New Economic Perspectives

Crossposted from Common Dreams Isaiah Poole Four people who have been at the center of some of the nation’s biggest Wall Street scandals have come together to send a message to the 2016 presidential candidates: Pledge to stand against Wall Street fraud and corruption – not just with words, but with the kind of actions that Americans have long expected but have yet to see. The four veterans of battles with banksters – Gary J. Aguirre, William K. Black, Richard M. Bowen III and Michael...

By J.D. ALT Classically, we imagine money being aggregated by an entrepreneur who uses it to build a factory, purchase raw materials, hire labor, and begin manufacturing widgets which are then sold in the marketplace. This same result could be had by the process of an ogre appropriating a factory by intimidation, acquiring raw materials by force, and using slave labor to produce the widgets. The difference is that, in the first case, the process produces customers (the laborers) who can...

Linwood F Tauheed February 23, 2016 Bill and Hillary Clinton used a pragmatic, practical, realistic, racist ‘southern strategy’ to win the White House in 1992.  Hillary Clinton tried unsuccessfully to use the same strategy in 2008 against Barack Obama.  This is history, what’s changed? Hillary Clinton’s pragmatic, practical, ‘realistic’ mantra about how she would operate as president can be boiled down to: ‘Take what you can get’.  In today’s political climate this means the same thing it...

William K. Black February 23, 2016     Bloomington, MN In an unintentionally hilarious piece evincing exceptional moral blindness, Mr. Womack, a journalist, writes to Bernie. Senator, you are forming a mob of angry, misinformed people and then turning it on the likely Democratic nominee. That, Senator, is a dangerous and destructive game. Does your campaign honestly wonder why it has become synonymous with nasty online invective? Gosh, I would have thought that “nasty online invective”...

William K. Black February 21, 2006     Bloomington, MN Paul Krugman is plumbing new depths of moral obtuseness, arrogance, and intellectual dishonesty in what is now his third smear of the well-respected economist Gerald Friedman in two days.  My prior column discussed Krugman’s two columns on February 17, 2016.  Here is Krugman’s lead in his column dated February 19. On Wednesday four former Democratic chairmen and chairwomen of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers — three...

William K. Black February 21, 2016     Bloomington, MN Wall Street CEOs are very upset with young adults.  They believe you are “clueless” and “voting against [your] own interests” when you support Bernie Sanders.  A Wall Street CEO took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to decry the fact that “Millennials are flocking to Sanders.”  It would be cruel to note that one has to be clueless to believe that writing an op ed in the WSJ was a good way to reach millennials supporting Bernie....

William K. Black February 21, 2016     Bloomington, MN If you depend for your news on the New York Times you have been subjected to a drumbeat of article attacking Bernie Sanders – and the conclusion of everyone “serious” that his economics are daft.  In particular, you would “know” that four prior Chairs of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) (the Gang of 4) have signed an open letter to Bernie that delivered a death blow to his proposals.  Further, you would know that...

Jamie Galbraith has written an excellent letter to the four former Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers under Clinton and Obama regarding their letter to Professor Gerald Friedman and Senator Bernie Sanders. The full text is below. February 18, 2016 I was highly interested to see your letter of yesterday’s date to Senator Sanders and Professor Gerald Friedman. I respond here as a former Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee – the congressional counterpart to the CEA....

William K. Black February 16, 2016     Bloomington, MN I have been planning to respond to a January 26, 2016 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Washington’s Corporate Purge” that begins with the claim that “Bernie and Hillary compete to drive more U.S. companies overseas.”  My title was going to be:  “WSJ Shills for Tax Cheats and Cheers Race to the Bottom.”  The context was a typical WSJ claim that it was “moral” to do a tax inversion deal with Ireland to cut a U.S. company’s...

William K. Black February 15, 2016     Bloomington, MN The Bank Whistleblowers United announce an early winner of our second Financial Fraud Lemons of the Week award, and it relates to our inaugural winner, the Department of Justice (DOJ) for its lies about the latest humiliating settlement with Morgan Stanley.  If DOJ had actually prosecuted the elite Morgan Stanley bankers that led its mortgage fraud epidemic the new winner of our lemons award could not have said what he did about that...