NSA revelations may cost US companies between $22 and $35 billion

The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation has released a report where they say that the recent NSA revelations are going to cost American companies that provide cloud computing and encryption services quite a lot of money, since many international businesses may be reluctant to give their business to US companies that can be compelled to provide the government with backdoor access to all their information. [Read more…]

Guilty bankers don’t even have to admit guilt

I have been railing about the fact that despite the massive damage that the major banks did to ordinary people and the economy leading up to and during the recent financial crisis, not a single major bank executive was even threatened with jail time. Instead the banks were merely fined amounts that seem impressive to ordinary people but are a pittance to the banks who can write it off as the cost of doing business. [Read more…]

Making sure the poor are also miserable

Most if us live within our means and keep some sort of rough budget of what we can afford and it usually works to keep spending in check. It is tempting to think that that is what keeps us out of debt, and one of the easiest traps that those of us who are not poor can fall into is thinking that the poor get into financial trouble because they suffer from a lack of that kind of planning. [Read more…]

The dismal state of the US banking industry

The Daily Show takes a close look at the banking sector in the US where, unlike in many countries, the banks seem to be more like crime syndicates than staid financial institutions.

In the first clip, the show discusses yet another revelation about how the banks and ratings agencies colluded to play fast and loose with other people’s money while they got rich, knowing that what they were doing was corrupt and likely to cause a collapse. [Read more…]

The academic two-step

Carmen Reinhart has written yet another defense of the discredited study that she and fellow Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff wrote. This one takes the form of an open letter to Paul Krugman, one of her harshest critics in academia. She says that it was not their fault if policymakers misread their statements about the impact of debt reaching 90% of GDP and arrived at an alarming conclusion that resulted in them pursuing the debt-reduction austerity programs that have caused such hardship around the world. [Read more…]