These are all worth a look, providing insights about the financial crisis now gripping the world.
Excerpts appear below:
- “Now-needy FDIC collected little in premiums“, Boston Globe, 11 March 2009 — Another give-away to the banks comes back to bite taxpayers.
- “In a First, Bankruptcy Judge Rules Calif. City Can Void Union Contracts“, National Law Journal, 17 March 2009 — Another step to the defaults that will eventually end this cycle. Excerpt:
- “Rising to the Occasion – Reimagining Socialism“, Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr., The Nation, 23 March 2009
Worth reading, but no excerpts given:
- “We Are All Socialists Now“, Newsweek, 16 February 2009 — “In many ways our economy already resembles a European one. As boomers age and spending grows, we will become even more French.”
For all those folks expecting small banks to weather the storm
- “Economic Conditions and Emerging Risks in Banking“, Report to the FDIC Board of Directors, 2 November 2006 — The risks to small banks from their concentration on builder loans was foreseen over 2 years ago.
- “Builder loans are the forgotten land mine in U.S. credit crisis“, Reuters, 10 March 2009 — Now the fuse burns down to the explosive. Too late for preventive action.
- “Bank Failures and C&D Loans“, Calculated Risk, 11 March 2009 — Nice graphs of the problem.
Excerpts
(1) “Now-needy FDIC collected little in premiums“, Boston Globe, 11 March 2009 — Yes, its OK to get angry now. Excerpt:
The federal agency that insures bank deposits, which is asking for emergency powers to borrow up to $500 billion to take over failed banks, is facing a potential major shortfall in part because it collected no insurance premiums from most banks from 1996 to 2006.
(2) “In a First, Bankruptcy Judge Rules Calif. City Can Void Union Contracts“, National Law Journal, 17 March 2009 — Another step to the defaults that will eventually end this cycle. Excerpt:
In the first ruling of its kind, a bankruptcy judge held the city of Vallejo, Calif. has the authority to void its existing union contracts in its effort to reorganize, holding public workers do not enjoy the same protections Congress gave union workers at private companies.
(3) “Rising to the Occasion – Reimagining Socialism“, Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr., The Nation, 23 March 2009 — Excerpt:
Introduction from the Editors: Socialism’s all the rage. “We Are All Socialists Now,”Newsweek declares. As the right wing tells it, we’re already living in the U.S.S.A. But what do self-identified socialists (and their progressive friends) have to say about the global economic crisis? The following essay will, we hope, kick off a spirited dialogue, with four replies in this issue and more to come here at The Nation.
… But we do understand–and this is one of the things that make us “socialists”–that the absence of a plan, or at least some sort of deliberative process for figuring out what to do, is no longer an option. The great promise of capitalism, as first suggested by Adam Smith and recently enshrined in “market fundamentalism,” was that we didn’t have to figure anything out, because the market would take care of everything for us.
Instead of promoting self-reliance, this version of free enterprise fostered passivity in the face of that inscrutable deity, the Market. Deregulate, let wages fall to their “natural” level, turn what remains of government into an endless source of bounty for contractors–whee! Well, that hasn’t worked, and the core idea of socialism still stands: that people can get together and figure out how to solve their problems, or at least a lot of their problems, collectively. That we–not the market or the capitalists or some elite group of über-planners–have to control our own destiny.
We admit: we don’t even have a plan for the deliberative process that we know has to replace the anarchic madness of capitalism. Yes, we have some notion of how it should work, based on our experiences with the civil rights movement, the women’s movement and the labor movement, as well as with countless cooperative enterprises. This notion centers on what we still call “participatory democracy,” in which all voices are heard and all people equally respected. But we have no precise models of participatory democracy on the scale that is currently called for, involving hundreds of millions, and potentially billions, of participants at a time.
Afterword
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To read other articles about these things, see the FM reference page on the right side menu bar. Of esp interest are:
- About Financial crisis – what’s happening? how will this end?
- About the End of the post-WWII geopolitical regime
- About America – how can we reform it?
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