Economist Bill Black: "[B]oth parties have conspired to bring us disaster. In this case, sequester is the fourth shoe to drop in austerity, and collectively this has strangled the recovery and may even put the U.S. economy back into recession." "So just to remind everybody, the sequestration formula deal was a proposal by President Obama." "...household wealth for the middle class is down to where it was 18 years ago. There's over a 15 percent of loss in wealth of the middle class and the working class and a massive increase in corporate profitability, where we get all these productivity gains..." "And virtually all of those productivity gains during the Great Recession have gone to the richest not 1 percent but the richest 0.001 percent."

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 theREALnews                                                                               Permalink

March 4, 2013

Sequestration - Fourth Austerity Shoe Drops

Bill Black: Both parties have conspired to bring us a disaster; Obama's sequestration plan gives cuts without blame
Watch full multipart The Black Financial and Fraud Report


Bio

William K. Black, author of THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. Black developed the concept of "control fraud" frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae's former senior management.

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Blogger: "Obama is no Roosevelt."

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March 4, 2013                                                                                                                         Original Here

80th Anniversary of Roosevelt and The New Deal

Jennifer Taub and John Weeks discuss President Roosevelt's policy of saving the economy from the ground up

CAPITAL ACCOUNT: THE WASHINGTON DC OFFICE OF A NEWS SERVICE BASED IN RUSSIA GETS TO THE HEART OF MATTERS AFFECTING THE WORLD'S ECONOMIES

Capital Account can be accessed here and subscribed to if you wish.

I have known of Russia Today (RT) from videos I had come across at random.  But it was only a few days ago I that was clued in to Capital Account by Paul Craig Roberts, an economist who was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan and occasionally picks bones with with Keynsian economists.  However, in the present-day state of the world's economy, PCR explicitly recommended the videos below of interviews with Keynsian economists Michael Hudson and Bill Black, presumably because he agrees with their analyses. The host and commentator of Capital Account, Lauren Lyster, is incredibly well versed in issues affecting the economy. I confess that I haven't watched the U.S. "mainstream media" news analyses in a month of Sundays, so I hope that some readers of this post who have will append comments on their impressions of the similarities and differences.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=zJhGExuAmtE

Michael Hudson, "Technocrats are Lobbyists for the Wall Street Gang"

12/07/11


While the failure of MF Global (together with its CEO Jon Corzine) is at the center of the present discussion, it is not the only large financial institution that lacks the collateral to cover it's gambling debts. Indeed, all of the large banks in the U.S. and many of those in Europe are presently on "life support," to pick a metaphor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=hHcMKxp30gs
William K. Black: Justice Department is the Dog that has Refused to Bark for a Decade
12/08/11



http://www.youtube.com/user/CapitalAccount?feature=watch#p/f/14/xFlV_js4j_o

Gerald Celente, "They are Robbing Celente to pay the Goldman Sachs Gang"

12/13/11


Unlike the videos above, the following is a full length show.

Jon Corzine, CEO of MF Global (and former CEO of Goldman Sachs, U.S. Senator, and New Jersey Governor), apparently presided over MF Global's taking money from customer savings accounts for use as collateral for a speculative "investments" by the supposedly-segregated investment division, which lost big time. American Farmers and airlines are among the victims. Many of the European banks are in the same situation. The fall in gold prices is viewed by interviewee Karl Denninger as being the result of the big banks in this situation selling off all their tangible assets to cover a landslide of withdrawals from savings accounts.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=P0N_tHh8f4U

Capital Account: Gold sinking, Dollar rising - are we facing a Financial Crisis worse than 2008?

12/15/11

THE BIGGEST CRISIS EVER IN THE HISTORY OF CAPITALISM ABOUT TO BLOW UP IN EUROPE?

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  theREALnews                                                                             Permalink

November 24, 2011

Global Recession Looms as Euro Crisis Deepens

Costas Lapavitsas: Crisis deepens as Germany fails to sell-out 10 year bonds; the public must take over the financial system

GREEK CRISIS IS A BANK BAILOUT IN DISGUISE: SHARP TOUNGUED ECONOMIST TOM FERGUSON EXPLAINS ALL

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  theREALnews

July 14, 2011

PERMALINK

Banks Refusing a "Haircut" Spur EU Financial Crisis

Tom Ferguson: Governments demand austerity so banks get paid, even though it deepens crisis



Bio

Thomas Ferguson is Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a Senior Fellow of the Roosevelt Institute. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and taught formerly at MIT and the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including Golden Rule (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Right Turn (Hill & Wang, 1986). Most of his research focuses on how economics and politics affect institutions and vice versa. His articles have appeared in many scholarly journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Economic History. He is a long time Contributing Editor to The Nation and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of the Historical Society and the International Journal of Political Economy.