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- Every time you give a bank one cent of your money, you are simply short-changing yourself.
- There’s no reason to continue to pay your bank; it should be paying you.
- Move your money to find better rates.
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Treasury Secretary Paulson and other senior Bush financial regulators flouted the law. The Bush administration wanted to cover up the depth of the financial crisis that its policies had caused.
Economics Populist:
I have a hard time understanding Americans sometimes.
They seem to have unlimited ability for outrage against government workers collecting middle-class paychecks, but can’t seem to work up a protest against a massive amount of fraud and theft from people who don’t live next door to them.
Why is that?
We, and by that I mean working people, have been betrayed at every level, and the average American just cannot accept it. The deception is so broad, and so complete, that Americans have turned to blaming scapegoats instead. Because they can’t accept that fact, when all the evidence points toward it, they are easily used and manipulated.
Their crime is trusting people who are obviously lying to them.
Asymptomatic Depression
Hidden Epidemic and Huge Untapped Market
Simplifying diagnosis, screening, intervention and treatment
In recent years, antidepressant sales have skyrocketed beyond the pharmaceutical industry’s wildest dreams.
Yet despite widespread screening programs and aggressive marketing campaigns designed to raise mental health disease awareness, a significant percentage of the population remains undiagnosed and untreated. Estimates vary, but research suggests nearly a third of American adults have never been diagnosed with any mental disorder. Precisely this segment of the population must be targeted for intervention if pharmaceutical profits are to continue rising at their current rate.
One way to increase the prevalence of a disease is to broaden its diagnostic criteria. By providing physicians with an ever-growing laundry list of signs and symptoms to evaluate (insomnia or oversleeping, poor appetite or overeating, constant crying or inability to cry, apathy or hostility, fatigue or restlessness, and so on), the number of potential clients/patients is greatly expanded.
However, a major flaw in this strategy is that it focuses exclusively on those who complain of sickness, while completely overlooking those who feel well. The present article explores the novel hypothesis that patients who feel well are, in fact, patients who need treatment.
How Reagan Ruined Conservatism
by Gideon Rachman at the Financial Times.
The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States of America:
America is the richest nation in history, yet we now have the highest poverty rate in the industrialized world with an unprecedented number of Americans living in dire straits and over 50 million citizens already living in poverty.
The government has come up with clever ways to downplay all of these numbers, but we have over 50 million people who need to use food stamps to eat, and a stunning 50% of US children will use a food stamp to eat at some point in their childhood. Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day. In 2009, one out of five US households didn’t have enough money to buy food. In households with children, this number rose to 24%, as the hunger rate among US citizens has now reached an all time high.
We also currently have over 50 million US citizens without healthcare. 1.4 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2009, a 32% increase from 2008. As bankruptcies continue to skyrocket, medical bankruptcies are responsible for over 60% of them, and over 75% of the medical bankruptcies filed are from people who have healthcare insurance. We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world.
A comprehensive, energized and well composed rant by David Degraf.
“The CEOs and directors of the failed companies, however, have largely gone unscathed. Their fortunes may have been diminished by the disasters they oversaw, but they still live in grand style.
“It is the behavior of these CEOs and directors that needs to be changed.”
Warren Buffett seeks oversight and penalties for those in charge.
“If their institutions and the country are harmed by their recklessness, they should pay a heavy price — one not reimbursable by the companies they’ve damaged nor by insurance.
CEOs and, in many cases, directors have long benefited from oversized financial carrots; some meaningful sticks now need to be part of their employment picture as well.”
Our supposedly capitalist society is seething with anticapitalist energy, affection and joy, which is why most of us have survived the official bleakness. In other words, that’s not all there is to our system. Our society is more than and other than capitalist in a lot of ways.
Resistance to the status quo can be a pleasure and an adventure.
Don’t bow down. To capital. Or to cliché or oversimplification or defeatism. Try rising up instead. It’s more interesting.
The real Adam Smith did not believe in a magically benevolent market which operates for the benefit of all without checks and balances.
Capitalism has to grow up, become less naive, rely less on a blind faith in ‘the invisible hand’ and rely more on an understanding of human nature.
Quoted endlessly by Republicans as their granddaddy of unfettered markets, here’s what Adam Smith actually said:
“When the regulation, therefore, is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.”
As Republicans stump spending cuts and since Bush took office January 2001, the nation hurts.
There’s $2.6 trillion in spending not paid for, more than $2.0 trillion in tax cuts. The new House PAYGO rule, effective immediately, stalls or stops any bill that would increase deficits.
Streamlining Accomplished.
The government willfully under-regulated both Toyota and Goldman for the sake of the race to the bottom — the never-ending quest for more profits — regardless of the dangers posed to taxpayers whether those hazards be derivatives or cars that accelerate for no apparent reason.
Hijacked
“The root cause of their problems is that the company was hijacked, some years ago, by anti-(Toyoda) family, financially oriented pirates,” said Jim Press, Toyota’s former U.S. chief and only American to hold a seat on the company’s board.
A recent survey by the California Association of Realtors has shown that 67% of California home sellers who sold last year could not pay their mortgages. That’s enormous.
Bush tax cuts cost $1.8 trillion, twice the bill for health reform. What did we learn?
“If we don’t do it, you know this whole city is going to go down. I’m hopeful people will understand that,” Detroit Mayor Bing said. “If we can incentivize some of those folks that are in those desolate areas, they can get a better situation. If they stay where they are I absolutely cannot give them all the services they require.”
