there associated business are in the business of labor arbitrage and offshore outsourcing.
Personally, I think those who use their degrees etc. to write up very obvious bogus "reports" and "studies" should be stripped of their PhDs. I mean literally the school should rescind the degree for such BS.
They litter congressional staffers desks with such noise, try to claim this as truth and frankly, who has time to read the original "paper" and realize it has major statistical or logic flaws...
few. They are not going to realize it's a bunch of spin in "econspeak".
I went and read them, esp. the Catherine Mann McKinsey report you are referring to and it is pure, absolute garbage. She should be publicly called out for writing such fiction.
I'd have to go back to the original paper to pull out the flaws and there are so many...but anything that is taken seriously it's a good idea to go through it and specifically post the obvious flaws. I've done that a few times here esp. when Congressional staffers email boxes are being snowed with corporate lobbyist BS using one of those.
Congress doesn't just need a spam filter, they need lobbyist bullshit filter.
I recall having an online argument with libertarian Virgina Postrel about the disaster which would befall us from the consistent offshoring of jobs. She believed there would be no fallout, that there is an infinite number of jobs being produced (possibly now there is, by Foreign Direct Investment overseas by American-based multinationals).
How can anyone be so ignorant yet write on economics? Boggles the mind. Obviously, as the rest of us understand, each time a job is offshored, so goes a chunk of the GDP, and with lowered personal and national income, so goes the economy.
And with Obama Administration appointments such as Diana Farrell (editor of that marvelous text extolling offshoring, titled: OFFSHORING, as well as that phony McKinsey Global Institute report extolling the same), the future has been pretty much established.
would you please think about covering, in such a blog, the following items: Group of Thirty (G30) and their push for the widespread adoption of derivatives; JPMorgan Chase's report: Glass-Steagall: Overdue For Repeal; the creation of the Credit Default Swap within JPMorgan (by Blythe Masters, who is head of SIFMA, I believe, and still at JPM) as well as the BISTRO, and the Derivatives Policy Group, which pushed for the "voluntary regulation" of derivatives, as well as the FSMA and CSMA legislation, and the ownership of those exchanges and "pricing" organizations such as InterContinental Exchange, Markit Group, etc., etc.
(Thanks, your blogs are far better than I could ever write.)
One thing we need to keep track of is what happens to the long-term unemployed. After the dot-com bust, tech companies were reluctant to hire anyone who had been unemployed for more than a few months. We quickly learned that we had "labor shortages" in many key areas, which led to a call for increased numbers of H-1B visas, and a call for more American students to major in engineering and computer science in college. The long-term unemployed could have been quickly brought back up to speed in their career fields if companies had been willing to hire them.
When we enter into our "recovery" period, I'm waiting to see if we again appear to have shortages of qualified workers, and also which industries claim they're suffering from the shortages.
The one thing that has been completely absent from discussion about banking reform, outside of Glass-Steagall on the internet, is rolling back deregulation.
People don't seem to realize that there were 4 or 5 major deregulation acts since 1979.
I think I'm going to write a blog about it. People should get a better idea of where we've come from and how much we've lost along the way. They should also know that two of the largest financial deregulations happened when the Democrats controlled both the White House and both houses of Congress.
Falling property tax revenues isn't the only concern for local gov'ts. Look at this updated report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Virtually every State Gov't is looking at very serious budget shortfalls, and the current estimates are probably low. My wife is a school teacher who has already been told that there will be 3 furlough days before Dec. 31st. The Board of Ed also approved 7 more for the remainder of the school year, but so far they can't figure out how to get it done without actually cancelling school days. Keep in mind, there is a lot of Federal money coming right now or the situation would be worse. It is a deep abyss we are all peering into, and a road none of us is ready to travel.
;) if so, I believe there might be some 60 minutes clip or a "dateline" (I cannot recall which covered it but some major network did) or reports on this "rat maze of denial" that's going on.
and part of the problem is the public attention waned. Part of this is the media faux paus populism. They get on there about "socialism" or "death panels" and brew ha ha to just divert public outrage.
They kind of grab outrage and spin it to some corporate agenda.
