Blog Archive: February, 2012

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently said that he felt safer in Lebanon than he did when Occupy marched past his house. If nothing else, it proves that Wall Street bankers haven't gotten any better at risk management - the art of knowing where danger lies and avoiding it - than they were when their bad bets crashed the economy and caused the Great Recession.

But then we knew that already, didn't we? After all, Chase is one of five too-big-to-fail banks that could lose $80 billion or more from their poorly-thought-out risk-taking in Europe's most troubled countries. The risky behavior shouldn't surprise anyone, though. These banks know -- or at least believe -- that their too-big-to-fail status means we'll rescue them again when they make the next devastating set of blunders.

What's really striking about comments like these is the fact that executives at America's big banks never seem to worry when police cars approach their houses. Their biggest fear is that that they might glimpse a sign or hear the sound of a mic check reverberating faintly through well-aged brick walls.

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Unions have been fighting the 1% vs 99% fight for more than 100 years. Now the rest of us are learning that this fight is also OUR fight. more »

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Originally posted on Capital Gains and Games.

Yesterday's The New York Times had a good story by Binyamin Appelbaum about how low interest rates are significantly driving down the government's borrowing costs.

Appelbaum said that, given the continuing very strong demand for U.S. debt, the Treasury is considering issuing securities with negative interest rates -- requiring buyers to pay for the privilege of safely parking their money -- and is assuming  it will get lots of takers. In fact, the story shows that some investors in Treasuries are already getting a negative return and, given the alternatives, are happy to have it.

Appelbaum's piece is factually correct and interesting but misses the real story. As Jesse Eisinger of ProPublica wrote about a months or so ago in The Times and I posted about here, there are three important budget implications of this situation.

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On the menu this morning

• MORNING MESSAGE: Forget Michigan. Worry About Hoyer.
• Wounded Romney Escapes Michigan
• Snowe Quits, But Why?
• President Mocks GOP On Auto Jobs

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Forget Michigan. Worry about Steny Hoyer.

While most political eyes are fixed on Romney's primary results, the middle class faces a threat to its financial security right in the heart of the Capitol.The Democratic Party does, too. more »

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p> It seems like just yesterday Mitt Romney released his 59-page "plan for jobs and economic growth." That's because it practically was just yesterday. Romney released "Believe in America: Mitt Romney's Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth," around the beginning of September 2011. It was even available as a free e-book on Amazon.Com. It was, as Richard Eskow put it, "the same old job-killing madness." Implementing it, Bill Scher noted, would require "slashing the social safety net."

That was before Romney retroactively lost the Iowa caucuses to Rick Santorum. That was before Newt Gingrich turned Romney into "The Man From Bain," and surged to victory in South Carolina. That was before Romney found himself running neck-and-neck with a guy he had been leading by 38 points.

That's gotta be enough to drive a guy who's gone from "inevitable" to "in-question" more than a little crazy. In Romney's latest economic agenda, it's starting to show.

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Congressional Republicans so far have been adamant that reductions in the projected spending assumed in the federal budget baseline for projected continuing military activities in Afghanistan must not be used to offset the cost of anything.

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The private prison industry is on the march. In recent months the industry moved to take over 24 state prisons in southern Florida and buy five prisons in Ohio. Now it’s making moves in Michigan.

But the industry doesn’t always win. Resistance isn’t futile. more »

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Who are the 1%?

Who is getting rich exploiting the 99%? Meet the worst of the 1%. This is a series of 1-minute videos by Brave New Films.

"The 1% in 1 Minute. These videos show the facts, plain and simple. Share them with your friends and family so Americans can understand exactly how their democracy is being taken from them." more »

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There’s just something about manufacturing. more »

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