John Oliver: Debt Buyers

Companies that purchase debt cheaply then collect it aggressively are shockingly easy to start. We can prove it!

books

Another Reading of Milanovic: Worlds of Inequality - Globalization's Winners and Losers

Miles Corak The American Prospect
Branko Milanovic offers us not just a plethora of facts about income inequality but brings them into a sound and rigorous global perspective, showing that what are too often treated as isolated national issues are on a world scale income massively maldistributed. While some nations saw the growth of a middle strata (China, for one) the real increase in world income is owned by the unprecedented 50-percent rise in incomes for the top 1 percent globally.

Why Paul Krugman Is Wrong About the 1990s

Rana Foroohar Time magazine
What is the true economic narrative about the 1990s? Was it a time of shared American prosperity brought on by smart policy? Or was it a time when the style of laissez-faire attitudes forged in the 1980s was co-opted by Democrats and began to create the growing inequality and periodic crises we’ve since become used to?

The New Generation Gap

Joseph E. Stiglitz Project Syndicate
The lives of both old and young, as they are now lived, are different. Their pasts are different, and so are their prospects.

Bernie Sanders and ‘The Big Short’

Larry Cohen Campaign for America's Future
Hollywood stars play all the major roles in the film, but it is no puff piece for the 1 percent. After watching “The Big Short” and talking to viewers, it’s hard to argue against Sanders’ demands to increase taxes on the billionaires and break up the banks, and use the revenue to fund better health care and education.

How Goldman Sachs Profited From the Greek Debt Crisis

Robert Reich Robert Reich
Just as with the American subprime crisis, and the current plight of many American cities, Wall Street’s predatory lending played an important although little-recognized role. Undoubtedly, Greece suffers from years of corruption and tax avoidance by its wealthy. But Goldman wasn’t an innocent bystander: It padded its profits by leveraging Greece to the hilt—along with much of the rest of the global economy.
Subscribe to economics