Tag Archives: Crony Capitalism

The signals of unrest in Chile mounted for years amid corruption scandals, rising inequality, and new monopolies. The tax increase on public transport that sparked the protests was only the final straw. ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of BusinessHow Economic Concentration and Crony Capitalism Led to the Chaos in ChileDaniel Matamala | Host of 360 and CNN Prime at CNN Chile

Tom Frank aptly characterized the Bush appointees that completed the destruction of effective financial regulation as “The Wrecking Crew.” It is important, however, to understand that Bush largely adopted and intensified Clinton’s war against effective regulation. Clinton and Bush led the unremitting bipartisan assault on regulation for 16 years. That produced the criminogenic environment that produced the three largest financial fraud epidemics in history that hyper-inflated the real...

That idea, that the market ensures that only the most efficient prosper, is a central message of neoliberal ideology, and it has held UK and US governments under its sway since the time of Thatcher and Reagan. But that ideology contains a large and deep internal contradiction, which applies particularly to large firms like Carillion. To see what that contraction is, we need to talk about ordoliberalism and Ronald Coase.Ordoliberalism is widely known as the German version of neoliberalism....

Central bank "independence." Say again?Oh, right. Central bank independence means political indolence of technocrats from influence or intrusion on the part of elected representatives. It has nothing to do with influence by financial industry cronies.Real-World Economics Review BlogThe curious silence of the British media regarding Mark Carney and the secretive G30 Norbert HäringAlsoJean-Claude Trichet cannot be chairman of the ECB’s ethics committee any longer

Guy Standing’s The Corruption of Capitalism (Biteback Publishing 2017) is a powerful attack on rentier capitalism and, very explicitly, a call to revolt. It is very informative and the detailed factual descriptions that Standing puts before his readers are intended to make them angry. He succeeded with me and probably will with most readers. Standing is at his best describing the features of crony capitalism that are totally different from the neo-liberal story of free markets that...

What Ed Harrison call "crony capitalism" is a feature of neoliberalism as government capture that favors special interests. "Crony capitalism" is an egregious example of the underlying assumption that capital formation should be favored over other factors in the interest of growth, based on the further assumption of trickle down. This results in upward distribution and growing inequality of income and wealth, which eventually leads to social dysfunctionality.Credit Writedowns Crony...

ECB advisory groups are used as lobby platforms by the financial industry, Corporate Europe Observatory’s newest report shows. Published today, “Open door for forces of finance at the ECB” reveals that the advisory groups counselling the European Central Bank have become largely dominated by representatives of some of the most influential global financial corporations. European parliamentarians are urged to act. Like many other EU institutions, the European Central Bank (ECB) actively...

Nothing much to say about this really. I don't think I discussed it much here, but I'm certainly skeptical. I don't see why fiscal policy, which is discussed in congress and is an eminently political affair (budgets are negotiated between the executive and the parties in the legislative in most countries), should be different than monetary policy in this respect. But at any rate, the Lacker affair reveals how much the Fed is not independent from the financial sector, and that should be...