Daily Archives: October 8, 2013

Needed at The Fed: A New Age of Boring

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Dan Kervick | 15 comments

It is being reported that the President will nominate Janet Yellen to be the next Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Yellen was the obvious candidate all along, and it’s a very good thing that Obama’s earlier preference for Lawrence Summers, a key architect of the deregulated neoliberal regime of the 80’s and 90’s that helped bring us the financial collapse of 2008, was vigorously shot down by critics. The most important challenges for the next Fed chief will be in the area of financial system regulation, and despite the efforts by some of Summers’s closest friends and colleagues to give him a rush makeover as a born-again regulator, Summers was clearly not the right person for the job.

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Posted in Dan Kervick

The Faux Hyper-Meritocracy that Threatens to Destroy Us

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Devin Smith | 7 comments

By William K. Black

I have written two prior columns about Tyler Cowen’s praise of the faux “hyper-meritocracy.” Cowen assumes that productivity determines personal wealth and is measured by wealth. He celebrates financial managers as the exemplars of this hyper-meritocracy. In my first column I explained that it should have given Cowen pause that his meritocratic vanguard caused the greatest loss of wealth to society and that so many financial CEOs not only destroyed societal wealth, but also became wealthy through accounting control fraud. I explained how the bank CEOs that led the accounting control frauds also created the Gresham’s dynamics that suborned other professions (e.g., appraisers, loan brokers, and auditors) that cause bad ethics to drive good ethics out of the professions. Cowen could not have picked a less meritocratic group as his heroes than the financial CEOs running the systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs).

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged accounting control fraud, hyper-metitrocracy

Behind the Crisis in American Governance: Delusions about the Economy Treated As a Matter of Differing Economic “Taste” – Pt. 2/2

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Devin Smith | 5 comments

By Michael Hoexter

[Part 1] [Part 2]

Why It’s Delusional: The Critical Dependencies of Capitalism

The mythical market and view of an autonomous, self-managing capitalism is contradicted by the multiple real critical dependencies of our economy. These critical dependencies, i.e. necessary relationships with other non-capitalist systems/entities, are integral to capitalism rather than optional features. Dependencies between these social and natural systems are the object of any meaningful economic policy or, for that matter, any government policy with economic effects. They are “critical” because they are non-optional and therefore not a matter of individuals deciding that for ideological reasons they “don’t like” one or the other of them and we can therefore jettison them, while maintaining something that is recognizably capitalism. If people in society were to seek to change the economic system to some other system, either by conscious effort or by historical accident, it then may be the case that one or the other of the dependencies listed below may no longer be “critical”. However no mainstream political actors in this drama are claiming that they are making a break with capitalism; in fact, to the contrary, right-wing Republicans claim to be its sole political defenders.

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