For General Electric Co., hawking subprime mort­gages was a long way from making light bulbs and jet engines.

That didn't stop the industrial giant from jumping into the subprime business in 2004, lending blue-chip re­spectability to the market for risky home loans by pay­ing roughly half a billion dollars to buy California-based WMC Mortgage Corp.

All is not as it appears in the global oil markets, which in my view have become entirely dysfunctional and no longer fit for its purpose. I believe that the market price is about to collapse as it did in 2008 and that this will mark the end of an era in which the market has been run by and on behalf of trading and financial intermediaries.

In this post I forecast the imminent death of the crude oil market, and I identify the killers; the re-birth of the global market in crude oil in new form will be the subject of another post.
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Global Oil Pricing*

Hello readers, This article is a piece of a monetary primer that L. Randall Wray as been developing. It is a fairly clear review of the principles and implications of Lerner's Functional Finance. as we go, Tadit

Hello there traveler, This is fairly succinct statement of perspective congenial with a metaphysics of "being." "Historical" is probably the intent of Marx and others within the domain of institutional economics. Though I greatly appreciate Zabala's essay, the absent link is that the mode of socialization involved omits fiscal policies other than as defined to reduce inequality. It is also true that the influence of the imperial north has been embedded by western context political economics, ie neo-classical and monopolist.

The financial scandal and the Great Recession that it caused have understandably captured the bulk of our attention, but we must not lose sight of the fact that “control frauds” continue to maim and kill enormous numbers of people and damage the environment and society throughout the world. Several examples of these frauds have led to recent press reports. I write to point out that control fraud is the common feature of these scandals.

Readers, this is offered mostly as a confirmation of other articles on this topic that have been posted here. The same attribution can be applied to the corporatist lemmings that are driving the the current dash into the sea. The next phase of the reaction to the econo-ideology which has both caused the original melt-down and now this entirely wrong and un-necessary econo-ideological plundering of the nations hardest hit by the culture of fraud and exemption oiled by the purchase of politicians at a wholesale rate.

It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.

True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.

Over the weekend, Fitch -- the major rating company that, with its fellow majors, Moody's and Standard and Poor's, dominate the business of assessing the riskiness of debt instruments -- took a highly publi­cized step. It downgraded the credit-worthiness of the sovereign debts of many European countries. What a spectacle! These rating companies were dis­tinguished by their laughably inaccurate (to be ex­tremely polite) assessments of the risks associated with asset-backed securi­ties. Those assessments contributed to the economic crisis we are living through.

Readers, This is the article that Wray is referring to in the article below. Tadit

Okay, Samuelson actually wants to say goodbye to Keynes, but he would have had a better case if he was talking about Darwin and the theory of evolution. After all, when we have seen nothing but confirming evidence for years, why should we still accept the theory?

Samuelson tells readers:

It’s a Funny World, News Recap on the Eve of Xmas

the original posting is at http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2011/12/21/payroll-tax-holidays-and-mmt-it’s-a-funny-world-news-recap-on-the-eve-of-xmas/?

As Mae Moore says, “It’s a Funny World” (2002). Let’s try to make sense of two news reports. Help me if you can.