A great example would be an economics prof, Marina von Neumann Whitman (von Neumann's daughter), at the University of Michigan. After years as an executive at General Motors (no doubt helping to nullify any future automotive industry in the USA), after her stint as head of the Council on Foreign Relations, she currently serves with the Group of Thirty (senior membership) along with the Bretton Woods Committee (the international lobbyist group for the ultra-rich, as well as the most anti-worker, anti-union bunch around). Also either a present, or past, member of the Brookings Institution.
But where does the reality-based economics come from? Prof. Michael Hudson, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts (recommend to everyone his interview in the latest issue of Hustler, brilliantly lucid and easily understandable by any non-econ types), Prof. James Galbraith and Prof. Ravi Batra.
When one comes across them (AIG) using a variation of the Binomial Expansion Technique claiming correlated assets as uncorrelated, or banksters using a bivariate Gaussian copula, when the applicability is highly questionable as well as nonapplicable variables, and then fallback on the Modigliani-Miller Theorem (although possibly semi-sensical) to justify leveraged buyouts to destroy jobs and companies (and the economy), junk economics and junk math most definitely merges.
they can affect you, but they should be regulated, monitored...
but yeah, when I saw this I thought, Jesus, call up a credit union, apply for a card at a great rate, transfer the balance and cancel BoA.
Also I thought....simply refuse to accept the changes and close the card down. If you refuse to accept the new interest rate, they will close down the card so you cannot use it but they also cannot charge the higher rate.
While I understand the sentiment, she's hurting herself in trying to skin this cat.
The U.S. seriously poo poos the engineers, on a host of topics but esp. in terms of crafting sane industrial, manufacturing and research policy.
Yeah, I saw this from day one, you're right but the thing is...if the U.S. invested in advanced manufacturing R&D, let the engineers figure it out to reduce the overall costs (instead of their usual ploy, which is to just find slave labor, move to another country), we might get somewhere.
Do you know China's economic strategy council, almost all of them have undergraduate degrees in engineering?
Here in the states....they are busy trying to figure out how to offshore outsource their job....about it. Unbelievable lack of awareness of such a difficult and critical area of expertise.
You've got the entire population of civil engineers screaming about U.S. infrastructure. Unbelievable how they get blown off.
Although I must say the ones who make the most sense are either in their 80's or....kicked out of the club in so many words.
When I see the ones who have in depth research, good intel, etc. I try to put them up on EP....obviously they aren't living in Martha's Vineyard by being honest/objective, but they deserve more public awareness, recognition.
What I see continually is beyond pathetic bad research, bad mathematics, really bad assumptions or say correct conclusions, but then policy recommendations which contradict what their own research results indicate.
But, I wouldn't lump them all together and say the field is bad, but it sure does seem like too many have an agenda and it's become political spin instead of hard core in depth research, analysis.
I just scanned over Krugman's article on why Economists got it so wrong...maybe we should overview that one.
If one goes back during that time and closely examines the market data surrounding the short-selling of Lehman and Bear Stearns, it sure does appear as if Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank (or their subsidiaries) were really pulling down the bucks on these situations.
Another excellent Bloomberg article (along with this blog, of course) which demonstrates how those securitized derivatives are multiple layered throughout the global markets. Study any area closely, e.g., CPDOs (Constant Proportion Debt Obligations), credit default swaps, naked swaps, ILWs, reinsurance plus notes, etc., etc., etc., and one begins to get an inkling of how these financial instruments are interlocking via pension funds, foundations, banks, financial institutions, and almost every type of investment entity imaginable, all the while creating paper billionaires while cannibalizing and destroying economies (Iceland, Latvia, US, Italy, etc.).
The layers of superleveraging upon superleveraging upon superleveraging, impossible to ignore (except by Bernanke "the Great Depression expert" and Geithner, and all the rest of those clowns), would give any rational person the extreme shakes, but the billionaires and zillionaires continue to dissolve this economy, and others around the planet.
It can hardly even be called a science anymore, at least on the macro level. Economists are so consistently wrong, and so consistently wrong in the same way (i.e. optimistic), that it leads one to believe that they are all drinking from the same punch bowl.
Seriously. If she wanted to make a real stand she would just cut up all her credit cards and swear off of debt once and for all.
Then she would close out her BofA account and go to a local credit union. Afterwards she would always pay for things in cash.
As long as people think that credit scores matter then the banks will always have us over a barrel.
