I and many others, including Yves Smith, waded into the thicket of Mike Kimel’s provocative generic and specific-reasons-for-the-generic claims in his post here earlier this week titled “Negative Effects of Immigration on the Economy.”  I and others, including academic economist Barkley Rosser, commented in replies in the Comments thread to Mike’s post.  Yves did so on […]

All the experts tell us not to pay too much attention to polls for another week or two. Still, it does look as if Hillary Clinton got a big bounce from her convention, swamping her opponent’s bounce a week earlier. Better still, from the Democrats’ point of view, the swing in the polls appears to […]

One charge against Sanders by the likes of Paul Krugman that I just could not abide—there were others, but this post is about this one—was that while Clinton was actively soliciting campaign funds for the Democratic Party to use for down-ballot candidates, Sanders was not.  In a post here about that a couple of weeks […]

I see so many listings about older dogs whose owner can no longer care for him or her, usually because of finances. I just received this sweet, touching email notice,* from Hempstead Animal Shelter in Wantaugh, NY (Nassau County), via RescueMe.org, and thought I’d pass it along. *Corrected link, thanks to Noni Mausa.  A note has […]

Yves Smith linked this morning on her Naked Capital blog to my post from yesterday called “The Secretive Democracy Alliance’s Secret Is Out: Some of its members are elitist, racist and self-serving,” and added a comment about it: Helpful, but does not follow the logic to the obvious conclusion. Why is the Dem apparatus harping […]

Via Naked Capitalism comes this youtube video from Jamie Galbraith on inequality and macroeconomics, a speech delivered at the INET talks in Berlin: Galbraith has marshaled a great deal of cross country data over time, and shows how changes in equality happened in a very large number of economies in parallel. He explains, persuasively, that the most […]

Yves Smith continues to follow the progress of investigations in  More Caution and Skepticism About Federal Mortgage “Investigation” While a large number of “liberal” groups, ranging from the official Democratic party outlets (the Center for American Progress) to ones that sometimes cross swords with the Administration (MoveOn, the Working Families Party) praised the Tuesday evening […]

Clifford Clark’s post at ataxingmatter* is worth a more complete look. This also brings to mind Steve Keen’s work on private debt and the economy on his blog Debt Watch as well as Lane Kenworthy’s exploration of poverty and severe poverty at Consider the Evidence, and Angry Bear Robert Waldmann’s recent posts here and here. […]

Yves Smith provides a snapshot of her perception of at least public thoughts from mortgage industry conference participants. It is worth a read. Denial in the Mortgage Industrial Complex I just came back from the AmeriCatalyst conference in Austin, which was a packed two days focused on the state of the housing and securitization market. […]

Yves Smith has been on fire lately. Here’s an article on when offshoring fails. …As these industry examples illustrate, the tradeoff between cost and flexibility can be quite involved and difficult to evaluate. It now appears that the labour-cost benefits gained from offshoring might not be sufficient to cover the lost flexibility under many circumstances. […]