Sunday, March 29, 2009

The Quiet Coup

The Quiet Coup by Simon Johnson, former Chief Economist of the IMF

Friday, March 6, 2009

Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street

Felix Salmon from Wired writes about David X. Li's Gaussian copula function which was used to predict risk of default.



Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street

Monday, March 2, 2009

Dean Baker: The Santelli Screed Hits Wrong Target on Mortgage Bailout

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy Research, writes about how Rick Santelli's rant about "loser homeowners" is misdirected on truthout.org.

The Santelli Screed Hits Wrong Target on Mortgage Bailout

Joan Walsh, editor-in-chief of Salon.com blogs about the media coverage of "Class Warfare" in response to the 2010 Federal Budget and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

Friday, February 27, 2009

Robert Reich: Why We Need Stronger Unions, and How to Get Them

This is a blog entry by Robert Reich (former Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton) from January 27, 2009.  Even though it's a few weeks old, I wanted to post this because I think Reich gets to the heart of our current economic crisis.  In a nutshell, labor has been receiving a diminishing share of the prosperity which they helped create.

Book of the Week

Each week I'll try to recommend a book that I feel provides insight into how THE ECONOMY works. I'll start with Richard Douthwaite's Ecology of Money. If you truly want to understand how banks work and how "wealth" gets distributed, this is the book to read.

Richard Douthwaite is a co-founder of the The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability (FEASTA), an economic think-tank based in Ireland.

A PDF version of the book is available for free download at the FEASTA web site:
http://www.feasta.org/documents/moneyecology/contents.htm

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts: How the Economy was Lost

Article by Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Treasury Secretary under Ronald Reagan, from counterpunch.org.


How the Economy was Lost