Good! Right now you have to pay nearly $1000 for a 130 watt panel. At that price, it simply isn't economical for anything but remote low power installations.
To compete with the grid, solar will have to drop in price to on the order of 1/10th the current cost, and even then it will be an expensive alternative.
I don't see why it can't. A panel is just silicon waffers and a piece of glass.
Same with wind. These little "Air-X" generators are hugely expensive compared to grid power and a standby generator.
Plus, if you are going for an independant power supply with no grid tie, you need a huge battery bank (more $$$) and need to run the stove and clothes dryer on natural gas as solar just isn't going to do it, even if your whole roof is covered with panels. And forget A/C. You can't have it.
The Obama Solar strategy will wither and die, another concept that they didn't run by the engineering department before they decided to announce it. It isn't anywhere near possible to do at today's prices.
This is why this "credit score" is a real problem. It seems they are trying to get "credit score" used as much as possible...in order to negatively affect people's lives.
I'm talking about using credit scores to determine if you can get a job, insurance rates, profiling.
The U.S. government esp. should have security clearances challenged. They use credit scores and a host of other methods which are not relevant today. Make matters worse we had a host of high profile Bush administration officials, who had the top level security clearances...and these are the ones where they are supposed to go interview the neighbors, polygraph, talk to family...I mean a very heavy duty background check...yet two pedophiles managed to get those clearances.
But the average U.S. citizen just trying to get a tech job gets denied over financial trouble...it's just ridiculous metric to deny someone a clearance over. Same kind of deal if someone had every smoked pot. Well, by today's standards, that's what? a good 80% of the population?
The real question should be alcohol, general "are you buzzed out all of the time, are you an addict/alcoholic, active, practicing", not if someone tried weed when they were 15.
One thing is certain, interest rates of 20%, 24%, 30% are clearly loan shark rates.
I also saw a show where "debt collections" are not only harassing people, one woman was told "how would she like to be raped" over the phone by one and threats of going to jail, taking their kids...
I mean out of control, criminal level threats and harassment.
Probably the most absurd thing credit card companies do is when someone gets into trouble. They basically push that person to not pay the cards by increasing the rates to 24%, 27%, 30%. Ya know, a person is having trouble paying their bills so the credit card companies make sure that person cannot pay their bills, which results in either a charge-off and/or bankruptcy.
I agree with this. The job market is not going to improve unless people stop losing their jobs and the ones who already did find better jobs than what they had before. If everyone lost their job in September then the unemployment rate in October would be 0. So the numbers really do not mean anything. casino en ligne
a pack of vultures than a group of concerned U.S. citizens about the future of our economy and financial system. Bloomberg article is very generous in itself description.
The other financial conglomerates and financial oligarchy gave flying fu*k whether Lehman Brothers survived. They knew that with them out of the picture meant less competition and more business for them. They were all concerned about their own asses rather than the system as a whole.
Rather than break up institutions such as Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc., or limit their expansion, the U.S. has given them billions of dollars in tax incentives and loan guarantees that enabled them to grow even bigger. To protect against a bank collapse touching off another freefall, President Barack Obama has proposed regulatory changes that rely on the wisdom of bankers and government overseers -- the same people who created the conditions that led to Lehman’s bankruptcy and were unable to foresee its consequences.
“Designating certain institutions as too big to fail, and not having a thorough regulatory process to match, practically invites another catastrophe,” Bernstein said.
I would offer a viewpoint that may be anathema to this site. That is, if economics is a "science" at all, it is more usefully a forensic science.
As much as I disagree with virtually everything Ben Bernanke has said and done, he did see (or at least feared) the current predicament as one of debt deflation. (Hopefully, we can agree that is our current condition). As a student of the GD, he has vigorously and consistently applied the prescribed antidote provided by Irving Fisher in his seminal 1933 work A Debt Deflation Theory of Great Depressions. Specifically, he paid attention to:
Finally, I would emphasise the important corollary, of the debt-deflation theory, that great depressions are curable and preventable through reflation and stabilisation.
Obviously, this isn't working and, in fact, there are many experts arguing that it is making matters worse. At the same, I think it is noteworthy that Keynes argument for Government Intervention in monetary and fiscal policies were designed to offset business cycle recessions and depressions.
But this is not a cyclical recession! Given the amount of industrial infrastructure already shipped abroad, and in view of the enormous levels of debt to income achieved in the past 25 years or so (and putting the political aspects aside), there was no combination of government policies that could have achieved a good outcome to the present scenario. In other words, there can not be a "keynesian recovery", or to say it another way, a "return to growth" in the economy. As I mentioned in a comment the other day, this is the previous "status quo":
This was, and still is, unsustainable.