The key components of the American School directly confront, deny and refute the economic imperialism championed then by England and imposed by means mostly foul upon Europe over the years.
Economics Populist:
Most Americans aren’t aware that America once had a national economic plan, and it existed from the days of President Lincoln to President Nixon in one form or another.
During that 112 year period America grew from an agrarian frontier nation to the most mighty economic power the world had ever seen.
Obviously there had to be something good in that economic plan.
The roots of the American School of Economics go back to Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List, and Henry Clay of the Whig Party. The American School of Economics was far different from the dominant economic thought of today.
Through this economic philosophy America set the standard in manufacturing, higher education, scientific research and development, finance, and general standard of living.
So what happened?
From the Economist:
What has disturbed me is the resistance of some within the financial sector to innovations which would improve the ability of the financial sector to perform its core functions.
For instance, modern technology allows the creation of an efficient electronics payments mechanism, where the transfer of funds, say, from a customer’s account to the retailer’s would cost at most pennies. Yet in most countries, the fees can be orders of magnitude greater.
As a member of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, I saw the resistance to the introduction of inflation-indexed bonds that protect individuals’ savings for their retirement from the uncertainties of inflation decades later. The financial sector’s complaint was that individuals just bought and held these securities; for the retirees, who wanted to minimize transactions costs, that was good; for the financial sector, that wanted to maximize transactions costs, it was not.
There are mortgage products (such as those prevalent in Denmark) which would have helped ordinary families manage the risk associated with their most important asset, their home. But in few countries have they been introduced; in many countries, the financial sector has resisted their introduction.
Feb. 23 (Bloomberg)
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said the financial crisis was “by far” the worst in history and called the recovery from the global recession “extremely unbalanced.”
“…by far the greatest financial crisis globally ever…”
The economy in far worse shape than the Great Depression… caused by “fundamental misjudgment in the marketplace”… more harmful than the 1930s… “extremely unbalanced recovery” and only for high-income consumers and large businesses benefiting from a recovery in stock prices…
Meanwhile, bonuses on Wall Street rose 17% while 24% of homes are upside down.
Hospital Finance News.
Hospital-acquired infections kill up to 99,000 people each year, plus cost an extra $33,000 to treat per person, reports the largest national study to date – 69 million discharge records from hospitals in 40 states. Fatal car accidents kill 39,000, much fewer than hospital acquired sepsis and pneumonia.
Public option? Free market?
Where’s our Ralph Nader of greed and sloppy?
The first thing we must acknowledge is that we have just witnessed one of the most massive transfers of wealth, from the poor to the rich, in mankind’s history.
This enormous theft now threatens the very existence of the middle class in America.
Economic Populist:
Economics today is not merely a science without a purpose. Economics, as the professions now exists, is to science what Fox News is to the news media. Just like the purpose of Fox News is to misinform the public, the purpose of economics today is a PR con to justify inefficient and immoral policies that defend the status quo and keep mankind from advancing.
Free market or fee market? Big banks charged more for almost every fee imaginable.
Overdraft fees were 41 percent higher at big banks compared to small; 43 percent more for bounced checks, 57 percent more for stop-payment orders, and 18 percent more for ATM withdrawals.
At the urging of then Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, Congress ordered the Federal Reserve to stop publishing its annual report on bank fees. . . .
More details from Stacy Mitchell of the New Rules Project.
At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated, but they’re not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs.
And they’re not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan — and there isn’t any plan, except to regain power.
But there is a kind of logic to the current Republican position: in effect, the party is doubling down on starve-the-beast.
Depriving the government of revenue, it turns out, wasn’t enough to push politicians into dismantling the welfare state. So now the de facto strategy is to oppose any responsible action until we are in the midst of a fiscal catastrophe.
You read it here first.
The New York Times notices America is creating poverty.
Robert Oak:
Wow. Just noticing something that has been going on for 30 years?
Will they endlessly argue about the market and the state?
The question facing world leaders today is not what to do. It is whether to do it.
There are two goals to meet: full employment and sustainable energy. That’s technically complex. But the complexities are complexities of engineering, organization and politics. They are not complexities of economics or finance.
Mark Thoma asserts, “Congress ought to have the same urgency in dealing with unemployment as it had when banks were in trouble.”
Hundreds of agencies, billions in charity,
but Haiti, a nation of 10 million,
does not have a single sewage treatment plant.
[NYTimes]
Center for American Progress:
An important point of this paper:
Until recently, economists spent little time or effort trying to understand the cognitive processes which led to observed economic behavior, relying instead, either implicitly or explicitly, on the assumption articulated by [Milton] Friedman that people could easily learn optimal behavior through trial and error.
As if to say, those who trumpet economic game theory, the so-called free market, have little more than jingo in their arsenal.
A more important finding in this paper:
The second contribution of the paper is to show that even when the goal is to learn only this simple approximation, pure trial-and-error learning requires an enormous amount of experience to allow consumers to distinguish good rules from bad ones – far more experience than any one consumer would have over the course of a single lifetime.
In other words, not one of us will live long enough to find out if relying upon ‘utility theory’ and ‘free market theory’ is workable.
Their final thought has me chuckling. We may have already walked off a cliff:
Elucidating the circumstances under which a process of social learning can be expected to lead the population to reasonably optimal behavior will be an interesting task for future work.
pdf here, “Individual Learning About Consumption” by Christopher Carroll and Todd Allen at John Hopkins, written for the journal Macroeconomic Dynamics.