Economics
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<img src="http://timebusinessblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/162795895.jpg?w=480&h=320&crop=1" alt="Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, during a House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 27, 2013." title="Ben S.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke Is Enabling Dysfunction in Washington
The truth comes out: CEO says 'stupid' consumers deserve hefty fees
Dani Pozo / AFP - Getty Images CEO of Irish airline Ryanair Michael O'Leary poses on a model jet at a press conference in Madrid on Aug. 23. By Bob Sullivan, Columnist, NBC News Finally, an honest CEO. Ryanair head Michael O'Leary called his customers "idiots" this week. The chief of the deep-discount, “gotcha”-dependent airline might be the first to say it, but he's hardly the first to think it.
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.
<img class="alignnone" src="http://cdn.billmoyers.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/FED_r.jpg" alt="" width="457" height="257" /> 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.
Banks and Congress Grapple with Stubborn, Stupid Facts | On Democracy
The Triggers of Economic Inequality
By Troy Oxford and Lauren Feeney In recent years, the rich have seen their wealth grow dramatically while the poor and middle class have basically flatlined. It’s no accident, argue Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their book Winner-Take-All Politics . The infographic below, which draws from Hacker and Pierson’s book, explains how our politicians — on both sides of the aisle — fell under the spell of corporate dollars and re-engineered our economic system to favor the wealthy.
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.