I continue to believe that we are really in a political crisis born of an economic depression/recession. We need to somehow "reset" the economy and usher in a new age of no growth, steady state economics. The conundrum is that to do this, one must accept that we need to go back in time to an economic level, and thereby a standard of living, that is well short of recent levels. But that is just not politically feasible, so we will continue to apply the same ineffective "remedies" and the legions of the vulnerable will continue to grow.
Because that is how banks make money. Sure right now, they are happy to reduce card limits. They are happy when people pay their cards in full and close them. They are happy when people pay off the car loan.
And we are suddenly doing it at a fantastic rate (good for us!).
But in a year or three, when the only accounts they have left are 1) the "deadbeats"who pay in full each month and aren't moneymakers for the bank and 2) the ones who have gone so broke they have been sold to credit bureaus for pennies on the dollar and written off the books, the credit card companies, auto loan companies, and banks will look around and realize that without customers, they have no money coming in, and without money coming in, they can't earn a paycheck.
Credit will come back. And it won't take very long for it to do so, either.
you must be very specific on solutions. One can complain all day long but without backing very specific solutions, what they will do, what their implications are....it just is more "rage in the airways".
That's what EP is for, not only to discuss economic indicators and so on but to also look at real policy solutions.
Believe me, it can get very twisted out there without understanding the specifics as well as what legislation will do what.
that talks about what we talk about here - hopefully in a way that people understand. I am working on getting my southside Chicago accent back and when I do then the GAME is on.
Seriously, at some point people will start listening. It is extremely difficult to overcome the noise of traditional media.
It's about getting peoples attention and sometimes we have to say outrageous things to get peoples attention.
but distributism and decentralization are bad words here- they're considered economic fiction.
But the sad thing is, there's only one other type of post-credit world that could possibly come into being- one where the rich flee for China.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
and felt like writing in big scrawling letters across the entire EP site "We are fucked! Everything they will do will benefit the super elite and screw America!"
kind of thing with no inspiration, kind of a "I have nothing to say because everything the public says will obviously be ignored" despondent feeling.
Ok, now how, just how do we get public backing of some policies we know will work.
Take for example a Financial consumer projection agency. But there are so many!
Great blog, great article, great points.
A great example would be an economics prof, Marina von Neumann Whitman (von Neumann's daughter), at the University of Michigan. After years as an executive at General Motors (no doubt helping to nullify any future automotive industry in the USA), after her stint as head of the Council on Foreign Relations, she currently serves with the Group of Thirty (senior membership) along with the Bretton Woods Committee (the international lobbyist group for the ultra-rich, as well as the most anti-worker, anti-union bunch around). Also either a present, or past, member of the Brookings Institution.
But where does the reality-based economics come from? Prof. Michael Hudson, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts (recommend to everyone his interview in the latest issue of Hustler, brilliantly lucid and easily understandable by any non-econ types), Prof. James Galbraith and Prof. Ravi Batra.
When one comes across them (AIG) using a variation of the Binomial Expansion Technique claiming correlated assets as uncorrelated, or banksters using a bivariate Gaussian copula, when the applicability is highly questionable as well as nonapplicable variables, and then fallback on the Modigliani-Miller Theorem (although possibly semi-sensical) to justify leveraged buyouts to destroy jobs and companies (and the economy), junk economics and junk math most definitely merges.
they can affect you, but they should be regulated, monitored...
but yeah, when I saw this I thought, Jesus, call up a credit union, apply for a card at a great rate, transfer the balance and cancel BoA.
Also I thought....simply refuse to accept the changes and close the card down. If you refuse to accept the new interest rate, they will close down the card so you cannot use it but they also cannot charge the higher rate.
While I understand the sentiment, she's hurting herself in trying to skin this cat.
The U.S. seriously poo poos the engineers, on a host of topics but esp. in terms of crafting sane industrial, manufacturing and research policy.
Yeah, I saw this from day one, you're right but the thing is...if the U.S. invested in advanced manufacturing R&D, let the engineers figure it out to reduce the overall costs (instead of their usual ploy, which is to just find slave labor, move to another country), we might get somewhere.
Do you know China's economic strategy council, almost all of them have undergraduate degrees in engineering?
