Economy
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Yet the bottom line is simple: Europe’s problems are a lot like ours, only worse. Like Wall Street, Germany is where the money is. Italy, like California, has let bad governance squander great natural resources.
Translating the European Financial Mess - NYTimes.com
If anything, however, the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent’s gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one-thousandth of the population. And while Democrats, by and large, want that super-elite to make at least some contribution to long-term deficit reduction, Republicans want to cut the super-elite’s taxes even as they slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the name of fiscal discipline. Before I get to those policy disputes, here are a few numbers. The recent Congressional Budget Office report on inequality didn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, did. According to that report, between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent.
We Are the 99.9% - NYTimes.com
And I don’t just mean a return to Clinton-era tax rates. Why should 1990s taxes be considered the outer limit of revenue collection? Think about it: The long-run budget outlook has darkened, which means that some hard choices must be made. Why should those choices only involve spending cuts?
Things to Tax - NYTimes.com
It's the Inequality, Stupid | Mother Jones
Want more charts like these? See our charts on the secrets of the jobless recovery , the richest 1 percent of Americans , and how the superwealthy beat the IRS . A huge share of the nation's economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244.
President Obama shouldn’t be afraid of a little class warfare - The Washington Post
On Monday, defending his plan to raise taxes on the rich to pay for job creation, President Obama said: “This is not class warfare, it’s math.” No, Mr. President, this is class warfare — and it’s a war you’d better win. Corporate interests and the rich started it. Right now, they’re winning.It’s hard to hate these occupiers - The Washington Post
By the hoary conventions of American politics, Americans should fear and loathe Occupy Wall Street. The occupiers are vaguely countercultural, counterculturally vague. They are noisy. They are radical. They offer no solutions, though they are prey to the damnedest ideas.
Steven Pearlstein: Obama can learn from the Occupy Wall Street movement - The Washington Post
I wish it were true that this naive and incoherent movement could somehow turn itself into the long-overdue national protest against speculation and manipulation by a financial services industry that misallocated so much capital and talent and continues to keep much of the global economy on the edge of recession. I wish it were true that Bank of America’s bone-headed decision to charge a $5 monthly fee for debit cards would prove to be the point at which public opinion finally turned against those who blame government regulation for our economic problems. I wish it were true that the Obama administration had learned how to channel public anger to lasting political advantage. When asked about the protests at his news conference last week, President Obama answered with perfect political pitch.
The Truth About Income Inequality in America - Charles Murray - Business - The Atlantic
Of course the rich are getting richer. But the divergence between Main Street and America's elites begins with two of our most cherished institutions: college and marriage. Gina Sanders/Shutterstock In the early 1990s, Bill Gates was asked what competitor worried him the most. Goldman Sachs, Gates answered. He explained: "Software is an IQ business.Mitt Romney's private equity record is suddenly the talk of the GOP presidential contest. What do we know about the industry he helped to create? Reuters With Mitt Romney on the march towards the Republican presidential nomination, chances are we're all going to be hearing a lot about the world of private equity for the next 11 months. The GOP frontrunner is already getting tarred by his primary rivals for his time running Bain Capital, where he helped write the playbook on how to buy up companies, rebuild them for maximum value, and flip them for a tidy profit. Was Romney just running a corporate chop-shop?
Is Private Equity Bad For the Economy? - Jordan Weissmann - Business - The Atlantic
A Gigantic Scam - NYTimes.com
November 23, 2011, 11:26 am That’s pretty much what Andrew Haldane, the executive director for financial stability at the Bank of England, is calling a large part of modern finance : In fact, high pre-crisis returns to banking had a much more mundane explanation.
Legends of the Fail - NYTimes.com
But what’s the meaning of the eurodebacle? As always happens when disaster strikes, there’s a rush by ideologues to claim that the disaster vindicates their views. So it’s time to start debunking. First things first: The attempt to create a common European currency was one of those ideas that cut across the usual ideological lines. It was cheered on by American right-wingers, who saw it as the next best thing to a revived gold standard, and by Britain’s left, which saw it as a big step toward a social-democratic Europe. But it was opposed by British conservatives, who also saw it as a step toward a social-democratic Europe.As Ohio Goes: A Letter from Tea-Party Country by Timothy Snyder | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books
As Michele Bachmann contends for the Republican nomination, we might ask what her Tea Party means for her native midwest. In southwestern Ohio, where I was born and raised, mantras of low taxation and small government have become the way to avoid discussing the challenges of globalization. Beneath this region’s soothing triple green of maize, soybeans, and copses of trees is a soil that serves the world. Places like Clinton County, where my family has lived for two centuries, are the American epicenters of an inspiring but pitiless global economy. Global competition has made family farming here all but impossible, and the region’s sowing and reaping is now done by combines that are in effect mobile, high-tech agricultural factories.on Wednesday agreed to pay $285 million to settle a civil complaint by the that it had defrauded investors who bought just such a deal. The transaction involved a $1 billion portfolio of mortgage-related investments, many of which were handpicked for the portfolio by Citigroup without telling investors of its role or that it had made bets that the investments would fall in value. In the four years since the housing market began its steady descent, securities regulators have settled only two cases related to the financial crisis for a larger sum of money.
Citigroup to Pay $285 Million to Settle S.E.C. Charges - NYTimes.com
By Sarah N. Lynch WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An ex-Moody's Corp derivatives analyst said the credit-rating agency intimidated and pressured analysts to issue glowing ratings of toxic complex, structured mortgage securities. In a 78-page letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, William Harrington outlined how the committees that make the ratings decisions are not independent and how managers often intimidated analysts. "The management of Moody's, the management of Moody's Corporation and the board of Moody's Corporation are squarely responsible for the poor quality of previous Moody's opinions that ushered in the financial crisis," he wrote.