finance

My neighbor Warren doesn’t understand high finance. He’s a physician, and they’re usually pretty savvy market-wise, but he’s an exception. Yesterday over the back fence he was expressing alarm over what he thought was a dangerous development in the banking sector.
“It seems that the next big thing on Wall Street,” said Warren, “is banks and other players bundling rental housing into a new product, that is a rent-backed security, similar to the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that were at the root of the big crisis in ’09.”

It’s an old axiom – “If an extraterrestrial (we used to say ‘Martian’ but we know what is in store for Mars – terraforming, toxic bombs of sulfur, microbes and viral, self-replicating bots, Avatars of purple epidermis and femurs as long as an NBA star’s jump shot) were to just drop into a city or plop right down in the middle of a Congressional hearing …  or land into a football stadium two minutes before halftime … or light into some Lazy Boy with the nuclear family watching TV, well, you get the idea – that Martian or extra-galaxy being would be blown away by our species.

Here’s a question: if you had to choose, what’s more important to you, your personal wealth or the welfare of your country?
For the overwhelming majority of us — the 99% — the question is pretty much one and the same, because what little wealth we have is entirely tied up in our country one way or another. So most of us would answer, the welfare of our country. But what about the 1%? How might they respond?

“Are Adjunct Professors the Fast-Food Workers of the Academic World?” Is this provocative, evocative, adversarial, or emblematic of an age of casino capitalism, corrupted Admin Class, and a see/ hear/speak no evil compliant groups of people who are in the 20 percent?

As gold broke below the psychologically important level of $1,200 an ounce late in December of 2014, the mainstream financial media burst with headlines like this one from Marketwatch: “Gold’s Safe-Haven Role is Over.” The Nobel prize winning economist from the New York Times, Paul Krugman, penned a wicked missive on the ‘barbarous relic’ by invoking Key

Cute, really, calling it, Surveillance Valley,  that abomination of elitist, mostly Zionist, and certainly white male-dominated reverse Darwinism IT bootcamp, where the most hostile sub-species exists to shred all human agency. These are Ivy League/Stanford/Georgia Tech types, very strange, indeed, humans who are possessed of the most puerile of spirit, the most usury, psychologically defective, narcissistic, Oedipal hearts on earth, and they just keep that lie going. Silicon Valley my ass!

Significant changes in Latin America have mystified writers, journalists, academics, and policy-makers who purport to comment on developments in Latin America. The case of Bolivia and two-term President Evo Morales (2006-2014) is illustrative of the utter confusion in political labelling.

Julie Wark has written a manifesto for justice. Simply titled The Human Rights Manifesto, her book examines the UN Declaration of Human Rights and compares it to the current situation. In doing so, it is clear that we as a species have failed.

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is relevant these days with many in Congress playing the role of Scrooge before he was visited by the Christmas spirits. Dickens was greatly concerned about the plight of children forced to work under dreadful conditions and about the lives of the poor in Britain under industrial capitalism in the 1840s.
Pope Francis recently echoed these ideas when he expressed concern about unfettered capitalism. The Pope also called on world leaders to address poverty and growing inequality. Specifically, he said:

Two distinctly different Americans with distinctly similar, independent thinking and progressive values passed away last week. The great accounting professor Abraham Briloff (age 96) who relentlessly and brilliantly took apart the failures of his profession to insist on honest and ethical corporate accounting, and Tom Laughlin (age 82), the jolting producer and star of the Billy Jack films who broke the Hollywood industry’s rules with sagas of fighting for justice.