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study published by the cleveland federal reserve on the plummeting share of income going to labor felix salmon notes the paradoxical trend over the past three years or so wages and salaries have been rising steadily while interest rates have been stuck at zero it s never been harder to make income from capital while incomes for people with jobs have actually kept on rising and unemployment while still high has been coming down given all that it would stand to reason that the share of national income going to labor should be rising not falling labor incomes are going up the number of employed people is going up and income from savings is going down and yet it turns out that people with capital are so rich and getting so much richer that it s not even close dayen s comment something happened around 2000 that separated capital income from the historical norm it started rising at spectacular levels i would argue that all the different deregulatory policies of the clinton administration s second term the commodity futures modernization act the repeal of glass steagall and the general laissez faire attitude to regulatory policy from both alan greenspan s federal reserve and the incoming bush administration created a runaway environment for capital that has not abated furthermore capital gains tax rates were slashed in 2001 to 15 after going down from 28 to 20 in clinton s second term finally you have the internationalization of finance posted by bruce wilder at 3 24 pm 1 comment email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest tuesday april 24 2012 the time bomb which is zombification the hidden bank time bomb interest rate risk naked capitalism yves smith explains the problem of too low for too long interest rate risk and zombification basically once the monetary system has hit the zero bound on interest rates there s no where to go but up and if policy is to maintain rates near the zero bound for a long time combined with a policy of low inflation the effect is to push financial institutions to load up on long term debt which carries a lot interest rate risk any rise in nominal interest rates any rise in inflation in other words will carry with it an increasing risk of destroying the capital of financial intermediaries destabilizing the financial system and that risk is increasing as long as the central bank is maintaining a low policy rate environment posted by bruce wilder at 2 41 pm 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest sunday april 22 2012 no justice no law ian welsh the us does not have justice or even the rule of law and whether the public approves or disapproves is irrelevant black letter law on the books makes most of what the banks did leading up to the subprime crisis illegal it was fraud black letter law makes the war on iraq a war crime and no one went to jail for that black letter law does not allow freestanding resisting arrest charges and those happen all the time basic law states that an accused has a right to face their accuser and see the evidence against them that no longer occurs in many cases basic justice says that you can t punish someone without a trial and the no fly list indicates that is no longer true along with being unable to face your accusers and see the evidence against you the us congress retroactively made wiretapping without a warrant legal and if i have to explain why retroactive immunity is wrong i give up basic justice says that secret laws and secret courts are unjust yet the us has plenty of both i thought that the coming political storm would so outrage the mass of people that much of this moral obduracy would be swept away and i was wrong instead of a political storm we got a quiet political counterrevolution and are marching down a path toward a fascist state maybe even toward a neo feudal order posted by bruce wilder at 7 34 pm 1 comment email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest the central question the central question posed by the great crash myfdl the great crash posed one question for this country who would bear the losses would it be the banks that caused the problems the officers directors and shareholders of those banks their careless counterparties the investors who bought the fraudulent real estate mortgage backed securities and the complex spin offs the owners of capital who threw money into hedge funds and other exotic investments expecting a geyser of money in return no that group doesn t lose money they used their control over the government and the fed to make sure that the losses would be passed on to the rest of us pushing millions into or near poverty the savers were trashed by the fed s zero interest rate policies the national debt run up by tax cuts and wars gave the rich an opportunity to end the safety net and focus all of the efforts of government on protecting them and their interests the rich are safe the rest of us are in deep trouble the government threw money at banks with abandon leaving incompetent failed executives in place when it turned out that banks lied about the quality of the notes and mortgages transferred to the rmbs trusts the sec and the department of justice refused to investigate let alone prosecute banks didn t complete the transfer of those worthless notes and mortgages into the trusts so the irs announced it wouldn t enforce the requirements for pass through non taxable status the servicing arms of those banks cheated and lied to courts around the nation about ownership and when they got caught they talked the government into a sleazy settlement that gives nothing to the people damaged by the frauds and allows the banks to continue to lie and cheat if at lower levels this list could be expanded indefinitely with the same outcome the fed congress and the white house have only done those things that protected the money of the rich whether or not the settlement was consistent with the law or not it didn t have to be this way from the outset there were things that could have been done that would have placed the losses where they belonged on wall street and its criminal denizens and its careless clients the bailouts could have come with constraints and requirements firings lawsuits and indictments the entire rotten structure could have been pushed into a form that would not threaten the lives and incomes of the middle class a group whose responsibility for the problems was minimal in contrast to that of crooked lenders and swindlers no not in this country not in a nation ruled by oligarchs and a government in thrall to economic theories years after those theories revealed themselves as nonsense or to the rich who endow those irrational theories with sanctity of revealed truth or both there was never a day when the primary or even subsidiary consideration was the middle class or the rule of law or even the pretend values of the free market the only consideration from the outset was the protection of the rich even two years later the government showed no interest in raising taxes on the richest americans both parties explained that they couldn t raise taxes even on the rich in a recession and that the only solution was cutting out unemployment benefits lowering the minimum wage slashing social security and medicare and removing people from medicare and the shredded remnants of help for the worst off the current lousy economy is a result of deliberately