Author Archives: Devin Smith

The Vampire Squid has feelings and Obama is no longer her BFF

Posted on October 15, 2012 | 5 comments

By William K. Black

Matt Taibbi famously dubbed Goldman “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Taibbi knew his metaphor worked a deep injustice on Vampyroteuthis infernalis, a small animal that feeds on carrion and excrement (I will let the reader explore the metaphorical possibilities).    Goldman Sachs’ leaders were always secretly flattered by Taibbi’s metaphor.  They like being thought of as hyper-aggressive and intimidating.  Saying that an investment banker’s goal is to make money is to state the obvious and causes no embarrassment. Continue reading →

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Chief Economist to VP Biden Tells Stephanie Kelton to Run for President

Posted on October 12, 2012 | 52 comments

You can view the details here in a segment at Huffington Post Live.

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The Best Way to Rob a Bank is still to Own One: a Postscript

Posted on October 8, 2012 | 4 comments

By William K. Black

The central questions for a theorist are whether his theory showed strong explanatory power and to what extent it proved useful in diverse settings.  A distinguished economist, Dr. Jayati Ghosh, has addressed those questions in an article in which she was explaining to Indian readers that a large fraud, Satyam, was not the product of unique defects in Indian regulation.

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American weirdness seeks to intervene in Honduras

Posted on October 8, 2012 | 16 comments

By William K. Black

Michael Strong is an American businessman who is a devotee of  the Austrian school of economics.  Austrians view democratic governance as so inherently illegitimate that they claim that virtually any governmental program irretrievably consigns us to the “Road to Serfdom.”   Strong has decided to save Hondurans from their government.  He wants his corporation to buy a Honduran city named Puerto Castilla and turn it into his first global “model city.”  The Honduran government holds power through a coup that removed that forced out Manuel Zelaya, the democratically-elected President.  The coup occurred during the Obama administration and returned the oligarchs to power.  The administration criticized the coup but recognized the (eventual) newly elected President Profirio Lobo.  The constitutional chamber of Honduras’ Supreme Court (which provided a fig leaf of respectability for the coup) rule 4-to-1 that it was unconstitutional to create privately run cities.  (The decision is expected to be appealed to the full Supreme Court.)

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Ideology trumps science and blocks regulation

Posted on October 8, 2012 | 10 comments

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

This column was prompted by a story that ran Friday entitled “Congressman Calls Evolution Lie from ‘Pit of Hell.’”  Yes, unintentional self-parody continues to reign supreme.

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Letter to My Brother

Posted on October 5, 2012 | 55 comments

By J. D. Alt

My brother, Jeff, is a very smart guy who went to West Point, got a masters degree at Purdue, had a successful career as a business man and now, in his retirement, can sometimes beat his wife at golf. I sent him the NEP link to Playing Monopolis Monopoly and the other two essays I wrote as well, Men on a Wall and New Sense Common Sense. Since then we’ve been corresponding about MMT—with me trying to get him to “see” it, and he, to his credit, actually doing his best to “see” it while also collecting a lot of other opinions on the topic. Recently he sent me one of these other opinions, which included a textbook circular flow diagram that seemed to prove that MMT was impossible. Continue reading →

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The Peril of Obama’s “Man Crush” on Geithner is exposed by the Debate

Posted on October 5, 2012 | 57 comments

By William K. Black

FDR transformed the nation when he was confronted with the Great Depression and World War II.  He famously welcomed the hate of the banksters.  President Obama wanted the love (and the contributions) of the banksters.  He chose Timothy Geithner to be his pipeline to the banksters because Geithner shared Obama’s lack of passion for holding the banksters accountable for their frauds that drove the ongoing crisis.  We have known the core of these sad facts for years, for they were revealed (irony of ironies) in a May 22, 2010 article whose theme was that we had all done Geithner and Obama a terrible injustice by criticizing them for their servile approach to the banks.  The key facts that the article disclosed can be summarized in a sentence:  Obama developed a “man crush” on Geithner and decided to follow Geithner’s policies to bail out the banksters rather than hold them accountable for the frauds that made them wealthy and caused the Great Recession.  Obama’s “man crush” is particularly odd given the fact that Geithner is a Republican who, as a fig leaf, became an independent.

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JPMorgan targeted for role in financial crisis

Posted on October 3, 2012 | 4 comments

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has become the first target of the task force that the  Justice Department created this year to hold big Wall Street banks accountable for their role in the financial crisis. NEP’s William Black provides input regarding these first steps taken by regulators to prosecute in an article at the LA Times. You can read the LA Times article here.

The Globe and Mail has also published an article on the prosecution of JPMorgan Chase & Co with input from William Black. You can read the Globe and Mail article here.

 

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Ryan Talks Jobs and Exposes the Lies about the 47%

Posted on October 3, 2012 | 12 comments

By William K. Black
(Cross posted at Huffington Post)

This Monday, I posted an article entitled:  “Let’s test Romney’s claims about the 47% by offering the unemployed jobs.”

The article explained that Romney, Ryan, and Charles Murray claim that 47% of Americans receive governmental assistance because they are morally defective and shiftless.  It goes through why Romney and Ryan know that they are lying when they use the 47% figure to slander Americans as refusing to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives” and as failing to pay taxes.  Continue reading →

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MODERN MONEY: The way a sovereign currency “works”

Posted on October 2, 2012 | 7 comments

By L. Randall Wray

Presentated at the conference: Central Banks, Financial Systems, and Economic Development, Banco Central de la Republica Argentina in Buenos Aires, Argentina on 10/2/2012

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