Today we partnered with National People’s Action (NPA) to release a new report, The Predators’ Creditors: How the Biggest Banks are Bankrolling the Payday Loan Industry. The report details ties between payday lenders and big banks, including financing arrangements, shared leadership, and ownership ties. …
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A closer look at a toxic avenger
To paraphrase Paul Krugman, it looks like the zombies have won. Insolvent banks continue to roam the earth, sucking up unfathomable sums of taxpayer capital, provided to hedge fund intermediaries as nonrecourse loans. The scheme is designed to create inflated “auction” prices by incentivizing investors to over-bid on assets which carry almost no downside risk …
Questions on AIG, Goldman, and Deutsche
I want to raise a few points on AIG that don’t seem to be coming up elsewhere, but that need critical attention if we are to understand how this disaster came to pass and who else is implicated. There have been a few reports that AIG stopped selling credit default swaps – the financial instruments …
The Protégés
In earlier posts, we’ve highlighted Robert Rubin‘s network of protégés, who have assumed nearly every economic policy post of consequence in the Obama White House. In spite of his abysmal record of institutional leadership – Citigroup entered penny stock territory on Friday and Harvard, where Rubin’s influence as a member of the Corporation is unrivaled, …
Roberts’ reign
After spending the better part of five years running for office, a victorious John F Kennedy set out to realize the promises made in the course of his 1960 presidential campaign, which was built on the New Frontier theme. As William Domhoff recounts in The Powers That Be, while Kennedy was an expert campaigner, he …
Who is Michael Froman?
The dominant analysis of Obama’s historic fundraising effort is that small donors carried the day. His campaign certainly inspired record-smashing levels of small donor support, but the feel-good story of Obama lifted to victory by a $5 army obscures the crucial role that traditional fundraising mechanisms and networks played in Obama’s campaign. After all, Obama …
LittleSis gets social with Analyst Notes
LittleSis is a latecomer to Twitter, and we’re still learning the ropes, but one thing is clear: microblogging makes nuanced argument difficult, but is quite effective for documenting simple facts and leads. What better model to mimic, then, for LittleSis’s much-needed analyst note system? We’ve decided to modify Twitter’s format to make it more flexible …