chosen policies the government could have chosen policies that would have protected the middle class at the expense of rich criminals and their clients and their hedge funds and their off shore trusts and their tax avoidance schemes the people and entities that wrecked the economy it didn t it s not that we don t know what to do to make the economy work for the middle class we do the government and the elites and the rich won t allow it they go house to house from bangor to bakersfield saying to the inhabitants what part of this sentence don t you understand you think we re going to eat our losses you think we don t care about our money well suck on this i didn t originally intend to quote this whole wonderful rant but i couldn t stop sort of like eating cashews posted by bruce wilder at 4 01 pm 1 comment email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest the death of facts facts 360 b c a d 2012 chicagotribune com to the shock of most sentient beings facts died wednesday april 18 after a long battle for relevancy with the 24 hour news cycle blogs and the internet though few expected facts to pull out of its years long downward spiral the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when florida republican rep allen west steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of theu s house of representatives are communists facts held on for several days after that assault brought on without a scrap of evidence or reason before expiring peacefully at its home in a high school physics book posted by bruce wilder at 1 41 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest thursday april 12 2012 wanker time atrios recalls that the last decade has been a time when this country stopped even bothering to pretend to live up to many of its supposed ideals we go to war and kill lots of people for no good reason elites have eliminated any accountability for themselves for criminal wrongdoing we ve tortured and assassinated people and the response to massive economic suffering and related criminal fraud has been to give lots of free money to the people who caused it all posted by bruce wilder at 1 25 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest monday march 19 2012 civilization john robb at global guerillas has some speculation about the rise and fall of civilizations the truth is that we know so little about the ancient roman world its politics and its economics that we are more likely to simply project our own obsessions and preoccupations on their history as we are to gain genuine insight from their example but it is still fun to speculate and draw parallels like anything organic i suppose that civilizations can be said to have something like a natural lifecycle birth growth and death the ancient hellenic world lasted about 1200 1300 years or so from its emergence at the end of the dark age that followed the collapse of bronze age civilization around 750 bc down to the fall of rome in 476 ad or if you prefer the plague of justinian in 541 542 ad as others have noted the eastern empire went on though there were severe strains there as well severe enough to mark out a dark age of at least a couple of centuries even in the east even where the institutional empire and the city of constantinople appeared to survive i find the handwaving over an opaque complexity as well as the analytically empty complaints about high taxes and a debased currency to be unsatisfying the early city state culture of trading cities and of rome s empire was a hungry and expanding beast bringing new lands under cultivation and extending the scope of peaceful trade throughout the mediterranean basin and beyond there must have been gains to economic productivity from the magna gracia project and the carthaginian expansion into spain as well as rome s methodical conquest of italy and its founding of new cities solon s reforms in athens planting olive groves etc must have unleashed energies comparable to those released by the french revolution energies which would have been capped and finally extinguished by the short sighted plutocracy of rome and its latifundia reducing sicily from the breadbasket of rome to a wasteland must have required centuries of poor farming practice soil erosion pestilence famine and plague the ancient romans in the latter days were not technically inventive they never seemed to grasp the potential of windmills they failed to invent the stirrup or a workable horse collar or really good heavy plow the empire was big enough to afford the kind specialization of labor which might yield technical advance to meliorate the shortage of new slaves and declining yield of soils under cultivation instead domination by the rich of the poor masses seems to have deepened to the point that the poor were liable to extinction in plagues and famines while the competition for power among the elites became ever more lethal our modern civilization emerged from the dark ages around 800 or 900 ad with a fusion of the franks and vikings and the invention of the motte and bailey castle a predatory military caste began an expansion that ended in something close to world conquest by the end of the 19th century accelerating technological advance has marked its character but it is worth remembering that the predatory character of the elite at this culture s core was there from the beginning william the conqueror the angevin henry ii the crusaders who sacked constantinople these were ruthless violent bandits whose first order of business was to exploit the mass of farmers everywhere from their walled castles the normal state of western states over the centuries has been a low performance equilibrium in which oppression and domination by parasitic elites was often just short of collapsing the society france in the 17th century was the richest and most powerful country in the world seemingly on the verge of ruling north america india and much of europe but by the end of the reign of the sun king the country lay prostrate it would struggle on fitfully for another 75 years before its feudal parasites were overthrown the outburst of egalitarian energy would catapult france back into contention for the domination of europe if not the world before the forces of reaction again gained the upper hand feudal empire would dominate much europe right up to the conflagration of world war i in the 20th century that we are again seeing a parasitic elite emerge in a neo feudal order should not be seen as anything but a renewed expression of western civilization s dna posted by bruce wilder at 1 27 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest older posts home subscribe to posts atom followers blog archive 2012 7 september 1 consequences april 5 march 1 2011 18 june 1 april 5 march 3 february 5 january 4 2010 65 august 4 july 8 june 8 may 13 april 1 march 3 february 13 january 15 2009 101 december 14 november 1 october 3 september 13 august 6 june 1 may 3 april 13 march 19 february 16 january 12 2008 120 december 22 november 6 october 12 september 7 august 2 july 4 june 12 may 18 april 12 march 8 february 14 january 3 2007 89 december 10 november 8 october 9 september 5 august 7 july 24 june 5 may 1 march 7 february 9 january 4 2006 240 december 15 november 11 october 20 september 26 august 24 july 20 june 17 may 7 april 26 march 15 february 28 january 31 2005 222 december 18 november 20 october 17 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