Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.
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How Antimonopoly Was Revitalized, Part 2: Barack Obama and the End of the End of History
In this second installment of his three-part series on antitrust’s recent resurrection, Matt Stoller discusses the legacy of Obama’s presidency. The real policy for which Obama will be known is not Obamacare or Dodd-Frank, but bailing out the banks after the 2008 financial crisis and helping Americans and the rest of the world understand that liberal democratic rhetoric was really an ornamental cover for a system of concentrated financial and political power.
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Ten Years After the Financial Crisis: “We Are Safer, But Not As Safe As We Should and Could Be”
Experts from academia and industry gathered at the University of Oxford to revisit what went wrong in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, whether the actions that were taken since seem sufficient, and the risks that might forestall a new crisis.
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“In the Wake of the 2008 Crisis, You Can’t Ignore the Influence of Big Business on Economic Policy”
Historian and author Adam Tooze talks to ProMarket about how the financial crisis “remade” American capitalism, why the US response to the crisis was “nakedly oligopolistic,” and how Europe could have solved its own crisis if it had an organized oligopoly of its own.
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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (September 7–16)
Is the government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis responsible for the rise of populism in the US and Europe?; the real Google censorship scandal is its re-entry into China; Europe’s new controversial copyright law could change the Internet; and can Facebook unbreak democracy?
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Loose Policies Around Close Elections Highlight the Political Limits of Macroprudential Regulation
What can policymakers do to prevent future financial crises? An emerging consensus holds that so-called macroprudential regulation is key: policies that aim to mitigate risks to the financial system as a whole. In a recent paper, Karsten Müller of Princeton shows that such policies were systematically loosened in the run-up to two-hundred seventeen elections across 58 countries. This raises the question of whether regulators can, in practice, withstand political pressures.
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Why Are There So Few Bankers on American Corporate Boards?
Relatively few American companies have bankers on their boards. New research reveals that bankers were commonly represented on corporate boards in the 19th century, and that affiliations with banks helped sustain non-financial corporations in the wake of financial crises.
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A Former Central Banker Tells Other Central Bankers: “Stay Away From Davos”
In an interview with ProMarket, former Bank of England deputy governor Sir Paul Tucker explains why the “unelected power” of central bankers threatens our system of government.
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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (May 26–June 2)
Google gives up Project Maven following “terrible” backlash; angry Facebook shareholders demand an end to Mark Zuckerberg’s “dictatorship”; American startups are in a 13-year slump; and Italy has a new government.
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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (May 12-May 19)
Wells Fargo is in hot water again; President Trump reportedly pushed the US Postmaster General to double the rate that Amazon pays to ship packages. Why are Google and Facebook investing half a billion dollars in journalism? And can the Senate bring back net neutrality?
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The Only Game in Town: Central Banking as False Hope
To accompany Paul Tucker’s mini-course at the Stigler Center this week, we offer here an extract of the former Bank of England Deputy Governor’s ambitious new tome Unelected Power: The Question for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State.
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Depositors Disciplining Banks: The Impact of Scandals
Can depositor activism make a real difference? New research set to be presented at the upcoming Stigler Center Political Economy of Finance conference examines the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy and similar events and suggests that banks see significant decreases in deposit growth after experiencing environmental, corruption, and tax evasion scandals.
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