President Reagan was not the originator of this central trope of free-market (neo-liberal) politics, but he famously said in his first Inaugural Address in 1981, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” President Clinton, a Democrat, continued this theme during his terms culminating the the deregulation of the financial industry…
Category: economy
economy, political system, politics
Park Avenue and How We Got There
economy, free-market ideology
The Gig Economy in the Academy – a note
The values of capitalism, especially as expressed through free market (neoliberal) ideology, have come to dominate how we organize our lives. Silicon Valley and the tech sector is busy celebrating the “gig” economy. Companies have simply stopped hiring employees and now conduct much of their work using “temps”, “1099ers”, part-time contract workers. The companies, and…
books, economy
Book Review – The Rise and Fall of American Growth
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: the US standard of living since the Civil War by Robert J. Gordon [2]Princeton U. Press. 2016 is a weighty book in every regard. At 762 pages it is a heavy lift – not beach reading or even bed-time either. But I found it almost a page turner. It…
economy, free-market ideology
Inside Goldman Sachs with the Federal Reserve
Since the beginning of the 2008 Great Recession we have hoped that the government would return to applying some real rational restraints on the financial system. To be honest, with both political parties deep in the pocket of the industry, this is probably merely wishful thinking.
books, economy, free-market ideology
Flash Boys Doesn’t Ask the Important Question
We should demand that our financial markets serve their findamental purposes – connect investors with those who can deploy those resources to create new products and services and enable the flow of these goods and services. To call holding financial insturments whether stocks, bonds, or other assets for mere seconds investments is to beggar the mind.
economy, free-market ideology
Wall St – not about investing but fixing the game
An article in the NY TImes today reports [7]Regulators Examining Early Sales of Financial Data http://nyti.ms/12hDF3t that NY Attorney General Schneiderman is pursuing various information providers, Thomson Reuters in the immediate case, for their practices of selling market sensitive information preferntially. Those paying a premium get information several minutes before its release to the general…
economy
Thomas Friedman’s It’s a 401(k) World – facile, misleading
Reading this op ed leaves one with the notion that these changes have arisen through some immutable forces of nature.
He fails to mention that in parallel with the individual being more and more alone in the world, big corporations and governments are becoming ever more well integrated, feeding at each others’ troughs.
economy, free-market ideology
The Job Creators – Who Are They? The Rich, Really?
In recent years a standard bit of political rhetoric in the US has included references to “the job creators”. This most usually flows along the lines of higher taxes on the wealthy will injure the job creators. Or, government regulation is crushing the job creators. The presumption of course is that the wealthy, the 1% in the…
economy
High Frequency Trading and Deeper Questions about Capitalism
A recent PBS Newshour report by Paul Solman on Thursday 3/15/12 in his series “Making Sense of Financial News” gave pause concerning the role of high frequency traders (HFT) on Wall St. (and doubtless on other markets around the world). First, you might ask what are HFTs? These are traders who use computer-based algorithms to…