Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills. “I will never forgive them,” wrote 13-year-old Kieran McArdle to the Daily Record, a national newspaper based in Glasgow. “I won’t be able to come to terms with my dad’s death until I get justice for him.” Kieran’s father, 57-year-old Brian, had worked as a security guard in Lanarkshire, near Glasgow. The day after Christmas 2011, Brian had a stroke, which left him paralyzed on his left side, blind in one eye, and unable to speak.
He could no longer continue working to support his family, so he signed up for disability income from the British government. That government, in the hands of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron since the 2010 elections, would prove no friend to the McArdles. Still, Cameron proceeded to cut billions of pounds from welfare benefits including support for the disabled. Kieran’s father was scheduled for an appointment to complete Atos’s battery of “fitness for work” tests. This argument was simple, intuitive, and wrong. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke Is Enabling Dysfunction in Washington. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke doesn’t get much respect. PIMCO’s Bill Gross, who oversees some of the country’s biggest bond portfolios, has warned that Bernanke risks rousing inflationary dragons. NYU professor Nouriel Roubini, who correctly anticipated the 2008 financial crisis, has argued that Bernanke’s policies are failing to help the economy and are instead fueling a stock market bubble that will end in a financial crisis.
Even experts who are sympathetic have been cutting at times. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has acknowledged that the Fed chairman is a fine economist. But his long-running disputes with Bernanke – known in some quarters as the Battle of the Beards – have included charges that Bernanke was assimilated by the Fed Borg, a reference to Star Trek’s collective alien intelligence that overwhelms individuality and personal will. (MORE: How Silicon Valley is Hollowing out the Economy) (MORE: 7 ‘Smart’ Credit Tips That Aren’t) OCC Probing JPMorgan Chase Credit Card Collections. First in a series JPMorgan Chase & Co. took procedural shortcuts and used faulty account records in suing tens of thousands of delinquent credit card borrowers for at least two years, current and former employees say.
The process flaws sparked a regulatory probe by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and forced the bank to stop suing delinquent borrowers altogether last year. The bank's errors could call into question the legitimacy of billions of dollars in outstanding claims against debtors and of legal judgments Chase has already won, current and former Chase employees say. For the banking industry at large, the situation at Chase highlights the risk that shoddy back-office procedures and flawed legal work extends well beyond mortgage servicing. "We did not verify a single one" of the affidavits attesting to the amounts Chase was seeking to collect, says Howard Hardin, who oversaw a team handling tens of thousands of Chase debt files in San Antonio. 'Outhouse' Attorneys.
Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail | Politics News. By Matt Taibbi | At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we'll all be paying for until the end of time. Did you hear about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? The ingenious plan to suck multiple fees out of the unemployment checks of jobless workers? Take your eyes off them for 10 seconds and guaranteed, they'll be into some shit again: This bank is like the world's worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt's funeral. It's been four years since the government, in the name of preventing a depression, saved this megabank from ruin by pumping $45 billion of taxpayer money into its arm.
But these laws didn't sit well with Hugh McColl. And why? The Great American Bubble Machine | Politics News. The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. Invasion of the Home Snatchers By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything.
The Feds vs. Wall Street's Big Win. J.P. Morgan Chase's Ugly Family Secrets Revealed | Matt Taibbi. Banks and Congress Grapple with Stubborn, Stupid Facts | On Democracy. Facts are stubborn things, said founding father John Adams, a basic truth Ronald Reagan famously mangled at the Republican National Convention in 1988, when he tried to quote Adams and declared, “Facts are stupid things,” before correcting himself. Nonetheless, in practice, certain financial and political leaders seem to embrace Reagan’s verbal misstep as closer to reality than Adams’ original aphorism. Witness the resistance on the part of banking institutions and certain members of the congressional leadership, despite regulations demanding that they allow facts and figures to be reported, information that could keep us from the edge of yet another economic meltdown.
“Three years ago, as the financial crisis was abating, the Fed published potential loan losses and how much capital each institution would need to raise to absorb them. Banks also are dragging their heels over a requirement that arose from last November’s G-20 meeting. The wills are an idea that makes perfect sense. Banks and Congress Grapple with Stubborn, Stupid Facts | On Democracy. The Triggers of Economic Inequality. Bob Samuels: Romney, Private Equity, and the Future of American Capitalism. While Mitt Romney would like to portray private equity (PE) firms, like his own Bain Capital, as examples of free market capitalism, the reality is that the only way many of these entities can make a profit is by manipulating the tax code and lobbying for favorable tax legislation and low interest rates.
First of all, Wall Street and related financial institutions have spent millions on campaign contributions and lobbying efforts to make sure that profits made from private equity deals are only taxed as capital gains (15%). In turn, large institutional investors, like pensions and endowments, do not have to pay taxes on their private equity profits if these firms are based in places like the Cayman Islands, which it turns out is true for many of Romney's investments. Inside the PE Machine The way that private equity deals usually work is that the PE firm will borrow a large amount of money, and then use this debt to buy a company. Romney's Role in Vulture Capitalism Romney's America.
We're Not Broke Movie.