David Brooks plows right ahead and blames the poor for being poor because of their bad behavior.
Foreclosures 101 – Part 2
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Kwazi Nkrumah: After U.S. housing prices peaked in mid-2006 and began a sharp decline thereafter, refinancing became more difficult.
Republicans Have a Gambling Problem
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Tina Dupuy: When you double down – you lose twice as much – twice as quickly. And that sums up Speaker John Boehner’s tenure just perfectly.
Occupy Wall Street’s “Gullible” and “Unsophisticated” Protesters
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Joseph Palermo: Prosperity never “trickles down.” And people are finally catching on. The housing bubble went too far. It destroyed too many lives and livelihoods to go unquestioned and unpunished, as Wall Street (and Washington) would like it.
Blacks and Latinos Will Suffer When the Student Debt Bubble Bursts
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David Love: There is every indication that the bursting of the student debt bubble, like the housing bubble before it, is imminent. And when it happens, it will send shockwaves throughout the financial markets. People of color will be especially vulnerable.
Obama’s Jobs Speech: Prepare to Be Underwhelmed
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Joseph Palermo: President Obama’s much anticipated speech outlining his jobs agenda for the 2012 election year will sound a lot like a tiny mouse trying to make a loud roar. Instead of clarity, we’ll get hedging; instead of “bold,” we’ll get wishy-washy.
Trump Slams Immigrants Who ‘Never Ever Achieved Anything’
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Andrea Nill: Over the past month, real estate mogul Donald Trump has made quite a name for himself as a right-wing birther.
Answering The Anti-Tax Whiners
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Mark Dempsey: After having reduced taxes without reducing spending, the Republicans can now get Jerry Brown and the California Democrats to do the politically unpopular work of terminating programs that would otherwise be too popular to touch. It’s clever, but hardly non-partisan.
Why the Tax Deal Confirms the Republican Worldview
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Robert Reich: As income and wealth have risen to the top, so has political power. Money is being used to bribe politicians and fill the airwaves with misleading ads that block all of this.
The Big Economic Story; Why Obama Isn’t Telling It
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Robert Reich: In reality, the lousy economy is due to insufficient demand – the result of the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income at the top.
Reconsidering Japan…Reconsidering Paul Krugman
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Steven Hill: No one has been more influential in defining this narrative than New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.
The California Budget Mess Backstory
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Adam Eran: So the origin of California’s tax reductions, and even its current budget deficit, is arguably oil price inflation. If we want a stable economy, and government without deficits, we need to stop kidding ourselves that spending is a the root our budget problems, and attend to our energy addiction.
Shorting Economists: The ‘Experts’ Keep Getting it Wrong
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Steven Hill: So when the authorities say “a recovery is under way” or “stimulus rather than deficit reduction” or “deficit reduction instead of stimulus,” remember: These are the same experts who are unsure of how to measure, who too often substitute ideology and partisanship for broken theory, and usually have been flat wrong in their assessments.
The Vanishing American Consumer and the Coming Trade War
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Robert Reich: We’re unlikely to see a repeat of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs that worsened and lengthened the Great Depression. But you can forget trade-opening agreements. In Toronto last week, the G-20 leaders dropped their 2009 pledge to finish the Doha round this year. In the U.S., agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Columbia are languishing.
Why Main Street Isn’t Getting Any Better
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Robert Reich: Americans have no choice but to pare back their debt. That’s bad news because consumer spending is 70 percent of the economy. It helps explain why we so few jobs are being created, and why we can’t escape the gravitational pull of the Great Recession without far more government spending.
Financial Reform Too Small to Succeed
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Joseph Palermo: The financial reform legislation currently winding its way through the Congress is a step in the right direction but it retains too much of the status quo that brought down the economy in the first place. The key problem, as many economists have been telling us, is that the top financial institutions remain “too big to fail.” Congress can enact all the regulations it wishes but even the best written rules won’t be enough to prevent another financial meltdown.
Peter Baker and David Herszenhorn: Wall Street Reform Reporting Lacking
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Joseph Palermo: The massive trading and swapping of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and other abstractions cooked up by the fertile minds of sociopathic Wall Street “traders” not only did nothing to lubricate the real economy through financial intermediation, but they helped bring down the entire system and cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
Alan Greenspan: As Unrepentant as Ever
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Joseph Palermo: He still wants to blame a “few bad apples,” instead of looking at his own role fanning the flames and pouring gasoline on the fire while the $8 trillion housing bubble was being pumped up. Greenspan said AIG’s problems were with insurance, but Born countered that if CDSs had been insurance they would have been regulated. Greenspan is bullshitting us again.
Greenspan, Summers, and Why the Economy Is So Out of Whack
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Robert Reich: If any three people are most responsible for the failure of financial regulation, they are Greenspan, Larry Summers, and my former colleague, Bob Rubin. In 1999 they advised Congress to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which since 1933 had separated commercial from investment banking. By 1999, Wall Street was salivating over such a repeal because it wanted to create financial supermarkets that could use commercial deposits to place bets in the financial casino. That would yield the Street trillions.
Democratic “Accomplishments” Not Nearly Enough
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Joseph Palermo: Unless the Congress moves some progressive legislation quickly there’s going to be trouble this fall because any political party that is stupid enough to allow a couple of shmucks like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, or the outcome of a special election in New England, to unravel its governing coalition doesn’t deserve to be in power.
How About a Student Loan Bailout?
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The education bubble is going to burst. It has to happen. On a daily basis, we hear about the bursting of the housing bubble. Housing values were over inflated. Millions of people found themselves with mortgages they could not afford to pay—whether through hard times and job loss, racial profiling and predatory lending by unscrupulous, [...]
And Now Homeowners
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The two most important features of the administration’s plan to help homeowners are, first, its support for amending bankruptcy laws to allow judges to modify mortgages. This will give homeowners bargaining leverage with mortgage servicers (and give the servicers more leverage with securitized creditors on up the line) to get better terms; and, second, a [...]
Why We Need Stronger Unions, and How to Get Them
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Why is this recession so deep, and what can be done to reverse it? Hint: Go back about 50 years, when America’s middle class was expanding and the economy was soaring. Paychecks were big enough to allow us to buy all the goods and services we produced. It was a virtuous circle. Good pay meant [...]
The Housing Bubble Continues to Burst
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by Robert Reich – The National Association of Realtors said today that home prices have now dropped to the point where they’ve wiped out all the gains in housing prices since 2004. 2004, not incidentally, was when interest rates last hit bottom, and the Feds looked the other way while mortgage bankers began shoving money [...]
The Logic of Keynes in Today’s World
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by Robert Reich – Not long ago I was talking to someone who once had been a deficit hawk but the current recession had turned into a full-blooded Keynesian. He wanted a stimulus package in the range of $500 to $700 billion. “Consumers are dead in the water,” he said, fervently, “so government has to [...]
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