Thank goodness we have a free market system where those who succeed get the spoils and those who fail need to face the consequences of their poor decisions. Unless, of course, you are in the financial services industry. As Bloomberg's Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz report: "The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks [...]
You know our tax system has gotten completely out of control when even people like Senator Tom Coburn (R-17th Century) are condemning it. David Kocieniewski writes a very useful and readable article about the tax strategies the most wealthy among us use to avoid paying their share of taxes. "An examination of public documents involving [...]
Alternet's Joshua Holland has an important post here about overreaching claims that there are federal forces seeking to destroy the Occupy movement by ordering local authorities to take coordinated actions against it. The first problem with Naomi Wolf's piece? It claims AlterNet had a scoop on something it has not reported. As Holland writes: Here’s [...]
In this post Barry Ritholtz combines his excellent recent column about emerging Big Lie of the economic crisis with charts and graphs exposing just how wrong it would be to see our attention diverted from what happened. This matters because it is impossible to solve a problem without first identifying it. The banks and their [...]
Do we need to explain why pepper spray should not be used as a competitive shopping tool? This is another reason, moreover, why our government agencies should not be so quick to use it to deal with inconveniences.
Mother Jones' Kevin Drum has a great post explaining how the origins of the term "Black Friday" appear to be different from what we assume–or, rather, what corporate public relations people have worked hard to get us to think.
Here's another example of how the facts can differ from our assumptions. In the New York times' Economix blog, Catherine Rampell writes about a recent Pew Research Center report on American exceptionalism: "Even so, American nongraduates still seem to think they have more control over their destinies than the average German, Frenchman or Spaniard does. [...]
As this Talking Points Memo headline explains: CHART: The More Congress "Fails" The More The Deficit Goes Down Let's just stay out of the way.
In order to figure out how to fix the economic problems facing us, we need to know what created our present crisis. Unfortunately, the banks and their allies are pushing a false narrative–a big lie. Barry Ritholtz today follows up on his column a few weeks ago with more on this important subject as he [...]
In a column, University of California, Berkeley Professor J. Bradford DeLong explains just how massively our federal government has failed us when it comes to macroeconomic policy. At least, that is what I said when I lectured on economic history back in 2007. Today, we have next to no hard-money lobby, almost all investors have [...]