Then, I think people are plain worried about their own financial survival, which has also caused public attention to waiver.
One of the reasons I try to write up as many of the Financial Services Committee hearings as possible.
This should be priority #1, above health care frankly.
Let's see. She stops paying her bills and her credit score is trashed, putting her on corporate America's blacklist. Sandy Berger lifts classified documents from National Archives, and his lawyers negotiate a "temporary" suspension of his security clearance. Politicians caught doing bad things agree to "temporarily" surrender their law licenses. But a bad credit score intrudes into other areas of your life -- I don't care if the guy who fixes my car is late paying his bills, I care about how well he fixes my car. Good people in this country are getting screwed by the financial "industry." Let's repeal some of the laws the banking lobby got rammed through -- bring back usury ceilings, and outlaw predatory lending.
Frank T.
I don't get this, his testimony looks like fiction. My understanding of the loan modifications, esp. to reduce principle is it's just for show, a huge rat maze with no cheese, like banks saying "they lost the paper work" or the individual "didn't turn in the right paperwork", refusal to take people's calls, return calls...
i.e. huge maze of blow off tactics all the while that person is being foreclosed on.
Where's that testimony? Also, why does CATO institute get to testify? Why do all of these large bank executives get to testify and where is the testimony of all of those individuals who are being interviewed on the news an in the press about this inane run around, no actual loan modification kabuki dance?
but I haven't found the time. While a lot of the media focus has been on the foreclosure rate as a percentage of all mortgages, there's another number that matters. Foreclosed homes for sale as a percentage of all homes for sale. THe Indy Star had a great piece about this over the weekend.
How acute is the problem? The Indianapolis Star reviewed more than 8,400 residential sales in Marion County from January 2008 through this June -- an 18-month stretch. The sales were filed with the Department of Local Government Finance. A key finding:
At least 47 percent of the homes sold during that period are considered "distressed" properties -- foreclosed on by private lenders, sold at a sheriff's sale or by a federal agency such as the Federal Housing Administration or Veterans Affairs. That number matches national figures for the first quarter.
As the article notes, close to half of homes for sale nationwide are foreclosed properties. Obviously this tends to depress home sale values. Who wants to pay market value for a house when you can get the same thing for a third the price?
And it's not just homeowners looking to sell that are impacted. In Indiana, and I imagine many states, one of the procedures to challenge a property tax assessment is to show that other, comparable, homes in the area have been sold at a lower price per square foot than your house. Think about that.
If you cut the assessed value per property by half or more without a massive expansion of the number of properties being taxed, it means a drop in local government revenue. And this has to be made up from other sources, or budgets have to be cut. It's a massive mess.
Whatever happened to Obama's plan to allow foreclosed on families to get their mortgages reset?
Until the market is cleared this is going to be a drag on housing prices, and that is going to hit local government hard.
are leaving physical threats of violence messages to people, live and threatening them with jail. They are only "one step away" from breaking someone's legs. Psychological torture in so many words.
Yeah, all of this might be why the Mafia is looked on with such nostalgia.
Seriously. Las Vegas, Porn industry, and most of all predatory lending. Who needs a loan shark when we have the largest banks in America?
I know, people only see "payment" or they see "money they can get today" and do not understand they will have to give them 4 paychecks for an advance on one paycheck.
They seriously need some basic financial education/driving test in this country.
Currently it's like corporations have free rein on their "prey". I guess they believe the American people are like rabbits....they can eat as many as they like and there will always be more...
nothing about how they are victimizing the middle class/poor to the point of extinction.
Predatory lending practices exist because of a lack of financial literacy. People are getting in these payday loan traps which is like an endless cycle of debt with ever higher fees. Talk about indentured servitude. I remember cases where people were basically working just pay-off their payday loan.
Where is the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency?
Years ago in parts of Chicago payday loan companies outnumbered any type of bank 10 to 1.
there associated business are in the business of labor arbitrage and offshore outsourcing.
Personally, I think those who use their degrees etc. to write up very obvious bogus "reports" and "studies" should be stripped of their PhDs. I mean literally the school should rescind the degree for such BS.
