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Must Read Posts for August 22, 2010

On The Economic Populist you might have noticed the right column. We try to list other sites and blogs who have exceptional insight and writing on what is happening in the U.S. economy.

Sometimes though, one cannot say it better but miss those who did.

Must Read Post #1

It appears there is a strong correlation to income inequality and national economic implosions. One of our themes on The Economic Populist is without a strong U.S. middle class and American labor force, there is no national economy.

Must Read Post #2

This is almost off the wall. The Wall Street Journal has an article, The End of Management. They discuss the bureaucratic nightmare called corporations and their never ending managerial organizational charts and roadmaps. The problem is the article solutions proposed often involve global labor arbitrage. Not everyone can sit around working on open source for free. Additionally, it is well documented that bidding per project is a method to pay below minimum wage for advanced software and engineering skills. No job security, benefits or even per hour pay. While I heartily agree that corporate management is arcane, one must figure out a way to provide stable income, retirement, benefits for people to produce.

Friday Movie Night - The Great Depression

hot buttered popcorn It's Friday Night! Party Time!   Time to relax, put your feet up on the couch, lay back, and watch some detailed videos on economic policy!

 

Tonight is quite a find. The entire 7-part 1993 PBS series on The Great Depression is online (for how long, one can never tell so watch it while you can!). I happen to love documentaries on this time period and by far this is the best of them.

A Job at Ford

 

 

Must Read Posts for August 14, 2010

On The Economic Populist you might have noticed the right column. We try to list other sites and blogs who have exceptional insight and writing on what is happening in the U.S. economy.

Sometimes though, one cannot say it better but miss those who did.

Must Read Post #1

Another scary chart, proving corporations are simply creating jobs....abroad, this time from The Economist. The last two recessions are worst than the Great Depression in terms of job growth.

 

TARP Money Helps Foreign Nations

Yet another month, yet another report on how our money was used to bail out foreign banks, while we go without retirement and jobs.

The Congressional Oversight Committee has released a new report, The Global Context and International Effects of the TARP.

Guess what?

It appears likely that America‟s financial rescue had a much greater impact internationally than other nations‟ programs had on the United States.

Gets better. Of course the U.S. didn't bother to ask other nations to help...

if the U.S. government had gathered more information about which countries‟ institutions would most benefit from some of its actions, it might have been able to ask those countries to share the pain of rescue. For example, banks in France and Germany were among the greatest beneficiaries of AIG‟s rescue, yet the U.S. government bore the entire $70 billion risk of the AIG capital injection program. The U.S. share of this single rescue exceeded the size of France‟s entire $35 billion capital injection program and was nearly half the size of Germany‟s $133 billion program.

And even better. Of course to this day the U.S. Treasury isn't collecting data on our taxpayer dollars flowing overseas.

Treasury gathered very little data on how TARP funds flowed overseas.

Must Read Posts for August 9, 2010

On The Economic Populist you might have noticed the right column. We try to list other sites and blogs who have exceptional insight and writing on what is happening in the U.S. economy.

Sometimes though, one cannot say it better but miss those who did.

Must Read Post #1

Goldman Sachs made 35% of their 2009 profits from derivatives:

In a memo sent to the FCIC -- a government panel charged with investigating the roots of the financial crisis -- Wall Street's most profitable bank revealed that its derivatives operations generated $11.3-$15.9 billion of its $45.17 billion net revenue in 2009. This amounts to 25-35 percent of the bank's revenue.

Must Read Post #2

William Greider writes about the AIG Bail Out Scandal:

Sunday Morning Comics - In Geithner We Trust Edition

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Cup O' Joe

 

Good Morning! Rise and Shine! Get that Cup O' Joe...
break out the O.J....hang out with the pooch...time to check out the Funnies!

 


Cartoonist: Mike Luckovich

 

I want to be a Pirate

 

A report claims the unemployment rate is so high because people keep blowing interviews.

Picking Over the Financial Reform Corpse

autopsy.jpg

Matt Taibbi has written an autopsy report on the lack of real financial reform and how it happened. In Wall Street's Big Win, Taibbi first sums up what happened in the last decade:

The huge profits that Wall Street earned in the past decade were driven in large part by a single, far-reaching scheme, one in which bankers, home lenders and other players exploited loopholes in the system to magically transform subprime home borrowers into AAA investments, sell them off to unsuspecting pension funds and foreign trade unions and other suckers, then multiply their score by leveraging their phony-baloney deals over and over. It was pure ­financial alchemy – turning ­manure into gold, then spinning it Rumpelstiltskin-style into vast profits using complex, mostly unregulated new instruments that almost no one outside of a few experts in the field really understood. With the government borrowing mountains of Chinese and Saudi cash to fight two crazy wars, and the domestic manufacturing base mostly vanished overseas, this massive fraud for all intents and purposes was the American economy in the 2000s; we were a nation subsisting on an elaborate check-­bouncing scheme.

Many of us contend the dot con bust, 9/11 fueled, offshore outsourcing 2001 recession never really recovered. It was masked by the glorified ponzi scheme described above.

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