Browsed by
Category: Economics/Business

The coming economic crash — and how to stop it

The coming economic crash — and how to stop it

Elizabeth Warren writes: I warned about an economic crash years before the 2008 crisis, but the people in power wouldn’t listen. Now I’m seeing serious warning signs in the economy again — and I’m calling on regulators and Congress to act before another crisis costs America’s families their homes, jobs, and savings. I’ve spent most of my career getting to the bottom of what’s happening to working families in America. And when I saw the seeds of the 2008 crisis…

Read More Read More

Americans caught in poverty traps harbor unrealistic expectations

Americans caught in poverty traps harbor unrealistic expectations

The New York Times reports: A widening income gap and sagging social mobility have left dents in the American dream. But the belief that anyone with enough gumption and grit can clamber to the top remains central to the nation’s self-image. And that could complicate Democratic efforts to frame the 2020 presidential election as a referendum on a broken economic system. Americans, who tend to link rewards to individual effort, routinely overestimate the ease of moving up the income ranks,…

Read More Read More

80% of the stock market is now on autopilot

80% of the stock market is now on autopilot

CNBC reports: It’s no secret that machines are taking up a bigger and bigger share of investing, but the extent of their influence is approaching shocking proportions. It is as high as 80%, according to one major investing firm. Passive investments such as index funds and exchange-traded funds control about 60% of the equity assets, while quantitative funds, those which rely on trend-following models instead of fundamental research from humans, now account for 20% of the market share, according to…

Read More Read More

The new left economics: How a network of thinkers is transforming capitalism

The new left economics: How a network of thinkers is transforming capitalism

Andy Beckett writes: For almost half a century, something vital has been missing from leftwing politics in western countries. Since the 70s, the left has changed how many people think about prejudice, personal identity and freedom. It has exposed capitalism’s cruelties. It has sometimes won elections, and sometimes governed effectively afterwards. But it has not been able to change fundamentally how wealth and work function in society – or even provide a compelling vision of how that might be done….

Read More Read More

Facebook’s path to global domination: Take over the internet, then the world’s financial system

Facebook’s path to global domination: Take over the internet, then the world’s financial system

Thomas Claburn writes: Facebook – the global ad business pilloried repeatedly over the past 15 years for privacy disasters – on Tuesday announced a scheme to allow account holders to buy credits and spend the digitized funds online through a network of partners, under a “strong commitment to privacy.” The antisocial network’s blockchain-tracked currency, Libra, will reside in a digital wallet named for the company’s newly formed financial services subsidiary Calibra. This coin-storing code will be available initially in WhatsApp…

Read More Read More

How American waste crosses the globe and overwhelms the poorest nations

How American waste crosses the globe and overwhelms the poorest nations

The Guardian reports: What happens to your plastic after you drop it in a recycling bin? According to promotional materials from America’s plastics industry, it is whisked off to a factory where it is seamlessly transformed into something new. This is not the experience of Nguyễn Thị Hồng Thắm, a 60-year-old Vietnamese mother of seven, living amid piles of grimy American plastic on the outskirts of Hanoi. Outside her home, the sun beats down on a Cheetos bag; aisle markers…

Read More Read More

Climate change poses major risks to financial markets, regulator warns

Climate change poses major risks to financial markets, regulator warns

The New York Times reports: A top financial regulator is opening a public effort to highlight the risk that climate change poses to the nation’s financial markets, setting up a clash with a president who has mocked global warming and whose administration has sought to suppress climate science. Rostin Behnam, who sits on the federal government’s five-member Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a powerful agency overseeing major financial markets including grain futures, oil trading and complex derivatives, said in an interview…

Read More Read More

Climate change is our World War III. It needs a bold response

Climate change is our World War III. It needs a bold response

Joseph Stiglitz writes: Advocates of the Green New Deal say there is great urgency in dealing with climate change and highlight the scale and scope of what is required to combat it. They are right. They use the term “New Deal” to evoke the massive response by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the United States government to the Great Depression. An even better analogy would be the country’s mobilization to fight World War II. Critics ask, “Can we afford it?” and…