They litter congressional staffers desks with such noise, try to claim this as truth and frankly, who has time to read the original "paper" and realize it has major statistical or logic flaws...
few. They are not going to realize it's a bunch of spin in "econspeak".
I went and read them, esp. the Catherine Mann McKinsey report you are referring to and it is pure, absolute garbage. She should be publicly called out for writing such fiction.
I'd have to go back to the original paper to pull out the flaws and there are so many...but anything that is taken seriously it's a good idea to go through it and specifically post the obvious flaws. I've done that a few times here esp. when Congressional staffers email boxes are being snowed with corporate lobbyist BS using one of those.
Congress doesn't just need a spam filter, they need lobbyist bullshit filter.
I recall having an online argument with libertarian Virgina Postrel about the disaster which would befall us from the consistent offshoring of jobs. She believed there would be no fallout, that there is an infinite number of jobs being produced (possibly now there is, by Foreign Direct Investment overseas by American-based multinationals).
How can anyone be so ignorant yet write on economics? Boggles the mind. Obviously, as the rest of us understand, each time a job is offshored, so goes a chunk of the GDP, and with lowered personal and national income, so goes the economy.
And with Obama Administration appointments such as Diana Farrell (editor of that marvelous text extolling offshoring, titled: OFFSHORING, as well as that phony McKinsey Global Institute report extolling the same), the future has been pretty much established.
would you please think about covering, in such a blog, the following items: Group of Thirty (G30) and their push for the widespread adoption of derivatives; JPMorgan Chase's report: Glass-Steagall: Overdue For Repeal; the creation of the Credit Default Swap within JPMorgan (by Blythe Masters, who is head of SIFMA, I believe, and still at JPM) as well as the BISTRO, and the Derivatives Policy Group, which pushed for the "voluntary regulation" of derivatives, as well as the FSMA and CSMA legislation, and the ownership of those exchanges and "pricing" organizations such as InterContinental Exchange, Markit Group, etc., etc.
(Thanks, your blogs are far better than I could ever write.)
has some new graphs and report based on Prof. Saez's work that are eye popping (ht: Chris Bowers @ Openleft ):
This is our country on 'neo-liberal' economic policies.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
One thing we need to keep track of is what happens to the long-term unemployed. After the dot-com bust, tech companies were reluctant to hire anyone who had been unemployed for more than a few months. We quickly learned that we had "labor shortages" in many key areas, which led to a call for increased numbers of H-1B visas, and a call for more American students to major in engineering and computer science in college. The long-term unemployed could have been quickly brought back up to speed in their career fields if companies had been willing to hire them.
When we enter into our "recovery" period, I'm waiting to see if we again appear to have shortages of qualified workers, and also which industries claim they're suffering from the shortages.
there are also a few but back from 2008 on EP for reference.
But I don't think it's been succinctly presented, even in journal or MSM articles.
The one thing that has been completely absent from discussion about banking reform, outside of Glass-Steagall on the internet, is rolling back deregulation.
People don't seem to realize that there were 4 or 5 major deregulation acts since 1979.
I think I'm going to write a blog about it. People should get a better idea of where we've come from and how much we've lost along the way. They should also know that two of the largest financial deregulations happened when the Democrats controlled both the White House and both houses of Congress.
Falling property tax revenues isn't the only concern for local gov'ts. Look at this updated report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Virtually every State Gov't is looking at very serious budget shortfalls, and the current estimates are probably low. My wife is a school teacher who has already been told that there will be 3 furlough days before Dec. 31st. The Board of Ed also approved 7 more for the remainder of the school year, but so far they can't figure out how to get it done without actually cancelling school days. Keep in mind, there is a lot of Federal money coming right now or the situation would be worse. It is a deep abyss we are all peering into, and a road none of us is ready to travel.
;) if so, I believe there might be some 60 minutes clip or a "dateline" (I cannot recall which covered it but some major network did) or reports on this "rat maze of denial" that's going on.
and part of the problem is the public attention waned. Part of this is the media faux paus populism. They get on there about "socialism" or "death panels" and brew ha ha to just divert public outrage.
