Debt

  • Pretty Bubbles Turning Into Grime

    Michael Hudson has a new book out so I thought it was high time I posted some thoughts I’ve been meaning to write up about his last one, The Bubble and Beyond. I’ve posted before about Hudson’s 1973 classic Superimperialism, whose analysis of the economic strategy of American Empire was followed by a terrific 1977…

  • Corporate Welfare.3: Welfare Wings

    Today the Real News Network, who I encourage you to support during their current drive to win a matching gift, is reporting that “the Michigan strategic fund has decided to issue $450 million in bonds for a new stadium for the Detroit Red Wings, 44% of which will be financed publicly,” while the city is…

  • Corporate Welfare.2: Subsidizing Sallie Mae

    Continuing this series on the publicly funded nature of so called private enterprise in this country…. Sometimes subsidies know how to disguise themselves.  Blackwater’s defense contracts bring them direct cash payments for no-bid contracts.  But student lenders like Sallie Mae get their government cheese in the form of regulations on interest rates.  In a double…

  • Secrets of the Temple.2: Double Dutch

    (This is a follow up to the post Secrets of the Temple.1: More Than a Doorstop, dated 1/13/13.) As I wrote in my first post on William Greider’s history of the Federal Reserve board, one of the aims of “Secrets of the Temple” is to question whether Ronald Reagan really was the primary source of…

  • Secrets of the Temple.1: More Than A Doorstop

    The operations of the Federal Reserve board are notoriously shrouded in mystery.  Technocratic decisions on monetary policy that supposedly need to be protected from the fickle pressures of politics are carried out by an appointed board of governors who like to operate behind closed doors.  William Grieder set out to demystify this institution in the…

  • Debt.4: What’s good for General Motors and what’s good for America

    Sometimes the mark of a good book is how it crops back up in your mind a few months or years or even many years after you first read it.  I wrote 3 posts about the book Debt by David Graeber back in February & March.  There have been several occasions since then when the…

  • Debt.3: South Dakota

    Ever wonder why you get so many credit card offers from banks in South Dakota?  You know, those loud envelopes with low introductory APR’s that turn around and clobber you with 25% interest rates a few months later?  Rates that bury folks in debt, just like the arid storms that buried much of South Dakota…

  • Debt.2

    “We’re used to assuming that capitalism and markets are the same thing, but as the great French historian Fernand Braudel (at left in this post) pointed out, in many ways they could equally be conceived as opposites.  While markets are ways of exchanging goods through the medium of money…capitalism is first and foremost the art…

  • Debt.1

    Last week I finished a book I really liked called Debt by David Graeber, (Melville Press.)  The author is an anthropologist and an activist who has been involved with the “anti-globalization” movement in general, and the Industrial Workers of the World and Occupy Wall Street in particular.  He used to teach at Yale but moved…