Lee Kershner's Page

 by Michael Hudson, Professor of Economics, University of Missouri      "The endgame in times past was to write down bad debts. That meant losses for banks and investors. But today’s debt overhead is being kept in place – shifting bad loans off bank balance sheets to become public debts owed by taxpayers to save banks and their creditors from loss. Governments have given banks newly minted bonds or central bank credit in exchange for junk mortgages and bad gambles – without re-structuring the…See More

Gary North has written a substantive article on the ultimate penalty borne by too much indebtedness.  http://lewrockwell.com/north/north1081.html CONCLUSION:All debt must have some sort of collateral. If voters understood that they are the collateral for the federal government's debt, they might rebel. They might demand a total default. But I don't think this is likely. The vast majority believe that they will be the folks sitting on the…See More

 MarketWatch Databased News NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- If you want to know the fate of bank stocks, why " wsodissue="57009" bridgesymbol="US;BAC"">Bank of America Corp. may bring down the industry and the economy with it, you need to change how you think about how banking works in this country.We tend to think of Washington and Wall Street as two separate entities. We think of the latter as private enterprise, and the former as the rule maker.But with the financial crisis, along with the…See More

 The Department of Justice is AWOL on the mortgage and banking beat, no doubt to avoid ruffling powerful possible Obama donors. Inspectors general are in theory independent, and on top of that, the FHFA is an independent agency and is not running the Administration playbook.  So what does the FHFA inspector general do, certain that Eric Holder will ignore any misdeeds he finds? Turn to another prosecutor who can bring cases that can bring cases that are national in scope. From the Financial…See More

It was Margaret Thatcher who oversaw the stematic deregulation of the London Stock Exchange, starting in 1986 with  what became known as the  Big Bang -- the wholesale removal of controls onfinancial transactions. From then on, the British economy went from one basedon manufacture and production to one hallmarked by financial speculation.London became the money capital of the world, outflanking New York. Thefinancialisation of other economies would follow the British slash-and-burneconomic…See More

(Legislators were bought with $5 billion in campaign contributions by the banking lobby -- and yes, as powerful chairs of congressional banking committees, the right's bogeymen, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, were two of the financial industry's top recipients of this largesse.)"The meltdown began to precipitate during a chance meeting in 1997 at Bank of America's Chicago headquarters.   People working in BofA's derivatives group happened to get into a discussion with another team that was…See More