How different are the big Wall Street banks circa 2008 from the loan sharks of the 1970s? Not very. Laura Gottesdiener has written a remarkable book that hits hard against the big Wall Street banks.
PHOENIX -- By the values that have long governed American housing, Megan and Danny Gilbertson are precisely the sorts of people who are supposed to no...
-- U.S. builders and the subcontractors they depend on are struggling to hire fast enough to meet rising demand for new homes. Builders would be sta...
Each turn of the cycle brings tighter global connectivity and integration, everything riding on hair trigger algorithmic trading seeking to squeeze out the last drops of advantage. Many believe this interdependency has reduced the risk of catastrophic failure.
Now these big real estate companies think they're going to make megabucks scooping up and renting out tens of thousands of foreclosed houses. Ha!
SAN FRANCISCO -- As anyone who even thought about buying a home in San Francisco in the past few years can readily attest, the city's real estate mark...
If you are under 40, your generation is getting utterly screwed compared to mine, and you should be in the streets. There are plenty of injustices in this country, but they have little to do with old versus young and everything to do with the one percent versus everyone else. You don't have to cut my Social Security benefits to give your generation a decent break. The secret sauce of my generation was that when I was young, prosperity was widely shared, ladders were plentiful, and tax rates were progressive. If gazillionaires pay their fair share, and we invest adequately in the young, there's no reason why Generations Y and Z can't enjoy the same economic tailwind that my generation did. That, however, will not just happen. It requires a politics -- and not the politics of young versus old, much less the politics of austerity.
Economic exploitation can't take place without dehumanization and caricature. It could be argued that the most racist thing about this cover is the culture of exploitation which Businessweek's editors, consciously or unconsciously, served so ably last week.
Now that Newsweek is out of print, there's a vacuum to be filled in the whole "trollgaze" cover game. Bloomberg Businessweek has apparently decided to...
Two long-awaited reports were published today at ShaleBubble.org by the Post Carbon Institute (PCI) and the Energy Policy Forum (EPF). Together, the reports conclude that the hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") boom could lead to a "bubble burst" akin to the housing bubble burst of 2008.
STOCKTON -- The moment is seared, like a scene from a horror movie, in Luz Sauceda's memory. She came home after picking up her teenage daughter from...
Now that the housing market is starting to come back to life -- that's "starting," as in it's got a long way back to healthy conditions -- the Federal Housing Administration is doing exactly what it should be doing: getting back to pre-crisis levels of lending standards and market share.
When what you do is make money from money, it seems as if breaking or avoiding laws and rules create victimless crimes. It's all a big game, where each person is trying to out-hustle the other. It's him or me so what does it matter if we both cheat a bit?
Why would so many people opt for an adjustable rate mortgage when it's so dangerous? Most likely, they just don't understand the risks.
So here we are, just a few short years past one economic Doomsday, and we're back to encouraging youth to make a career buying and flipping homes for profit. Not just any homes, but the still smoldering wreckage of the housing bubble.
The truth is often painful but nonetheless it is important that we live in the real world. Just as little kids have to come to grips with the fact that there is no Santa Claus, it is necessary for millions of liberals, including many who think of themselves as highly knowledgeable about economic matters, to realize that President Clinton's policies sent the economy seriously off course. In Washington it is common to tout the budget surpluses of the Clinton years as some momentous achievement, as though the point of economic policy is to run budget surpluses. Of course the point of economic policy is to produce an economy that improves the lives of the people in a sustainable way. Clinton badly flunked this test.
On a Thursday evening three years ago, Sandra McCutchen found an eviction notice stuck to the door of her Miami rental apartment. The following day, s...
Angelo Mozilo is the smartest man in the world. The Salmon-American hero of the housing boom that sadly ended for no apparent reason a few years ag...
If the Fix the Debt members expect the country to take their pronouncements seriously, they should be forced to answer one simple question: When did you stop being wrong about the economy?
The reality is that the large budget deficits of recent years are due to the economic downturn following the collapse of the housing bubble. But pointing out this fact makes one shrill; you have to say that the deficit is a huge problem to be a serious person in Washington.
Monday's New York Times included a fine column by David Carr, taking the mainstream sports media to task as not-to-silent partners in the selling of the Lance Armstrong legend.
Bringing health care costs in the United States in line with costs in other wealthy countries should not be an impossible task. After all, the U.S. can't be that much more corrupt than Italy, Spain, or the other countries that have managed to contain their health care costs.
The IRS possesses a fearsome audit power that gives it access to records and information that the public and litigants are yet to obtain. It should have used that power more effectively before the financial crisis.
The latest housing information indicates that home prices have continued to make a slow and steady recovery. That's good news for the economy in general, and specifically could help homeowners and depositors in savings accounts.
Fannie Mae has paid $1.5 billion to a dozen banks that manage its massive home loan portfolio so that it can hire companies it thinks will do a better...
