To understand why bankers love the status quo you have to understand how they pay themselves. Unlike most enterprises, labour actually has more power than capital at the big banks because debt plays such a huge role on bank balance sheets. To make shareholders feel better about this quasi-Marxist relationship, bankers use “return on equity” as a way to justify their compensation.
Category: Politics
How Toxic Finance First Met Toxic Chemical
But is the tie between industrial poisons and speculative excess a mere accident of timing? History suggests otherwise. Deregulation, financial bubbles, and chemical contamination have a common heritage that goes back all the way to Victorian England. They became linked in 1880, when the great British statesman William Ewart Gladstone restructured the taxation of beer.
Fiscal Papal: Why The Next Pope Should Address Global Debt
From bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to complacency;
from complacency to apathy;
from apathy to dependence;
from dependence back into bondage.
We’ve Nationalized the Home Mortgage Market. Now What?
They would lobby to reduce the amount of capital they have to reserve for an emergency, and to lower the fees charged for mortgage insurance so they could compete on price. If another crisis hits, lower capital reserves and lower fees would make them far more vulnerable to going bankrupt, leaving the taxpayer to bail them out.
The Tyranny of Political Economy
By endogenizing politicians’ behavior, political economy disempowers policy analysts. It is as if physicists came up with theories that explained not only natural phenomena, but also determined which bridges and buildings engineers would build. There would then scarcely be any need for engineering schools.
Abnormal Capitalist 