If you have something to say...
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If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
A wrap-up of stories and posts you might have missed or overlooked -- the ones below the fold: There's been more than the usual static from the Federal Reserve Banks this month.
An unaddressed cause of the 2008 financial crisis was banks' reliance on elaborate schemes called repurchase agreements, or "repos," to fund their operations. Four years later, the usual suspects remain heavily dependent on them, endangering the financial system.
How good is the Federal Reserve at its job? That can be a difficult question to answer. Monetary policy is subjective, and it can take years before t...
It is a grotesque symbol of how the Wall Street banks control our government. Mr. Dimon, sir, out of respect to our waning confidence in government institutions, your resignation from the Fed Board is well past due.
Let's be clear: There's nothing wrong with high-risk trading, but if the bets go bad, only the people who made the bets should have to pay. This sort of gambling should happen in hedge funds, not in the federally-insured banks that families and small businesses depend on.
"The fact that JPMorgan Chase lost so much money in a relatively benign moment compared to what we've seen in the past and what we're likely to see in the future suggests that we are absolutely on the path towards another financial crisis of the same order of magnitude as the last one."
We not only need to rein the banks in but we've got to delegate the responsibility for measuring household wealth -- and hopefully come up with ways to boost it -- to an agency that's more in touch with "the 99%."
Bitcoin created a decentralized currency that cannot be counterfeited, will not create inflation and is free for everyone to use. Now the challenge is building confidence in alternative currency.
U.S. taxpayers now pay nearly half a trillion dollars annually to finance our federal debt. By financing the debt itself rather than paying interest to private parties, the government could divert what it would have paid in interest into tuition, jobs, infrastructure and social services.
The Fed's mandate needs a massive overhaul, and our government needs to refocus its priorities from bailing Wall Street out of the mess they have gotten all of us into, and focusing on how bailing Wall Street plays out on Main Street.
In the light of JP Morgan's stunning losses on derivatives, announced yesterday but with the full scope of total potential losses still not yet clear (and not yet determined), Jamie Dimon and his company do not look like any kind of appealing role model.
Preventing banks from becoming so large, complex, and interconnected that their failure would ravage the economy is the safest guarantee against a future "too big to fail"-driven financial crisis.
According to the Federal Reserve, Americans had more than $800 billion in outstanding credit card debt at the end of 2011. So how much credit card debt do most people really have?
As long as growth remains sluggish, the Fed seems determined to keep rates low. This means that if stagflation takes hold, it could be especially damaging to money market accounts this time around.
Europe's election results sound an alarm for European integration and, consequently, the wellbeing of both the region and the global economy. Let us hope that the inevitable short-term volatility is a precursor to a more decisive effort to deal with the continent's festering problems.
The real meaning of the April jobs number is that the participation of age-eligible Americans in the labor force -- both working and unemployed -- is at a 30 year low. How is that synonymous with an economic recovery?