Here in the states....they are busy trying to figure out how to offshore outsource their job....about it. Unbelievable lack of awareness of such a difficult and critical area of expertise.
You've got the entire population of civil engineers screaming about U.S. infrastructure. Unbelievable how they get blown off.
Although I must say the ones who make the most sense are either in their 80's or....kicked out of the club in so many words.
When I see the ones who have in depth research, good intel, etc. I try to put them up on EP....obviously they aren't living in Martha's Vineyard by being honest/objective, but they deserve more public awareness, recognition.
What I see continually is beyond pathetic bad research, bad mathematics, really bad assumptions or say correct conclusions, but then policy recommendations which contradict what their own research results indicate.
But, I wouldn't lump them all together and say the field is bad, but it sure does seem like too many have an agenda and it's become political spin instead of hard core in depth research, analysis.
I just scanned over Krugman's article on why Economists got it so wrong...maybe we should overview that one.
If one goes back during that time and closely examines the market data surrounding the short-selling of Lehman and Bear Stearns, it sure does appear as if Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank (or their subsidiaries) were really pulling down the bucks on these situations.
Another excellent Bloomberg article (along with this blog, of course) which demonstrates how those securitized derivatives are multiple layered throughout the global markets. Study any area closely, e.g., CPDOs (Constant Proportion Debt Obligations), credit default swaps, naked swaps, ILWs, reinsurance plus notes, etc., etc., etc., and one begins to get an inkling of how these financial instruments are interlocking via pension funds, foundations, banks, financial institutions, and almost every type of investment entity imaginable, all the while creating paper billionaires while cannibalizing and destroying economies (Iceland, Latvia, US, Italy, etc.).
The layers of superleveraging upon superleveraging upon superleveraging, impossible to ignore (except by Bernanke "the Great Depression expert" and Geithner, and all the rest of those clowns), would give any rational person the extreme shakes, but the billionaires and zillionaires continue to dissolve this economy, and others around the planet.
It can hardly even be called a science anymore, at least on the macro level. Economists are so consistently wrong, and so consistently wrong in the same way (i.e. optimistic), that it leads one to believe that they are all drinking from the same punch bowl.
Seriously. If she wanted to make a real stand she would just cut up all her credit cards and swear off of debt once and for all.
Then she would close out her BofA account and go to a local credit union. Afterwards she would always pay for things in cash.
As long as people think that credit scores matter then the banks will always have us over a barrel.
Good! Right now you have to pay nearly $1000 for a 130 watt panel. At that price, it simply isn't economical for anything but remote low power installations.
To compete with the grid, solar will have to drop in price to on the order of 1/10th the current cost, and even then it will be an expensive alternative.
I don't see why it can't. A panel is just silicon waffers and a piece of glass.
Same with wind. These little "Air-X" generators are hugely expensive compared to grid power and a standby generator.
Plus, if you are going for an independant power supply with no grid tie, you need a huge battery bank (more $$$) and need to run the stove and clothes dryer on natural gas as solar just isn't going to do it, even if your whole roof is covered with panels. And forget A/C. You can't have it.
The Obama Solar strategy will wither and die, another concept that they didn't run by the engineering department before they decided to announce it. It isn't anywhere near possible to do at today's prices.
This is why this "credit score" is a real problem. It seems they are trying to get "credit score" used as much as possible...in order to negatively affect people's lives.
I'm talking about using credit scores to determine if you can get a job, insurance rates, profiling.
The U.S. government esp. should have security clearances challenged. They use credit scores and a host of other methods which are not relevant today. Make matters worse we had a host of high profile Bush administration officials, who had the top level security clearances...and these are the ones where they are supposed to go interview the neighbors, polygraph, talk to family...I mean a very heavy duty background check...yet two pedophiles managed to get those clearances.
But the average U.S. citizen just trying to get a tech job gets denied over financial trouble...it's just ridiculous metric to deny someone a clearance over. Same kind of deal if someone had every smoked pot. Well, by today's standards, that's what? a good 80% of the population?
The real question should be alcohol, general "are you buzzed out all of the time, are you an addict/alcoholic, active, practicing", not if someone tried weed when they were 15.
One thing is certain, interest rates of 20%, 24%, 30% are clearly loan shark rates.
I also saw a show where "debt collections" are not only harassing people, one woman was told "how would she like to be raped" over the phone by one and threats of going to jail, taking their kids...
I mean out of control, criminal level threats and harassment.
