Rethinking the Economy

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi has a great, depressing piece on ” Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?” In it, he has example after example of big players committing fraud of either getting off scott free or getting a slap on wrist. One small example:
Another major firm, Bank of America, was caught hiding $5.8 billion in [...]

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Recently there’ve been a few articles about the possibility of a bipartisan agreement on corporate tax reform. The Economist’s M.S.says, it’s not going to happen. Here’s why:
The ability to negotiate tax breaks is a core competency of large American businesses, and the ability to award tax breaks is a core competency of politicians. And [...]

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I’ve been reading John Cassidy’s How Markets Fail: the Logic of Economic Calamities, and in it I discovered a great Adams Smith quote. You probably know that Smith wasn’t an unthinking free market cheerleader. What you might not know is that Smith believed government should stomp on financial speculation:
Smith and his successors also [...]

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Some folks have argued that given the Republican’s Obama-must-fail strategy and the Conservadems desire to punish working families, there’s no way Obama could have prevented the economy from going off the cliff. Brad DeLong has published a great, depressing talk that’s a center-liberal economist perspective on what Obama could’ve done despite these obstacles.
Although [...]

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From the New York Times’ Frank Rich:
Asked in “ Inside Job” why there’s been no systematic investigation of the 2008 crash, [economist Nouriel] Roubini answers: “Because then you’d find the culprits.”

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Professor Teresa Ghilarducci on a major piece missing from the finance Reform Bill: reinventing the 401(k).
In a perfect world, an average worker could amass something like $400,000 in a 401(k) by retirement. After nearly three decades of 401(k) contributions, though, the average account balance for people nearing retirement age is about $60,000, far [...]

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Unlike many other countries, Canada is coming out of the global financial meltdown in pretty good shape. One reason why: the rules of their financial game. Business Week explains:
Canadian banks did not fail because they mostly avoided the big mistakes with mortgages. They didn’t lend to people who couldn’t prove a [...]

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In bad times and increasingly even in good times, layoffs have become a way of life in the US, and until the Wall Street meltdown, Europe’s been under increasing pressure to follow our lead. But according to a Newsweek article by Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton,
there is a growing body of [...]

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Now that the Supremes have said the corporations can run wild with political spending, what’s our next move? Back in November, the Brennan Center’s Ciara Torres-Spelliscy made an interesting suggestion in Business Week — do what the Brits do and put more power into shareholders’ hands:
A law passed in 2000 requires British companies [...]

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Cash for Caulkers — giving homeowners a tax break or some other means to decrease the cost of energy retrofits — has been getting a bunch of publicity. It’s a great way of creating jobs, and estimates show that $2 billion in loan guarantees could leverage $20-$40 billion in financing. But David Dayen at firedoglake [...]

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