Experts on banking and labor markets offer their reasons for optimism and pessimism going into 2016.
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback wants to make a decades-long bet that pension-fund returns will exceed current interest rates for taxable municipal bonds. “The use of pension bonds impugns an issuer more than a downgrade, because it shows they’re willing to saddle future generations with risk in order to make current budget discussions easier,” says Matt Fabian, a partner at Concord, MA-based research firm Municipal Market Analytics.
... most people are aware that Wall Street crashed the economy and rode out of town scot-free, collecting unimaginably huge bonuses along the way. But vagueness breeds passivity. Fortunately, we now have Bob Ivry’s Seven Sins of Wall Street as an indispensable guide for tracking down live villains and unburied bodies. By the time you reach the end, all the sheer fury anyone with the merest flutter of a moral pulse felt back in 2008/2009 wells up again, white hot.
Blame interest-rate swaps, not retirees, for the Motor City’s downfall.
We have working examples of the kinds of cooperative banking and financial institutions we need in order to scale up our vision of a New Economy beyond corporate control: from cooperative banks to credit unions, to federal loans and the community’s own investment. By enriching this sector, we can nurture the power of workers over capital, an age-old struggle that the most recent financial crisis makes only more urgent. But there are real constraints.
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