Every Sunday CNN’s “Your Money” airs at 9:00AM HST, and it fits a hole in our TV-watching schedule (I think Mom likes Ali Velshi’s sense of humor, too). Today the host was talking to a panel of guests about the bull market in stocks and whether it was too late to get in (in my …
Fix the Debt is another group of deficit scolds made up of CEOs and other Very Serious People (it includes Simpson and Bowles, among others) who are advocating the destruction of the social safety net in order that America’s debt and deficits be balanced. Part of its “Core Principles” reads: In order to develop a …
Continue reading ‘Ulterior motives? Them? Nah, surely not!’ »
I see that Kevin Drum watched the show last night and had the same reaction I did to the segment on manufacturers whining they can’t find enough skilled workers (the “skills gap”). First, $12 an hour for a manufacturing job is not “paying very, very well,” despite what Alcoa’s CEO says. My last accounting job …
Are we about to become, not Greece as the Republicans would have it, but Venice, specifically Venice as it was in the 14th century? America’s Serrata also takes a more explicit form: the tilting of the economic rules in favor of those at the top. The crony capitalism of today’s oligarchs is far subtler than …
Matt Yglesias, quoted in full: Here’s one question I’m all but certain won’t be asked tonight but really should: Given that both tickets are running on rival deficit reduction plans, could you explain to the American people what problem in the typical person’s life today would be ameliorated by a smaller deficit? I think the …
In both senses of the word. A New Yorker article by Chrystia Freeland tries to explain why the ultra-ultra rich, the 0.1%, are so unhappy with President Obama. It focuses on a hedge-fund manager named Leon Cooperman and a letter he wrote to the President in November of 2011. In it Cooperman complains that the …
How do companies like Bain make their money? Listen my children and you shall hear (and see):
Two articles about people who understand that without public investment they’d never have gotten where they have: Mark Walter, the money guy behind Guggenheim’s purchase of the LA Dodgers. The Self-Made Myth, a review of a book in which millionaires point out that without public schools, a strong regulatory environment, enforceable copyright and IP law …
Greg Sargent, quoting Nick Confessore in the upcoming Sunday NYT Magazine: Obama campaign manager Jim Messina recently met with a group of Wall Street donors, and they gave him an earful: For the next hour, the donors relayed to Messina what their friends had been saying. They felt unfairly demonized for being wealthy. They felt …
Mitt Romney seems to feel that his biography needs refining. He was just a middle-class kid growing up, he says. On the campaign trail, the former Massachusetts governor sometimes talks about his father, George, growing up poor and driving across the American West looking for work. When Mitt was born, the family was middle class, …