They kind of grab outrage and spin it to some corporate agenda.
Then, I think people are plain worried about their own financial survival, which has also caused public attention to waiver.
One of the reasons I try to write up as many of the Financial Services Committee hearings as possible.
This should be priority #1, above health care frankly.
and a diary of its own. This deserves to be written up so that the word can get out.
I thought these people WERE loan sharks.
Frank T.
here. Has examples of blow off letters at the end, modifications outside the rules, etc.
Let's see. She stops paying her bills and her credit score is trashed, putting her on corporate America's blacklist. Sandy Berger lifts classified documents from National Archives, and his lawyers negotiate a "temporary" suspension of his security clearance. Politicians caught doing bad things agree to "temporarily" surrender their law licenses. But a bad credit score intrudes into other areas of your life -- I don't care if the guy who fixes my car is late paying his bills, I care about how well he fixes my car. Good people in this country are getting screwed by the financial "industry." Let's repeal some of the laws the banking lobby got rammed through -- bring back usury ceilings, and outlaw predatory lending.
Frank T.
Progress of the Making Home Affordable Program: What Are the Outcomes for Homeowners and What Are the Obstacles to Success?
testimony of Barr.
I don't get this, his testimony looks like fiction. My understanding of the loan modifications, esp. to reduce principle is it's just for show, a huge rat maze with no cheese, like banks saying "they lost the paper work" or the individual "didn't turn in the right paperwork", refusal to take people's calls, return calls...
i.e. huge maze of blow off tactics all the while that person is being foreclosed on.
Where's that testimony? Also, why does CATO institute get to testify? Why do all of these large bank executives get to testify and where is the testimony of all of those individuals who are being interviewed on the news an in the press about this inane run around, no actual loan modification kabuki dance?
but I haven't found the time. While a lot of the media focus has been on the foreclosure rate as a percentage of all mortgages, there's another number that matters. Foreclosed homes for sale as a percentage of all homes for sale. THe Indy Star had a great piece about this over the weekend.
As the article notes, close to half of homes for sale nationwide are foreclosed properties. Obviously this tends to depress home sale values. Who wants to pay market value for a house when you can get the same thing for a third the price?
And it's not just homeowners looking to sell that are impacted. In Indiana, and I imagine many states, one of the procedures to challenge a property tax assessment is to show that other, comparable, homes in the area have been sold at a lower price per square foot than your house. Think about that.
If you cut the assessed value per property by half or more without a massive expansion of the number of properties being taxed, it means a drop in local government revenue. And this has to be made up from other sources, or budgets have to be cut. It's a massive mess.
Whatever happened to Obama's plan to allow foreclosed on families to get their mortgages reset?
Until the market is cleared this is going to be a drag on housing prices, and that is going to hit local government hard.
are leaving physical threats of violence messages to people, live and threatening them with jail. They are only "one step away" from breaking someone's legs. Psychological torture in so many words.
Yeah, all of this might be why the Mafia is looked on with such nostalgia.
It is true - I researched it. But I guess loan sharks carry a bigger stick or provide a stronger 'incentive' to pay-off a loan.
I believe the one thing the financial oligarchy fears the most is a well engaged and financially educated populace.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
Seriously. Las Vegas, Porn industry, and most of all predatory lending. Who needs a loan shark when we have the largest banks in America?
I know, people only see "payment" or they see "money they can get today" and do not understand they will have to give them 4 paychecks for an advance on one paycheck.
They seriously need some basic financial education/driving test in this country.
Currently it's like corporations have free rein on their "prey". I guess they believe the American people are like rabbits....they can eat as many as they like and there will always be more...
nothing about how they are victimizing the middle class/poor to the point of extinction.
Predatory lending practices exist because of a lack of financial literacy. People are getting in these payday loan traps which is like an endless cycle of debt with ever higher fees. Talk about indentured servitude. I remember cases where people were basically working just pay-off their payday loan.
Where is the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency?
Years ago in parts of Chicago payday loan companies outnumbered any type of bank 10 to 1.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
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