The Cuts Are Coming “Casino Jack,” the movie about crooked lobbyist Jack Abramoff, portrayed anti-tax demagogue Grover Norquist as just another member of the Washington fixer’s club. But the filmmakers greatly underestimated him.
The Myth of 'American Exceptionalism' Implodes One aspect of "American exceptionalism" was always economic. US workers, so the story went, enjoyed a rising level of real wages that afforded their families a rising standard of living. Ever harder work paid off in rising consumption. The rich got richer faster than the middle and poor, but almost no one got poorer. Nearly all citizens felt "middle class". A profitable US capitalism kept running ahead of labour supply. So, it kept raising wages to attract waves of immigration and to retain employees, across the 19th century until the 1970s.
homeless in america Video
FED GAVE Banks Access to 23.7 TRILLION DOLLARS NOT $700 Billion! Video
Tossing The Consumer Under The Bus...And Insanely Expecting An Economic Recovery I’ve been pouring through the Fed Reserve’s recent release of circa 2005 FOMC meeting transcripts. The most striking observation that one can make is that the consumer - the very lifeblood that determines whether our economy will live or die - has been discarded.
Muni Bond Crisis Can Only Deepen We often disparage the Wall Street Journal for being too spineless to tell it like it is when reporting on the state of the economy, but with last Friday’s lead story, New Hit to Strapped States, they pulled no punches. You can almost pick a paragraph at random and get a sense of how serious the cities’ credit problems are. This paragraph, for instance “Municipalities borrowed $122 billion of variable rate demand debt in 2008, roughly twice the amount of these types of loans borrowed the year before…” How did they get in so deep? The answer lies in the way they navigated the shoals of 2008. While most muni-bond debt is long-term, scads of jerry-rigged credit deals were struck that year to get municipal borrowers past the crunch. For the most part, this involved the use of so-called letters of credit – guarantees by large banks to backstop municipal borrowers when they were having trouble raising cash via bond auctions. Under the circumstances, noted the Journal, “Many municipalities scrambled to convert the debt into other instruments, including variable-rate demand obligations, which are long-term bonds with interest rates that reset periodically. For a fee, big banks guaranteed many of these deals.”
Priceless: How The Federal Reserve Bought The Economics Profession The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found.
Goldman Sachs outright Lied about their back door bailout from AIG - the financial commission has found! Yet, our U.S. Treasury is run by all past Goldman Executives and arranged this right now. The financial commission has found Goldman Sachs lied about their back door bailout from AIG and where the 2 billion they got from them, went. Goldman Sachs, when it was revealed, they had also gotten money from AIG, after the government (U.S. taxpayers) bailed AIG out, Goldman said it went to their clients.