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Congress Must Do More for Long-Term Unemployed
Tweet Share on Facebook May 16, 2012 Comment (5)Chad Stone is chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The long-term unemployed are in deep trouble, with the human and economic costs of long-term unemployment reaching crisis proportions. That was the message of a piece in Sunday's New York Times from an incongruous pairing of economist policy wonks from opposite sides of the political divide. Policymakers should take heed.
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How to Prevent Another J.P. Morgan-Style Loss
Tweet Share on Facebook May 16, 2012 CommentDavid Brodwin is a cofounder and board member of American Sustainable Business Council. Follow him on Twitter at @davidbrodwin.
Last week's $2 billion trading loss at J.P. Morgan Chase dashes any hope that we've resolved the instability of our banking system. How can we get banks to trade responsibly? When "too big to fail" banks generate huge losses, we all suffer. Legitimate businesses can't get credit. Taxpayers foot the bill for bailouts. Working Americans get laid off as scarce credit hobbles the economy.
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How Barack Obama's Fed Policy Fuels the Oil Shock
Tweet Share on Facebook May 16, 2012 CommentJoseph Mason is the Moyse/LBA Chair of Banking at the Ourso School of Business at Louisiana State University and a senior fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
The Federal Reserve met last month to discuss its economic outlook. And though the Fed didn't announce a formal third round of quantitative easing, Chairman Ben Bernanke confirmed the zero-bound interest rate policy will continue into the near future. What is interesting to note—and underreported—is the impact this will have on oil prices.
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Leaving Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac As Is Risks Another Housing Bubble
Tweet Share on Facebook May 15, 2012 Comment (6)Anthony Sanders is a senior scholar at the Mercatus Center and the distinguished professor of Real Estate Finance at George Mason University.
Last week Fannie Mae, one of the two mortgage giants in conservatorship with Freddie Mac, reported a $2.7 billion profit for the first time since the financial crisis. This seemingly good news may actually be a reason to finally do something about Fannie and Freddie rather than pretending that they will be just fine on their own.
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Obama's Corporate Tax Plan Not the 'Job Killer' Big Business Claims
Tweet Share on Facebook May 15, 2012 Comment (2)In February President Obama laid out his framework for reforming corporate taxes. He proposed a substantial cut in the corporate income tax rate from 35 to 28 percent—a boon to companies, especially small businesses that lack the opportunities for tax avoidance that major companies regularly exploit.
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Why J.P. Morgan's Jamie Dimon Should Resign
Tweet Share on Facebook May 14, 2012 Comment (30)James Rickards is a hedge fund manager in New York City and the author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis from Portfolio/Penguin. Follow him on Twitter: @JamesGRickards.
Of all the tricks Wall Street uses to pull the wool over the eyes of regulators, Congress, and everyday Americans, none is more effective than the pretense that the strategies used in finance are so complicated that few outside the banking industry could possibly understand them. Wall Street CEOs ask to be treated like nuclear engineers and say "trust us" when it comes to the complexity of their tasks. In fact, no trust could be more misplaced and no claim to superior knowledge could be further from the truth.
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Washington Should Remove Hurdles to Job Creation
Tweet Share on Facebook May 11, 2012 Comment (2)Ronald Lazof is managing director and member of Prism Advisers, LLC and the newest member of the Job Creators Alliance.
Good economic news is hard to come by these days as our national economy continues to struggle. The latest jobs report was just more of the same: more than 5 million long-term unemployed, nearly 4 million "missing workers," and 4.7 million jobs needed to get back to where we were before the Great Recession.
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Impact Investing: Will It Make a Difference?
Tweet Share on Facebook May 11, 2012 CommentJohn Vogel is an adjunct professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. Megan Shackleton is a Tuck student of the class of 2012.
About a year ago, the New Hampshire Charitable Trust asked us if some Tuck students would be interested in helping them investigate best practices in the new and emerging field of Impact Investing. Our first question was: what do you mean by Impact Investing? The Trust defined it as making investments that would generate a market rate of return in the 8 percent range and also further their mission of improving the quality of life for people living in New Hampshire.
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How Government Can Unleash Small Business to Grow the Economy
Tweet Share on Facebook May 10, 2012 CommentDavid Brodwin is a cofounder and board member of American Sustainable Business Council. Follow him on Twitter at @davidbrodwin.
Skip Schwarzman and Lynn Buono, co-owners of Feast Your Eyes Catering in Philadelphia, nearly came to grief when expanding their business in their hip, newly-renovated building. The expansion consolidated several real estate parcels, each with a different address. But the computers in the city's revenue department couldn't handle the change. The business was double-billed for taxes for more than two years, and then cited for delinquency.
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Today's Biggest Economic Fights: Stimulus, Austerity, and the Fed
Tweet Share on Facebook May 9, 2012 CommentChad Stone is chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Here are three big questions about current economic policy: Was the 2009 Economic Recovery Act good for the economy and could we use more such stimulus? Is cutting the budget deficit as quickly as possible (austerity, Europe style) the best policy for promoting a stronger economic recovery? Should the Federal Reserve focus more on stimulating economic growth and job creation and less on inflation right now?
