financial crisis 
Wed Jun 09, 2010 at 09:00:29 AM EDT
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BP/Deep Horizon oil spill, Madoff, the collapse of the mortgage economy and the great recession, the coal miners who died, what does it all have in common? The lack of effective government monitoring and regulation. That's the argument Jim Surowiecki makes in his always brilliant and interesting weekly New Yorker column this week. In discussing the Mineral Management Service (MMS), the federal agency responsible for overseeing deep water oil drilling: M.M.S.’s bad behavior was unusually egregious, but it’s hard to think of a recent disaster in the business world that wasn’t abetted by inept regulation. Mining regulators allowed operators like Massey Energy to flout safety rules. Financial regulators let A.I.G. write more than half a trillion dollars of credit-default protection without making a noise. The S.E.C. failed to spot the frauds at Enron and WorldCom, gave Bernie Madoff a clean bill of health, and decided to let Wall Street investment banks take on obscene amounts of leverage, while other regulators ignored myriad signs of fraud and recklessness in the subprime-mortgage market. These failures weren’t accidents. They were the all too predictable result of the deregulationary fervor that has gripped Washington in recent years, pushing the message that most regulation is unnecessary at best and downright harmful at worst. The result is that agencies have often been led by people skeptical of their own duties. This gave us the worst of both worlds: too little supervision encouraged corporate recklessness, while the existence of these agencies encouraged public complacency
He's not anti-capitalist or anything, far from it, but he lends credence to the argument that a functioning society needs systems of trust between people (as investors, institutions, partners, etc...), and benefits from a system of quality regulatory services that serve the common good. Read the full piece here.
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Mon Feb 01, 2010 at 12:13:47 PM EST
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There’s this new website which is encouraging people to move their money out of large banks and into community banks or credit unions. I heard about it on NPR this weekend and decided that I’m going to do it. Yes, my giant bank is convinent, but it's also evil. A smaller one that is close to my job would be convenient too and I already go to whatever random ATM I see anyway, incurring fees. I don’t really do too much else at the bank. And sorry to be crude, but F banks being “too big to fail.” If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big to manage.
Here’s what Move Your Money’s saying: “Community banks are typically more conservative about how they manage their money, they’re more closely connected to the people and businesses that live near them, and they’re more inclined to make loans they know will get paid back. In other words, they have the values that more people would want banks to have.”
On their website they have way to search the closest community, which oddly named my closet bank as Woori Bank, a bank headquartered in Korea. Eh...that makes no sense, but I guess I’ll figure it out.
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Mon Feb 09, 2009 at 10:43:58 AM EST
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The news cycles of late seem to have been dominated by two major themes: the effects of the financial crisis on other sectors of the economy and the nomination of a whole new cast of federal officials under the Obama administration. While the talking heads expound about predictions, analyses, and mea culpas (or lack thereof), there is a figure that has been a silent force at the forefront of both issues: domestic workers. In the case of new appointees, a number, including President Obama’s choice for White House performance officer, Nancy Killefer, and an erstwhile frontrunner for Hillary Clinton’s vacated senate seat, Caroline Kennedy ran into trouble around their domestic workers. And in the case of the financial crisis, the New York Times published an entire article about how those negatively affected by the economic downturn have been laying off their domestic workers all over the New York metropolitan area, which my colleague Rachel Berger discussed in an earlier JSpot post.
Domestic Workers United, a grantee of Jewish Funds for Justice, is actively working to better the lives of these very workers. Primarily women of color and immigrants, these workers are often invisible both to those in other positions in society and to each other, despite the fact that, by caring for our aging parents and our young children, they support us in ways that make all our other work possible.
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Fri Dec 12, 2008 at 13:25:09 PM EST
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( - promoted by Sheila Webb-Halpern)
You know it’s hard times when union workers get congratulations for getting a severance package after being laid off; when it takes a week-long sit-in to get employers to comply with federal regulations. But the members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America may well count themselves among the lucky by comparison. The NY Times yesterday described the way the current financial crisis has affected the lowest rung of the labor pool: nannies, housekeepers, home-care workers; they aptly called it “trickledown downsizing”
The article noted that as salaried and high-wage workers are being laid-off or become financially fearful, the women they employ to take care of their children and run their homes are being “downsized” as well, their hours gradually reduced or cut altogether. Ai-Jen Poo, executive director of Domestic Workers United (DWU), a JFSJ transformative organizing grantee, noted in the article that domestic workers have no safety net if their hours are cut, no severance package or legal protection.
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Thu Sep 25, 2008 at 14:01:50 PM EDT
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Hannah, Thanks so much for bringing up the global financial crisis. Global capitalism's enormous effect on billions of people stands in stark contrast to the small amount of information available to regular folks. And, as my years of knocking on doors at PIRG demonstrated, many Americans believe that the winners in the financial system and the government have it mostly under control. I have two key points for readers: - One drives home an important radical (meaning, "at the source") critique of the financial mess
- The other point I'll make offers hope for both activists and believers in the benefical aspects of markets in general
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