Read More Read More

Trump’s tariff threat to Mexico may upend trade deal, undermine the economy

Trump’s tariff threat to Mexico may upend trade deal, undermine the economy

The Washington Post reports: President Trump’s surprise announcement of an escalating series of new tariffs on all goods imported from Mexico is likely to upend hopes for early congressional action on his proposed North American trade deal and trigger economic upheaval on both sides of the border, according to trade analysts and business executives. Business leaders reacted with dismay to Trump’s statement Thursday that he would impose a new 5 percent tariff on all goods from Mexico beginning June 10…

Read More Read More

Jeff Bezos offers absurd and hypocritical reason for his massive space plan

Jeff Bezos offers absurd and hypocritical reason for his massive space plan

Joe Romm writes: Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos recently announced a wildly ambitious plan to ultimately put up to 1 trillion humans in vast cylindrical space colonies near the Earth. But while the goal is over-the-top, the justification is both absurd and hypocritical. Bezos argued at length on Thursday in a major presentation at the Washington, D.C. Convention Center that we need such a future to save the Earth “if the world economy and population is to keep expanding.”…

Read More Read More

U.S. fossil fuel subsidies exceed Pentagon spending, says IMF

U.S. fossil fuel subsidies exceed Pentagon spending, says IMF

Rolling Stone reports: The United States has spent more subsidizing fossil fuels in recent years than it has on defense spending, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund. The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was $599 billion. The study defines “subsidy” very broadly, as many economists do. It accounts for the “differences between actual consumer fuel prices…

Read More Read More

Global wealth gap would be smaller today without climate change, study finds

Global wealth gap would be smaller today without climate change, study finds

The New York Times reports: Climate change creates winners and losers. Norway is among the winners; Nigeria among the losers. Those are the stark findings of a peer-reviewed paper by two Stanford University professors who have tried to quantify the impact of rising greenhouse gas emissions on global inequality. It was published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Global temperatures have risen nearly 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since the start of the industrial age,…

Read More Read More

Trump’s attacks on the Fed aren’t unique. Central banks worldwide are under attack

Trump’s attacks on the Fed aren’t unique. Central banks worldwide are under attack

Fareed Zakaria writes: Around the democratic world, there is a power struggle taking place that might end up being the most damaging and long-lasting consequence of this era of populism. Elected leaders — from President Trump to Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan to India’s Narendra Modi — have been steadily attacking the independence of their nations’ central banks. This could end very badly. A brief history of modern central banking. As the Economist points out, politicians in the 1970s would routinely…

Read More Read More

The financial sector must be at the heart of tackling climate change

The financial sector must be at the heart of tackling climate change

Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, François Villeroy de Galhau, governor of Banque de France, and Frank Elderson, chair of the Network for Greening the Financial System, write: The catastrophic effects of climate change are already visible around the world. From blistering heatwaves in North America to typhoons in south-east Asia and droughts in Africa and Australia, no country or community is immune. These events damage infrastructure and private property, negatively affect health, decrease productivity and destroy wealth….

Read More Read More

Federal Reserve official: Climate change is an ‘international market failure’

Federal Reserve official: Climate change is an ‘international market failure’

Eric Holthaus writes: Climate change was already worrying enough — now a report from the U.S. central bank cautions that rising temperatures and extreme storms could eventually trigger a financial collapse. A Federal Reserve researcher warned in a report on Monday that “climate-based risk could threaten the stability of the financial system as a whole.” But possible fixes — using the Fed’s buying power to green the economy — are currently against the law. Glenn Rudebusch, the San Francisco Fed’s…

Read More Read More

‘Reduced consumption is going to have to be a part of the equation’ for climate action, J.P. Morgan executive warns

‘Reduced consumption is going to have to be a part of the equation’ for climate action, J.P. Morgan executive warns

Bloomberg reports: The world isn’t cutting carbon emissions anywhere near quickly enough, a senior executive at J.P. Morgan Asset Management told clients this week — and changing that will require far harder choices than most people realize. In his annual “Energy Outlook” report, Michael Cembalest, chairman of market investment and strategy for the asset management group, wrote that the U.S. needs to reduce its use of carbon much faster — a view he shares with the authors of the Green…

Read More Read More