Lynn Parramore [ht: ja], in reviewing Rana Foroohar’s forthcoming book, Makers and Takers: The Rise of American Finance and the Fall of American Business, presents a memorable image (straight out of Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors)…Occasional Links & Commentary
It thus remains a subject of considerable frustration that it is hard to marshall reader interest in what are clearly problematic and in many cases fraudulent practices. Mind you, it isn’t just that lack of reader engagement is demotivating to us. It’s that it sends the wrong message to regulators and investigators. If they see few comments on posts describing certain types of bad conduct on a site geared towards smarter, savvier readers, they may well assume that the public doesn’t care about this issue and thus they have little reason to stand up to financial services industry demands.
As Simon Johnson described in a seminal 2009 Atlantic article, The Quiet Coup, the financial crisis was not merely a massive transfer of wealth to financiers but allowed them to capture the US government. The banking industry also emerged more powerful in the Eurozone.
It is not obvious how to break the stranglehold of elite financiers. But remaining ignorant about how they operate guarantees that they will be able to improve upon their already advantaged position. Remember, as much as debating news stories on Ukraine may sharpen your resistance to propaganda, you can’t influence that course of events. By contrast, you can have an impact on the banking front, in ways small and large, from warning friends and colleagues about the dangers of various borrowing and investment products, to writing regulators about why you are opposed to yet more concessions to a bloated financial services industry. This is a front where citizens like you can take ground back, but only if you go to the effort to arm yourself with information.Naked Capitalism
Sustained recovery requires direct investment, not just a rise in consumption income that hopefully might convince capitalists to again reinvest in the US (or not convince). So the problem is not merely a lack of income growth to stimulate investment. US capitalists are investing–just not in real asset investment and not in the US. They are investing in emerging markets, and even more so in financial asset markets globally (which are now more numerous, liquid, and available than ever before due to the creation of an unregulated global shadow banking system).…
The more fundamental problem is that finance capital has changed. Raising incomes of workers and middle class Americans will help somewhat, but not all that much. It will not result in sustained economic recovery any longer. It is therefore not the main solution to the long term economic stagnation that the US has been experiencing since 2009. Capitalist profit opportunities are simply greater offshore in EMs, and in financial asset markets, than they are from making goods and services in the US, even if US workers were able to buy those real goods and services if they had more income.…
To argue simply for wage and income growth as the solution to a chronic stagnant US economic recovery—as Krugman and colleagues do for example—is to assume that capitalist enterprise will redirect itself from more lucrative profit opportunities from financial speculation and in offshore markets, back to less profitable real production of goods and services in the US. They won’t to any significant extent, since rates of return in the latter are significantly less than in the former.
The only real solution to a sustained US recovery is for massive public government investment, that then subsequently creates income. Investment precedes income creation, it does not necessarily follow it any longer in a world of 21sts century global finance capital. Just calling for income growth (via minimum wage hikes, more contingent job creation, tax cuts, or whatever) will not necessarily result in US-based investment if Capitalists continue to shift to more profitable financial speculation offshore; public investment must therefore occur prior to income growth in order to generate a sustained recovery.…
In today’s world of 21st Century Global Finance Capital, don’t expect capitalists to invest in real production and thus jobs and income in the US economy as they did decades ago. They are too busy making greater profits offshore and in financial asset speculation, leveraging the trillions of dollars of free money and credit created for them by the Federal Reserve. If real investment in the US economy is ever to return, it will have to come via major public investment initiatives. And if not, expect chronic economic stagnation to continue, as has been the case since 2010.Counterpunch
This is the first part of a four-part interview with Costas Lapavitsas focusing on the Era of Financialization and the transformations at the “molecular” level of capitalism that are driving changes in economic performance and policy in both high-income and developing countries. Lapavitsas is a professor of economics at SOAS, University of London, and the author of Financialised Capitalism: Expansion and Crisis (Maia Ediciones, 2009) and Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (Verso, 2014).Triple Crisis
Through thorough research and incisive writing, Nomi Prins has revealed how tightly Wall Street and White House policy have been aligned for more than a century. This is a difficult relationship to nail down, but Prins - as one reviewer noted - "followed the money." As a result, All the Presidents' Bankers is a must-read blockbuster of a book that names names and nails down the reality that US domestic and foreign policy is largely driven by the interests of economic hegemony and consolidated wealth.
Prins, a former executive on Wall Street and now an author and journalist, knew where to find the evidence - and it is startling to read the details.
In an extensive interview with Truthout, Prins discusses "the hidden alliances that drive Amercan power."Truthout | Author Interview
If you hear a kind of whooshing, rushing noise, don’t worry—it’s not US jobs moving to China. Today’s great sucking sound is the sound of agricultural wealth being siphoned off into the global financial system. Dragging poverty and insecurity in its wake, this broad movement of wealth from agriculture into finance is enriching and empowering finance capital at the expense of farmers, traders, consumers, rural communities and the earth. In fact, that sucking sound is really the sound of injustice.
Finance capital globally deploys a huge variety of methods and techniques that generally serve to redistribute wealth from agriculture to finance. These include debt, farmland acquisition, commodity hoarding, and derivative and insurance markets. In the following posts, I outline the wealth transfer mechanism in each of these contexts, focusing largely on new data and evidence from the past several years.Naked Capitalism
Why are both parties so hell-bent on eliminating or cutting Social Security benefits? Is there really that much at stake — for them? I’m going to slow-walk the answer in this post, and follow up later with numbers (this is turning into a research project on the numbers side). Let’s start with this …America Blog
A new PBS Frontline report examines outrageous steps Obama's administration took to protect Wall St. Wall Street from prosecutions.AlterNet
1. Boost productivity while keeping worker wages flat.
2. Build up a financial industry that has no maximum wage.
3. Keep accumulating wealth created by the financial industry.
4. Tax yourself as little as possible.
5. Lend out your excess money to people who can no longer afford a middle-class lifestyle.
"In today’s neo-rentier economy the bottom 99% (labor and consumers) owe the 1% (bondholders, stockholders and property owners). Corporate business and government bodies also are indebted to this 1%. The degree of financial polarization has sharply accelerated as the 1% are making their move to indebt the 99% – along with industry, state, local and federal government – to the point where the entire economic surplus is owed as debt service. The aim is to monopolize the economy, above all the money-creating privilege of supplying the credit that the economy needs to grow and transact business, enabling them to extract interest and other fees for this privilege. The top 1% have nearly succeeded in siphoning off the entire surplus for themselves, receiving 93% of U.S. income growth since September 2008." — Michael Hudson, America’s Deceptive 2012 Fiscal CliffP2P Foundation
NEW BOOK: This collection contains the most important interviews and speeches that Professor Michael Hudson, Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri (Kansas City), and president of the Institute for the Study of Long-term Economic Trends (ISLET) has given over the past decade (2003-2012). They span the political spectrum from COUNTERPUNCH.COM and KPFK radio’s GUNS AND BUTTER to iTULIP.COM and SANKT GEORGE in Berlin. It also includes his now-famous Rlmini, Italy, speeches that were given at a packed sports arena in early 2012 on the topic of how finance capitalism is pushing the world, starting with Europe, into austerity and neo-feudalism.Michael Hudson
