Daily Archives: May 27, 2014

The Dangerous Lure of Austerity to Progressives Seeking to Reduce Pentagon Spending

By William K. Black

William K. Black

I spent today in Washington, DC presenting and attending a conference put together by Ralph Nader on left-right convergence.  The theme was that there were many issues on which large elements of the left and right agreed and could change existing policies if they worked together.  I spoke about the desirability of effective financial regulation to break the Gresham’s dynamic and prevent or at least minimize the damage of future financial crises and the desirability of prosecuting the elites that run financial “control frauds.”

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Explaining the Conflict between Obama’s Climate Policy and Obama’s Energy Policy – Pt. 1

By Michael Hoexter

With the Obama Administration recently publishing a frightening report on the effects of climate change, the National Climate Assessment 2014, contradictions in Obama’s orientation on climate and energy are placed in higher relief.  As part of the publication of the NCA2014, Obama took the time to meet with regional weathermen to discuss the contents of the report.   Apparently, Obama did not think or did not want the public to think of him and his Administration as lightly skimming over the dire warnings in the report as an afterthought.

In the meantime, we have experienced a pivotal moment in the discovery of the present and future effects of climate change, with current ice melting patterns ensuring with a high degree of certainty that the West Antarctic Ice shelf will detach and deliver anywhere from 1 to 3 meters rise in sea levels over a 200 to 500 year period or perhaps sooner.  So, talk of rising seas is, to those who heed the science, given much greater weight.  No one has worked out the policy implications of this still relatively distant future event, except that adaptation to climate change in or migration from the world’s very populous low-lying areas becomes a more concrete reality.

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Madness Posing as Hyper-Rationality: OMB’s Assault on Effective Regulation

By William K. Black

In a rational world the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), under Presidents Bush and Obama, would have responded to the financial crisis by demanding an emergency effort as a top national priority to develop superb regulatory capacity in the financial sphere and in many other fields. Regular readers will recall the questions I emphasize we must answer – why do we suffer recurrent, intensifying financial crises? That may sound like one question, but it asks multiple questions. The two most critical are:

  • What is causing our financial crises?
  • Why are we failing to learn the correct lessons from the crises and instead making finance ever more criminogenic?

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