Author Archives: Devin Smith

Money is not true wealth (Part II – The Dutch Republic 1477-1806 and revolution in the Netherlands 1747-1848)

Posted on September 23, 2013 | 3 comments

By Glenn Stehle

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4]

The richest eschews a vain parade of wealth

And entertains the poor with friendship and with care

…Where the farmer so rich…the sailor so beloved

The humblest servant as merry as his master

–SIMON STIJL, Rise and Flourishing of the United Netherlands (his description of the Dutch Republic in the 3rd quarter of 18th century)

Every nation has its national mythology, and the Netherlands is no exception.  As Simon Schama points out, many Dutch still see “themselves frozen in the attitudes of Hals’ guild deacons and de Hooch’s interiors, a maritime community of God-fearing burghers dwelling in piety and liberty” (Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators:  Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813).  The rub, however, is this, and again the Dutch prove no exception to the rule:  national mythologies are unfailingly more fiction than fact.

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The Wall Street Journal Pines for the Return of Liar’s Loans

Posted on September 23, 2013 | 3 comments

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

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial staff (WSJ) criticizes the Dodd-Frank Act and the leadership of the financial regulatory agencies.  I share many of those criticisms, but I parted company when the WSJ expressed its horror that: “The regulation micromanages bank decisions down to the kind and quality of loan.”  The Dodd-Frank Act bans a “kind” of loan based on the inherently fraudulent “quality of [the] loan.”  The Act bans liar’s loans.  The WSJ considers this ban so appalling, so obvious a violation of the divine right of banks, that it labels it “micromanage[ment]” and assumes that the label proves the absurdity of banning liar’s loans.

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The “Lessons” that Wall Street, Treasury, and the White House Need You to Believe Five Years After the Collapse of Lehman Brothers

Posted on September 20, 2013 | 9 comments

By Robert E. Prasch
Department of Economics
Middlebury College

Five long years have passed since the demise of the once venerable firm of Lehman Brothers. To mark the occasion, Wall Street, the United States Treasury Department, the White House, and their several political proxies and spokespersons have taken to the mass media to instruct the public in the “lessons” to be drawn from the financial crisis of 2007-09. Regrettably, we are witnessing the propagation of several self-serving falsehoods in the hope that the public can be induced to embrace them now that the immediacy of the events in question is in the past. Some of the lessons are so flagrantly false that they demand immediate correction.

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Money and Morality

Posted on September 19, 2013 | 20 comments

By Brian Werner

Notions of money, debt and morality have a long history together (see Graeber and Atwood).  Money and the desire for it is usually connected with greed and immorality like in the often paraphrased “The love of money is the root of all evil” from the New Testament book 1 Timothy.  But what if a better understanding of what money is can help our country to be moral?

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Now is the Time to Cast Off Delusion…

Posted on September 18, 2013 | 3 comments

By Michael Hoexter

In writing the Pedal-to-the-Metal Plan (P2M) to build a post-carbon energy system, I felt compelled at various points to turn and address what would be expectable objections to what I believe is a sensible way forward on economic and climate-related issues.  To face the massive challenge of climate change and to reorient our economy towards “real” goods and services will require people to have greater mental clarity about a number of important issues that have over several decades become muddled or swept into forgetfulness.  To sign onto and participate in an effort such as the P2M Plan or similar it would in many cases involve examining some of one’s life priorities and will take deliberate thought by each to figure out how they would come to terms with and collaboratively shape a new reality.

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My “Idiotic” Insistence on Being Fair in Criticizing Larry Summers

Posted on September 18, 2013 | 12 comments

By William K. Black

My most recent column: Larry Summers Got a Bad Rap on Stimulus: Obama is the Problem so distressed one of my readers that he was moved to comment:

“Wow, this is a piece of shit column, full of straw men and idiotic praising of bad economists. You owe those of us who look up to you much much better than this.”

I have written a series of columns over the last several weeks criticizing President Obama’s reported desire to appoint Larry Summers as Ben Bernanke’s replacement to run the Fed.  I explained why I viewed Summers as a leading architect of financial crises because of his failure to understand fraud and financial regulation.  The reader who I distressed has a long and distinguished track record in fighting effectively for progressive causes.

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Larry Summers Got a Bad Rap on Stimulus: Obama is the Problem

Posted on September 17, 2013 | 15 comments

By William K. Black

I am a strong supporter of Janet Yellen and believe her support for the fiscal and monetary policies best designed to produce a stronger, prompter recovery from the Great Recession makes her the superior replacement for Ben Bernanke.  The criticism of Larry Summers’ position on fiscal stimulus, however, was generally inaccurate.  Within the Obama/Biden administration, the best known economists (Summers, Christina Romer, and Jared Bernstein) proved dramatically better economists than did the non-economists who eventually came to dominate Obama’s economic policies (Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew, and William Daley).  Summers, Romer, and Bernstein were strong voices in favor of fiscal stimulus.  Summers deserves some additional praise because he had to break from his mentor’s (Bob Rubin’s) pro-austerity dogmas to reach his anti-austerian position.

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Higher Bank Capital Requirements are Necessary but not Sufficient

Posted on September 16, 2013 | 1 comment

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

The last ditch efforts to save Larry Summers’ prospective nomination to run the Fed and the comments about his withdrawing from consideration have prompted further discussions of financial regulation.  The thrust of the comments is that Summers’ big regulatory idea was that capital requirements are the key and other forms of rules are worthless because they are easy to evade.

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NEP’s Bill Black on HuffPost: I Don’t Think Holder Takes Holder Seriously

Posted on September 16, 2013 | Comments Off on NEP’s Bill Black on HuffPost: I Don’t Think Holder Takes Holder Seriously

Bill Black’s appearance on Huff Post discussing Eric Holder and the likelihood of prosecutions of banksters. You can view the video here.

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Money is not true wealth (Part I)

Posted on September 16, 2013 | 15 comments

By Glenn Stehle

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4]

The events of the 1590s had suddenly brought home to more thoughtful Castilians the harsh truth about their native land – its poverty in the midst of riches, its power that had shown itself impotent…  For this was not only a time of crisis, but a time also of the awareness of crisis – of a bitter realization that things had gone wrong.  It was under the influence of the arbitristas that early seventeenth-century Castile surrendered itself to an orgy of national introspection, desperately attempting to discover at what point reality had been exchanged for illusion….

The arbitristas proposed that Government expenditure should be slashed…

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