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Re Regulating Finance

http://www.tuac.org/en/public/e-docs/00/00/03/91/document_doc.phtml This is a very useful discussion/policy paper from Pierre Habbard of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD. Executive...

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Obama’s Bank Bail Out

Martin Wolf of the Financial Times has written a pretty scathing critique of the new US Administation’s overhaul of the TARP program.  I am increasingly convinced by Duncan Cameron’s  argument that –...

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Warning: Credit Card Use May be Harmful (to Your Country’s Income Distribution)

Ah plastic. What’s not to love? Convenient? Check. Light in the pocket? Check. Monthly bill summaries? Check. Free short-term credit? Check (provided you pay your bills in full, on time). Benefits...

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Bonds, lame bonds

Below is a dispatch on bond rating agencies from my former CCPA colleague, Stuart Murray: Here is some more grist for the blog.  Bloomberg just published a very interesting and informative article on...

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Bank Mergers – The Left was Right

My personal theory as to why the Canadian banking system survived the great global financial crisis relatively unscathed is that calls by the big Canadian banks in the late 1990s to allow mergers were...

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What’s in Play at Pittsburgh?

The London G-20 summit last fall may go down history as the meeting that saved the world. That’s a huge exaggeration of course, but leaders did agree to a program of co-ordinated monetary and fiscal...

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Towards a SAFER Financial System

The good folks at PERI at U Mass Amherst led by Gerry Epstein and  Jane D’Arista have just launched a new web site so theirr useful work on why and how to reign in finance can be easily accessed....

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Transactions tax on the front page

I was surprised to see the IMF highlighting the potential virtues of a Financial Transactions Tax (FTT) on the front page of its website.  The Bloomberg news service earlier had a good story about on...

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Fox Guarding the Henhouse?

From the “fox guarding the henhouse” category comes news that the Bank of Canada has appointed Tim Hodgson, CEO of Goldman Sachs’ Canadian subsidiary, to be a special advisor for the next 18 months on...

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Finance Capital Turns Parasitic

In an announcement that largely went unnoticed last week, U.S. Steel said it plans to close down the blast furnace at Stelco’s Hilton Works in Hamilton, Ontario. Hilton Works was once the main...

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Might the proposed new federal securities regulator weaken regulatory oversight?

The front page of today’s Globe and Mail reports the latest chapter in the federal attempt to create a national securities regulator. (Premiers push back against national securities regulator plan)....

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Revenge of the Debt Zombies — or —“What are Banks for Anyway?”

What are banks for?  Typically, banks are described as intermediaries that take deposits and lend them out, earning what is called net interest margin on the gap between what is paid on the savings and...

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From Wall Street to the White House

Sometimes the crudest forms of Marxist analysis of the relationship between class and politics make the most sense. Read this  scorching commentary by Simon Johnson – the former IMF Chief Economist...

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A Call for Capital Controls

Today, the Global Development and Environment Institute and the Institute for Policy Studies released the following statement signed by more than 250 economists, including a couple of Progressive...

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Financial Illiteracy

The Report of the Task Force on Financial Literacy is all that one would have expected from one co chaired by the CEO of Sun Life Financial and the Chairman of  BMO Nesbitt Burns. There is hardly a...

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Wageless recovery and the politics of austerity

The UNTCAD just published its annual report on Trade and Development, titled Post-crisis Policy Challenges in the World Economy. The report describes a two speed global recovery, showing how developing...

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Stock Market Swindles Galore

This past weekend (March 31st), Sino-Forest Corp. announced it was filing for bankruptcy protection. The Chinese-Canadian company, once the largest publicly-traded forestry firm on the TSX, collapsed...

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BMO Professor vs. Bank Regulation

Last week, the C. D. Howe Institute was out with an op-ed contending that Canadian household debt is not worth worrying too much about: “There does not seem to be a strong case for restrictive...

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The Big Banks’ Big Secret

The CCPA today released my report: “The Big Banks Big Secret” which provides the first public estimates of the emergency funds taken by Canadian banks.  The report bases its estimates on publicly...

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Complete details of 2008-09 Bank Support

Readers of this blog will have hopefully read my report “The big banks big secret” which examines the $114 billion that Canada’s banks received during the 2008-09 financial crisis.  Its major finding...

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