A paper by Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart entitled Growth In A Time Of Debt became the intellectual backbone for the austerity movement/plutocrats and their apparatchiks in Washington and elsewhere. Now a graduate student has discovered a major excel error in Rogoff and Reinhart’s research which skewed the data to support their thesis and found that when that error was corrected their data actually supported the contrary view.

The story of robotics replacing workers in manufacturing is nothing new but now it seems that robots are moving into the once unthinkable sector of service jobs. The kind of work some previously thought only humans could do. If you meet Baxter, the latest humanoid robot from Rethink Robotics – you should get comfortable with [...]

When dealing with regulators from the Office of the Comptroller of Currency (OCC) JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon reportedly started screaming and told regulators he did not believe they should have the documents they were required to have under the law. Senator Levin asked a bank regulator with the OCC what had happened, how [...]

Last Friday President Obama signed the sequester order officially launching America’s latest austerity program. Austerity has yet to produce jobs or growth in any country it has been tried in. In fact, austerity is becoming one of the few certainties within economic policy making – the certainty of losing growth if the policy is adopted. [...]

Oh how much class the ruling class have. On a conference call with investors and analysts JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon displayed the kind of wit and grace one could only expect from the truly refined – not only agreeing to answer a mere peasant’s question but offering illumination into his heavenly projection into the [...]

Billionaire Penny Pritzker, of the plutocratic Pritzker family, has been floated by the Obama Administration as a candidate for Commerce Secretary. Penny Pritzker, an heiress to the Hyatt hotel fortune, is a leading candidate to become President Obama’s next commerce secretary as the president slowly moves to complete his second-term economic team. Ms. Pritzker, who [...]

Steve Randy Waldman had a much remarked-upon piece about how policymakers choose to have recessions and depressions, because they have been captured by an elite rentier class. It becomes much easier to understand the decisions made in government with this perspective. We are in a depression, but not because we don’t know how to remedy [...]