April 5, 2010Jon Brooks
“Federal regulatory functions all had become dominated by political pressure from the providers of services promulgating ‘free markets’ and ‘lifting the regulatory burden’, greased by millions of dollars of campaign contributions and lobbying.”
One of the sticking points in enacting the financial reform bill stuck in the Senate is the creation of a new consumer financial protection agency, which Republicans have ardently opposed.
This
post from the financial sector policy blog
Finance: Facts and Follies summarizes the dismantling of consumer protections in the mortgage and credit card industries in the 2000s.
Many of the steps violating unsophisticated consumers’ protections against predatory lending came from a cascade of federal, not state, regulatory actions and legislation.
read More »
January 22, 2010Jon Brooks
I don’t pretend to understand what all the numbers on this US. National Debt Clock mean, but I will give you one impression I have: They don’t look good. Especially when you click on the snapshot below and see the numbers actually moving in one direction: up. For some perspective, however, look at the following [...]
read More »
January 5, 2010Jon Brooks
There’s a school of thought out there that holds that the policies of the Fed and the Treasury, while perhaps preventing a full-blown economic depression, are sooner or later going to lead to massive inflation. Even if that’s true, one would hope the situation won’t spin as out of control as it has in hyperinflationary [...]
read More »
October 29, 2009Jon Brooks
Here’s an excellent summary of the esoteric concepts and arcane financial instruments that contributed to the near collapse of the entire system last year. Created by designer Jonathan Jarvis as part of his thesis work. Part 1 Part 2
read More »
September 8, 2009Jon Brooks
The price of gold rushed past $1000 per ounce today, sending it within glittering distance of last year’s record high before profit-taking ate into gains. But the breach of the psychological $1000 barrier has put a sparkle into the eyes of those who have been accumulating the precious metal, and has them looking for more [...]
read More »
September 4, 2009Jon Brooks
You know the answer to that if you happened to catch Floyd Norris’s column in the New York Times today: “It was he who, at the end of 1861, figured out that the American government simply needed to print money to pay for the Civil War. It was economic heresy then, but without it this [...]
read More »
