Lynn Parramore — Predator Banks Enter Brave New World of Epic Scams and Public Hasn't Got a Clue

If you didn't read the latest Taibbi on the squids, here's a summary.

Truthout
Predator Banks Enter Brave New World of Epic Scams and Public Hasn't Got a Clue
Lynn Parramore, AlterNet | Op-Ed

Dave Jamieson — Ted Cruz Gets His Health Insurance Through Goldman Sachs, His Wife Confirms

The wife of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) confirmed in an interview with The New York Times what the tea party star's opponents have insinuated gleefully for weeks: The most vocal opponent of Obamacare enjoys a high-priced health plan through investment bank Goldman Sachs.

"Ted is on my health care plan," Heidi Nelson Cruz, who has worked in the firm's management division for eight years, told the paper in a story published Wednesday.
Cruz's plan through Goldman appeared to be an uncomfortable fact for the conservative senator as he lambasted the health care reform law and helped drive what would become a two-week government shutdown. In an exchange during Cruz's 20-hour anti-Obamacare marathon on the Senate floor in September, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) tried unsuccessfully to get Cruz to admit where he gets his own coverage.

“Will the senator from Texas for the record tell us now -- and those who watched this debate -- whether he is protected and his family’s protected?” Durbin asked.
Cruz deflected the discussion toward an uninsured diabetic woman that Durbin had been talking about earlier.

A spokeswoman for Cruz confirmed to the Times that the senator gets his coverage through Goldman. The Wall Street bank told the paper the coverage is worth at least $20,000 a year. "The senator is on his wife’s plan, which comes at no cost to the taxpayer and reflects a personal decision about what works best for their family," the spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, said.

The Huffington Post
Ted Cruz Gets His Health Insurance Through Goldman Sachs, His Wife Confirms
Dave Jamieson

OMG! Cruz's wife works for Goldman? 

WTF. Is there anyone that GS doesn't have its tentacles around?

Randy Wray — Wall Street’s Rent Seeking Vampires Kill Innovation

I can't tell you how excited I am to see Randy going after rent-seeking. I had though that was missing as an MMT emphasis previously, although Michael Hudson has been on it for a long time. As Randy pointed out in his previous post, "euthanizing the rentiers" in the sense of ending parasitical economic rent and extractive rent-seeking was high on the policy agenda of Keynes at the conclusion of the General Theory.

While there are moral arguments against economic rent, rent-seeking is inefficient and constitutes an unnecessary drag on circular flow that inhibits productive investment and innovation. It also leads to inequality that also becomes an economic drag, as well as increasing the political power of wealth.

Perhaps most significantly in the long run, without addressing rentierism and rent-seeking, capitalism becomes increasing incompatible with democracy and distributive justice, and leads to corporate statism.

Even from the side of capitalism, economic rent and rent-seeking are also disruptive to price discovery in markets by favoring vested interests that able to extract rents and thereby to exact privilege as well. This leads to artificially imposed market power and artificial scarcity, as well as exclusion of disruptive innovation that would shift the status quo.

Economonitor — Great Leap Forward
Wall Street’s Rent Seeking Vampires Kill Innovation
L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics, UMKC