October 2009
13 posts
1 tag
Too Big to Fail: Why The Big Banks Should Be...
And now there are five — five Wall Street behemoths, bigger than they were before the Great Meltdown, paying fatter salaries and bonuses to retain their so-called”talent,” and raking in huge profits. The biggest difference between now and last October is these biggies didn’t know then that they were too big to fail and the government would bail them out if they got into...
Why Wall Street Reform is Stuck in Reverse
At a conference in London, a Goldman Sachs international adviser, Brian Griffiths, praised inequality. As his company was putting aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46 percent from a year earlier, Griffiths told us not to worry. “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” he said. Eight...
Why Obama Has to do What Letterman Did: Refuse to...
Last January, as I understand it, the White House promised Big Pharma, big insurance, and the American Medical Association the moral equivalent of what Joel Halderman allegedly demanded of David Letterman: hush money. The groups agreed to stay silent or even be supportive of healthcare reform, as long as they were paid off. But now that it’s time to collect, the bill is larger than the...
More Desperation from the Right
Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Rush, and the right-wing blogosphere seem interested in a talk I gave in September, 2007 to students in a political science class here at Berkeley, in which I played the role of a presidential candidate so politically incorrect and tone-deaf as to pummel every sacred cow in sight — including the notion that our society could afford and would continue forever to pay...
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Why the Dow Broke 10,000, and Why You Should Still...
How did the Dow break 10,000 when the rest of the economy is in the toilet?
1. Corporate earnings are up — mainly because companies have been cutting costs. Payrolls comprise 70 percent of most companies’ costs, which means companies have been slashing jobs. In the end, this is a self-defeating strategy. If workers don’t have jobs or are afraid of losing them, they won’t...
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The Audacity of Greed: How Private Health Insurers...
The health-insurance industry has finally revealed itself for what it is. Background: The industry hates the idea that’s emerged from the Senate Finance Committee of lowering penalties on younger and healthier people who don’t buy insurance. Relying on an analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers, insurers say this means new enrollees will be older and less healthy — which will drive up...
Empty Hands on the Climate, and What Obama Needs...
On Friday, Denmark’s climate and energy minister, Connie Hedegaard, who will be chairing U.N.-sponsored climate talks in December in Copenhagen, said President Obama needs to do more on climate. “It is hard to imagine that he will be receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Dec. 10 and then come empty-handed to Copenhagen a week later,” she said. But there’s no way...
Why Obama Should Not Have Received the Peace Prize...
President Obama’s only real diplomatic accomplishment so far has been to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy from unilateral bullying to multilateral listening and cooperating. That’s important, to be sure, but not nearly enough. The Prize is really more of Booby Prize for Obama’s predecessor. Had the world not suffered eight years of George W. Bush, Obama...
So Much Happening in Washington and So Little To...
The Senate Finance Committee is set to vote Tuesday on a healthcare bill that just got a seal of approval from the Congressional Budget Office and is very likely to garner the vote of Republican Senator Olympia Snowe — a twofer that gives the bill preeminence over four other healthcare bills that have emerged from House and Senate committees over these long months. Unlike those bills,...
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Specifically, What Should Be Done For Jobs?
In his Saturday radio address, President Obama acknowledged the White House is exploring “additional options to promote job creation.” It’s about time. This is the worst job market in seventy years — including the longest duration of steep job losses.
If anyone had any doubt that something far more dramatic must be done, listen to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan....
Addendum: The Job Numbers for September
This morning’s job numbers are bad enough — 263,000 more jobs lost in September, and unemployment now at 9.8 percent — but look behind them and the news is even grimmer. The only reason the numbers don’t look worse is that 571,000 workers dropped out of the labor force. Remember, too, that the economy needs about 125,000 new jobs every month just to keep up with a growing...
The Truth About Jobs That No One Wants To Tell You
Unemployment will almost certainly in double-digits next year — and may remain there for some time. And for every person who shows up as unemployed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey, you can bet there’s another either too discouraged to look for work or working part time who’d rather have a full-time job or else taking home less pay than before (I’m...
