As a recent Congressional Budget Office report put it, “Recessions often accelerate the demise or shrinkage of less efficient and less profitable firms, especially those in declining industries and sectors.”
via The Growing Underclass: Jobs Gone Forever – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com.
Too bad it can’t happen here.
Oregon voters bucked decades of anti-tax and anti-Salem sentiment Tuesday, raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy to prevent further erosion of public schools and other state services.
The tax measures passed easily, with late returns showing a 54 percent to 46 percent ratio. Measure 66 raises taxes on households with taxable income above $250,000, and Measure 67 sets higher minimum taxes on corporations and increases the tax rate on upper-level profits.
Watch as this story gets zero attention in the mass media. This is the first I’d even heard of the ballot measures, and I’m a pretty well-informed guy.
via Oregon voters pass tax increasing measures by big margin | Politics & Elections – - Oregonlive.com.
Mr. Blankfien on a cruise last year
Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein has turned!
Speaking at the Handelsblatt banking conference yesterday, the CEO said that bankers and traders had behaved irresponsibly and that public backlash against their salaries was justified.
Of course, he’s not offering to give back the $26 million Central Park penthouse he bought last year. I mean, what are you? Some kind of Marxist?
Nevertheless, the Harvard Law School graduate commented: “The industry let the growth and complexity in new instruments outstrip their economic and social utility as well as the operational capacity to manage them.”
He continued by saying, my-god-is-that-the-indoor-pool? House party up in this beeeyotch! Holler!
Pool Party!
No doubt, Mr. Blankfein has done his job and made the rich even richer. He’s been well-paid for his service, so we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that, although he can’t afford to hide behind a PR firm (yet), we must remember that he is a small fish and this is merely his introduction to the ruling class.
I’m not certain why, but I was earlier reminded of a recent statement illustrating the rate at which Financial Services, as a component of US GDP, had grown dramatically in the post-Cold War period. I was startled by the figures I’d heard, but only this evening took it upon myself to actually research the claim.
The figures I discovered which best suited my inquiry are sourced to the Bank of International Settlements in Basil. Some of you may know this institute as the clearinghouse that allowed German and American financiers and industrialists to have financial interactions during World War II (AGFA, BASF, Bayer, I.G. Farbenindustrie, ITT, Deutsche Telekom, GM, IBM, GE, DuPont, Standard Oil, Coca Cola, Dow Chemical, it’s really silly how long the list gets). The bank was appropriately enough co-founded by Germany’s finance minister, and two-time appointee to head the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, who had, oddly enough, a rather American sounding full name: Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht.
He had this name because, although born in Germany, Schacht had grown up in New York.
I sort of remember reading somewhere that Schacht had once had some sort of minor social interaction once with FDR at the Harvard Club in New York. This all happened before FDR had fully entered politics.
The BIS was so publicly scandalous that in 1944, an organization no less august the the United Nations recommended its dissolution. See United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, Final Act (London et al., 1944), Article IV. Obviously this action was never undertaken.
Nevertheless, I digress. You can see the charts and figures at the BIS website. It’s all very interesting if you like that sort of thing.
It’s crazy when you read up on it and you realize, on a strategic level, what significance there was in the role of economics in World War II, particularly in the European theater. I suppose you can have a global total war between industrialized nations without a large amount of capital interactions between the opposing sides. This is particularly obvious in consideration of the entanglements resulting from Versailles.
Kyle Hayes
My friend Kyle has a blog. Kyle is The Master.
10
