The latest numbers, when put in context, hardly impress
This is the heart of the new financialism and it is happening all over the country. If this were just one isolated case, we could probably live with it. It might even lead to a new law that would outlaw Ackman's outrageous behavior. But this kind of de-creative destruction is now a central feature of our new financialized economy. It is now routine for big-time investors to make bets against companies and then try to bring those companies down using a variety of tactics.
We have passed the era of industrial capitalism and have entered finance capitalism based on expansion of the neoliberal economic model globally. This is fundamental to understand because it is this model that is driving all of our crises.
Dean Baker refutes Bill Keller's New York Times article, "Inequality for Dummies," published on December 22, (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/opinion/inequality-for-dummies.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0) in which he contrasts the "left-left against the "center-left.
It’s easy to see that the crisis has wounded the country in ways big and small, and that the damage isn’t done even now. Here are five charts that capture the scope and struggles of the Great Recession, five years after it began:
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