In contrast with the former New York Fed president and later Treasury Secretary's account about the efforts to save the U.S. economy from the collapsing housing market, others say the administration -- more particularly the Geithner-led Treasury -- did not push aggressively for mortgage debt relief .
Are banks too large? →
Large banks have grown significantly in size and become more involved in market-based activities since the late 1990s. Figure 1 shows how the balance-sheet size of the world’s largest banks increased two- to four-fold in the ten years prior to the crisis. Figure 2 illustrates how banks shifted from traditional lending towards market-oriented activities.
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Also, large banks appear to have a distinct, seemingly risky business model. They tend to simultaneously have lower capital (Figure 3), less stable funding (Figure 4), more market-based activities (Figure 5), and be more organisationally complex (Figure 6), than smaller banks.
Chinese journalists are beginning to fight their government’s censorship →
...students in some of China’s leading journalism schools oppose censorship, doubt the credibility of their domestic media, and don’t believe journalists should be members of the Communist Party.
As Ties With China Unravel, U.S. Companies Head to Mexico →
“When you have the wages in China doubling every few years, it changes the whole calculus,” said Christopher Wilson, an economics scholar at the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “Mexico has become the most competitive place to manufacture goods for the North American market, for sure, and it’s also become the most cost-competitive place to manufacture some goods for all over the world.”
Trouble in Russia’s Other Backyard →
The president of the semi-independent state of Abkhazia has apparently fled the capital, Sukhumi, after protesters stormed his headquarters. The opposition is reportedly still in control of the building.
Reporting Saudi Arabia's hidden uprising →
In Saudi Arabia's oil-rich Eastern Province, protesters inspired by the Arab Spring have been venting their anger against the government for the last three years.
Seeds of Discord in Ukraine →
As a historian of 19th-century financial panics, I knew something that many commentators do not: Ukraine has some of the best and most productive land on earth, land that fed Europe for more than a hundred years after the French Revolution. It is hard to see that now. Ukrainians have suffered for a century for the wealth that lies just beneath their feet.
Study: The U.S. Is an Oligarchy →
A new study by researchers from Princeton and Northwestern Universities finds that America's government policies reflect the wishes of the rich and of powerful interest groups, rather than the wishes of the majority of citizens.
The researchers examined close to 1,800 U.S. policy changes in the years between 1981 and 2002; then, they compared those policy changes with the expressed preferences of the median American, at the 50th percentile of income; with affluent Americans, at the 90th percentile of income; and with the position of powerful interest and lobbying groups.
No surprise, but it is nice to see real analysis to back that up.