Monthly Archives: December 2012

Ecuador’s President Correa Fires his Cousin

Posted on December 21, 2012 by | 3 comments

By William K. Black

In November 2011, President Correa appointed Pedro Delgado as head of Ecuador’s Central Bank.  The appointment was controversial.  The obvious controversy was that Delgado is Correa’s cousin.  Conservatives claimed that Delgado lacked integrity.  Some progressives shared the concerns about his integrity and saw Delgado as too supportive of Ecuador’s largest banks and bankers.  The recent banking crisis, in which the owners and managers of Ecuador’s four largest banks began a bizarre campaign of threatening to induce a run on their institutions to extort Correa into withdrawing his very sensible program of increasing the banks’ taxes and reforming the bankers’ dangerously perverse executive compensation, provided a test of these concerns by Correa’s supporters about Delgado.  I explained how irresponsible the banking oligarchs’ campaign was in interviews in Ecuador and the U.S. and an article.  I explained the vigorous manner in which U.S. regulators of my era would have acted to end the oligarchs’ efforts to extort the government and people of Ecuador by threatening to cause a banking run. Continue reading →

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Let’s Celebrate the Failure of the July 2011Great Betrayal

Posted on December 20, 2012 by | 29 comments

By William K. Black

In July 2011, President Obama and Speaker Boehner reached an agreement in principle on a deal crafted to inflict $4 trillion in austerity by raising taxes modestly, slashing social spending, and beginning to unravel the safety net.  The deal would have been a disaster for America.  Unemployment was 9.1%.  The deal would have thrown us back into a recession and caused unemployment to surge.  Recessions and increased unemployment cause tax revenues to fall and increase demand for social services (e.g., for unemployment compensation) – they produce large deficits.  Austerity kills jobs and frequently increases deficits.  The Eurozone is the latest demonstration of this fact.  Continue reading →

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Full Employment as the New Progressive Paradigm

Posted on December 19, 2012 by | 60 comments

By Dan Kervick

Part Two of a four-part essay

In Part One of this essay, I evoked the dismal state of the progressive movement in the developed world, and proposed that as part of the effort to turn this situation around progressives should embrace the political ideal of a full employment economy, with an activist government permanently standing ready to provide a productive job for every person who is both willing and able to work, but who is unable to find work in the private sector.

I would hope people of every political stripe would see value in a full employment economy.  But my argument here is aimed at progressives specifically.  I want to explain why, given the kinds of defining values they have traditionally embraced – democracy, equality, solidarity and progress – progressives should be drawn to the full employment ideal.  I will first explain why, in my view, progressives should view the pursuit of a full employment economy as a political, economic and moral imperative, and embrace the full employment cause as a foundation for progressive political revival.  I will then set out a few basic proposals about how a full employment economy might be structured.

Continue reading →

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The Miraculous Turnaround in Ecuadorian Migration under President Correa

Posted on December 19, 2012 by | 6 comments

By William K. Black

I have recently presented a series of talks and authored a series of articles on Ecuador’s and Italy’s leaders’ policy responses to their nation’s challenges.

Why is the failed Monti a “technocrat” and the successful Correa a “left-leaning economist”?

Note to Italy: Please send us more Saracenos

Ecuador: Bank Spreads, Taxes, Executive Compensation and Growth

Craziness on Three Continents

Continue reading →

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Did Obama and Cameron require HSBC to aid the prosecution of Tax Frauds?

Posted on December 17, 2012 by | 3 comments

By William K. Black
(Cross posted at Benzinga.com)

I have explained in prior columns that HSBC is not only a criminal enterprise, but also a recidivist of epic proportions.  The U.S. and the U.K. have refused to prosecute not only HSBC, but even its officers who directed the frauds and covered them up from the U.S. government.  The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) claimed that one of the reasons it failed to prosecute was that HSBC gave it “immediate, full cooperation.” Continue reading →

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The Second Great Betrayal: Obama and Cameron Decide that Banks are above the Law

Posted on December 17, 2012 by | 23 comments

By William K. Black

One of the “tells” that reveals how embarrassed Lanny Breuer (head of the Criminal Division) and Eric Holder (AG) are by the disgraceful refusal to prosecute HSBC and its officers for their tens of thousands of felonies are the false and misleading statements made by the Department of Justice (DOJ) about the settlement.  The same pattern has been demonstrated by other writers in the case of the false and disingenuous statistics DOJ has trumpeted to attempt to disguise the abject failure of their efforts to prosecute the elite officers who directed the “epidemic” (FBI 2004) of mortgage fraud.

Continue reading →

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Platinum Coin Seigniorage, Issuing Debt, Keystroking Deficit Spending, and Inflation

Posted on December 16, 2012 by | 17 comments

By Joe Firestone

The most frequent objections to proposals that we use Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) to create reserves for debt repayment and deficit spending, frequently come back to inflation. Perhaps people can’t get over the association they learned in high school Social Studies, or perhaps in American History, or Economics 101, that when Governments create money and then just spend it without any compensating deflationary action, inflation or hyperinflation happens. Maybe they can’t forget those cartoons about people in Weimar Republic days pushing wheelbarrows full of money to the market to buy some bread. So, I’ve been promising for about a week now, to blog about the likely expected relationship between the different PCS options and inflation using the framework laid out by Scott Fullwiler!

Continue reading →

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New MSM Trillion Dollar Coin Wave: Here’s The Big Story

Posted on December 14, 2012 by | 37 comments

By Joe Firestone

The one thing that jumps out at you when reading the mainstream posts of the past week-and-a-half bringing Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) into the forefront of attention again, for the first time since last year’s debt ceiling crisis, is that every mainstream blogger or commentator is telling a story about minting a Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC), or a few trillion dollar coins as an option the President can either use or not to get around the debt ceiling. But no one is telling us the much bigger story of the enormously increased authority to cause the creation of fiat money, delegated to the Executive Branch by the Congress in the 1996 legislation enabling PCS. And no one is telling us what the possible implications of this change are for our political and economic systems. Continue reading →

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Alternative Framing of Money: Coda

Posted on December 14, 2012 by | 79 comments

By L. Randall Wray

Today George Lakoff had a new piece on Michigan’s “right to work” law. I won’t go into that issue, but obviously the framing involved in the naming of a law that is diametrically opposed to “right to work” is worth examining. Instead I just want to quote a couple of particularly insightful (incite-ful?) paragraphs. Continue reading →

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New MSM Trillion Dollar Coin Wave Misses the Big Story: Bradford and Plumer

Posted on December 13, 2012 by | 4 comments

By Joe Firestone

In my last three posts, I’ve critiqued the new wave of mainstream posts and commentary on Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) on my way to making the case that the MSM are missing “the big story” about PCS. These  include posts by Pethokoukis, Wiesenthal, Carney, Drum, Yglesias,  Yglesias, and an MSNBC cable segment by Chris Hayes. All of these have looked at PCS in terms of the Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) and its possible impact on the impending debt ceiling shakedown. None have viewed it from a broader point of view. Let’s now look at commentaries by Harry Bradford, and Brad Plumer. Continue reading →

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