Probably the most absurd thing credit card companies do is when someone gets into trouble. They basically push that person to not pay the cards by increasing the rates to 24%, 27%, 30%. Ya know, a person is having trouble paying their bills so the credit card companies make sure that person cannot pay their bills, which results in either a charge-off and/or bankruptcy.
I agree with this. The job market is not going to improve unless people stop losing their jobs and the ones who already did find better jobs than what they had before. If everyone lost their job in September then the unemployment rate in October would be 0. So the numbers really do not mean anything. casino en ligne
This is no surprise. Check out the graph
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
a pack of vultures than a group of concerned U.S. citizens about the future of our economy and financial system. Bloomberg article is very generous in itself description.
The other financial conglomerates and financial oligarchy gave flying fu*k whether Lehman Brothers survived. They knew that with them out of the picture meant less competition and more business for them. They were all concerned about their own asses rather than the system as a whole.
[Emphasis added]
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
You should turn this comment into a blog post.
Today there was a long article on how the reaction to this crisis will cause the next.
Big long history on Federal Reserve Actions too.
this comment is half way there to a full bore essay.
I would offer a viewpoint that may be anathema to this site. That is, if economics is a "science" at all, it is more usefully a forensic science.
As much as I disagree with virtually everything Ben Bernanke has said and done, he did see (or at least feared) the current predicament as one of debt deflation. (Hopefully, we can agree that is our current condition). As a student of the GD, he has vigorously and consistently applied the prescribed antidote provided by Irving Fisher in his seminal 1933 work A Debt Deflation Theory of Great Depressions. Specifically, he paid attention to:
Obviously, this isn't working and, in fact, there are many experts arguing that it is making matters worse. At the same, I think it is noteworthy that Keynes argument for Government Intervention in monetary and fiscal policies were designed to offset business cycle recessions and depressions.
But this is not a cyclical recession! Given the amount of industrial infrastructure already shipped abroad, and in view of the enormous levels of debt to income achieved in the past 25 years or so (and putting the political aspects aside), there was no combination of government policies that could have achieved a good outcome to the present scenario. In other words, there can not be a "keynesian recovery", or to say it another way, a "return to growth" in the economy. As I mentioned in a comment the other day, this is the previous "status quo":
This was, and still is, unsustainable.
I continue to believe that we are really in a political crisis born of an economic depression/recession. We need to somehow "reset" the economy and usher in a new age of no growth, steady state economics. The conundrum is that to do this, one must accept that we need to go back in time to an economic level, and thereby a standard of living, that is well short of recent levels. But that is just not politically feasible, so we will continue to apply the same ineffective "remedies" and the legions of the vulnerable will continue to grow.
Because that is how banks make money. Sure right now, they are happy to reduce card limits. They are happy when people pay their cards in full and close them. They are happy when people pay off the car loan.
And we are suddenly doing it at a fantastic rate (good for us!).
But in a year or three, when the only accounts they have left are 1) the "deadbeats"who pay in full each month and aren't moneymakers for the bank and 2) the ones who have gone so broke they have been sold to credit bureaus for pennies on the dollar and written off the books, the credit card companies, auto loan companies, and banks will look around and realize that without customers, they have no money coming in, and without money coming in, they can't earn a paycheck.
Credit will come back. And it won't take very long for it to do so, either.
you must be very specific on solutions. One can complain all day long but without backing very specific solutions, what they will do, what their implications are....it just is more "rage in the airways".
That's what EP is for, not only to discuss economic indicators and so on but to also look at real policy solutions.
Believe me, it can get very twisted out there without understanding the specifics as well as what legislation will do what.
that talks about what we talk about here - hopefully in a way that people understand. I am working on getting my southside Chicago accent back and when I do then the GAME is on.
Seriously, at some point people will start listening. It is extremely difficult to overcome the noise of traditional media.
It's about getting peoples attention and sometimes we have to say outrageous things to get peoples attention.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
but distributism and decentralization are bad words here- they're considered economic fiction.
But the sad thing is, there's only one other type of post-credit world that could possibly come into being- one where the rich flee for China.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
and felt like writing in big scrawling letters across the entire EP site "We are fucked! Everything they will do will benefit the super elite and screw America!"
kind of thing with no inspiration, kind of a "I have nothing to say because everything the public says will obviously be ignored" despondent feeling.
Ok, now how, just how do we get public backing of some policies we know will work.
Take for example a Financial consumer projection agency. But there are so many!
Bring down over-capacity and start over. Trash this 'neo-liberal' economic growth model.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
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