Category Archives: William K. Black

NEP’s Bill Black appears on The Real News and says the Democrats’ demands are the result of bad economics and bad politics, while Trump’s vision is “the type of thing that comes from ingesting too much peyote”. You can view with a transcript here.

“All of this is particularly bizarre because the Trump administration is having enormous difficulty getting any of its supposed agenda done, and the only person who is actively implementing the Trump agenda is Jeff Sessions,” says NEP’s Bill Black. You can view here with a transcript.

More than fifty economists signed onto an open letter, written by professors Ha-Joon Chang of the University of Cambridge and James K. Galbraith of the University of Texas at Austin, ahead of this year’s presidential elections in Ecuador. The letter noted:

Over the past ten years, Ecuador has achieved major economic and social advances. We are concerned that many of these important gains in poverty reduction, wage growth, reduced inequality, and greater social inclusion could be eroded by a return to of the policies of austerity and neoliberalism that prevailed in Ecuador from the 1980s to the early 2000s. A return to such policies threatens to put Ecuador back on a path that leads not only to a more unequal society, but to more political instability as well. It is important to recall that from 1996 to 2006, Ecuador went through eight presidents.

The authors and signatories emphasized that “our goal is not to tell Ecuadorians whom to vote for, or to interfere in Ecuador’s political processes,” but instead to counter misinformation in mass media and “correct the record.”

Carlos Uribe-Teran and Pablo Vega-Garcia, both professors of economics at the Universidad de San Francisco de Quito, responded in kind with a critique of the open letter. In their concluding remarks, the authors generously offered up an opportunity to address their analysis, as well as to re-publish any exchange on their blog. We hope they will post this response there.

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The Grenfell Tower Block fire in London is a predictable consequence of policies that can be traced to Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, as well as those of David Cameron and Theresa May, says NEP’s Bill Black on The Real News Network. You can view here with transcript.

By William K. Black
June 27, 2017     Bloomington, MN

The president of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) launched a coordinated attack on “shorts” that mirrored his rival’s (Nasdaq) attack.  The NYSE assault, however, used bizarre rhetoric.

“It feels kind of icky and un-American, betting against a company,” NYSE Group President Tom Farley told lawmakers in Washington Tuesday.

The heads of the NYSE and Nasdaq have appropriated the word “transparency” to support the effort to reduce the shorts’ effectiveness.  When the NYSE purports to champion “transparency” – the key to reducing fraud by the CEOs of the companies whose stocks they exchange – it is time for investors to grab their wallets and hold them tight.  The stock exchanges are very far from being champions of transparency when the question is what the CEOs of the listing companies should be required to disclose.  Sure enough, it turns out that the stock exchanges’ proposed anti-short “reform” is actually a means to try to reduce the reliability of the public disclosures made by the CEOs of firms on those stock exchanges.  A sophisticated stock fraudster wants the public to believe the firm is “transparent” because of its disclosures, but it is those very disclosures (when false) that turn that ‘transparency’ into an illusion designed to deceive the investor.  When shorts improve the reliability of the disclosures that the CEOs of firms listed on the stock exchanges make, they protect investors from fraud.  That makes honest “shorts” highly “American.”

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By William K. Black
June 26, 2017     Bloomington, MN

There are many people culpable for the mass loss of life in the Grenfell fire in London.  At this time, we know enough about the fire and its causes to be able to discuss these matters with sufficient confidence to draw preliminary conclusions.  As always, we should also keep in mind that we do not have all the facts so some of our conclusions must be tentative.

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