Jennifer Brunner asks President Obama Do NOT sign HR 3808,
HR 3808 seems designed to cover up and enable Mortgage Securitization fraud and Mortgage foreclosure fraud

Noted economics blogger Yves Smith has an article discussing Simon Schama’s recent Financial Times piece evaluating the likelihood of popular revolt in western democracies in reaction to financial chaos.

A little more than a week ago, I proposed a Fiscal Sustainability Teach-In and Counter-Conference to be held in Washington, DC as a response to the First Meeting of the Administration’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, sardonically called by some the “steal our retirements commission,” on April 27th. The Counter-conference would also be a response to the Conference scheduled by The Peter G, Peterson Foundation’s (PGPF’s) “fiscal summit” on April 28th. This conference will be full of notables but won’t include even a single economist who doesn’t share the neo-liberal view of fiscal sustainability, centered around budget deficits, the national debt, and the debt held by the public to GDP ratio. The PGPF Conference, some powerful Senators and the President’s commission are spearheading a very broad-ranging campaign to persuade the American people that austerity is necessary for ordinary Americans (as if we haven’t had enough of that since the crash of 2008), including cutbacks on entitlements while, at the same time, the same people do all they can to preserve one of the periodic “great barbeques” in American history where well-off people accumulate immense wealth by looting the few resources owned by working people. It’s the purpose of the teach-in Counter-conference to oppose this deficit hawkism point of view with a alternate new economic paradigm offered by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) that offers opportunity, balanced growth, and public purpose, in place of austerity, private irresponsibility, and hopeless Hooverism.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, virtually moribund for the last decade while giant vampire squids looted local, state and union pension funds and misled investors, has finally chosen to take on Goldman Sachs for conning everyone. Who knew?

The Press continues to be full of opinions reflecting deficit: “mongering,” “hawkism,” “terrorism,” and “errorism,” all based on erroneous neo-liberal ideas about economics. There are a number of sites however that provide very good analysis and refuting of these very dangerously silly ideas, which our President, who claimed he understood economics during his campaign, both espouses and seems ready to implement at both his political and our material peril. So, I thought it would be useful to identify some of those here, especially for those progressives who still think it’s a good idea to balance budgets at all costs.

ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism