When recent headlines range from a women going to jail for not mowing her lawn, to the tracking technology embedded in each of our cell phones, you can get easily depressed and discouraged simply by being aware of the world you live in. I remember when I first announced that my wife and I were expecting a child. I received a multitude of … Read more
The following article from the New York Times is actually pretty awful. However, the admission that wages have failed to grow in 15 years is important. Particularly in light of the fact that we are five years into the second so-called “recovery” since the turn of the century. These are recoveries that only Joseph Goebbels could love. … Read more
Like so many other things in popular American culture, this quaint notion of a “middle class” in the U.S. is at this point nothing more than a myth; a rapidly fading fantasy from a bygone era. As myself and many others have noted for quite some time, the decimation of the middle class began long ago. … Read more
One reason we know voters will embrace populism is that they already have. It’s what they thought they were getting with Obama. In 2008 Obama said he’d bail out homeowners, not just banks. He vowed to fight for a public option, raise the minimum wage and clean up Washington. He called whistle-blowers heroes and said … Read more
By now, it must be completely obvious to anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention that the so-called “recovery” we have supposedly been witnessing for the past several years is nothing more than a wealth transfer to a handful of oligarchs and their political minions. While I am intimately familiar with the process in … Read more
When people ask me to describe the state of the U.S. economy, what I always say is that it can best characterized as an ongoing state-sanctioned theft. This theft consists of the 0.01% oligarch class intentionally leveraging a corrupt monetary and political system in order to funnel all of the wealth of the non-oligarch rich and … Read more
If you thought you had seen it all when it comes to sob stories of the “super rich” following the comparison of the criticisms of banker bonuses to the lynching of black people in the south by AIG’s CEO in September, think again. The latest groveling, inane defense of the “super rich” comes from none other than … Read more
Welcome to the global recovery folks. A recovery that is so strong in the UK, the Red Cross has been called in to provide food aid for the first time since World War II. Nothing spells happy days are here again like that sort of news. Oh, didn’t participate in the global recovery? No worries, … Read more
We are in the middle of an epic credit bubble, in my opinion, the likes of which I haven’t seen in my career in private equity. – Joseph Baratta, Global Head of Private Equity at the Blackstone Group According to CNBC, the above statement was made this past Thursday at the Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst … Read more
The article below from the LA Times is both extremely interesting as well as depressing from a cultural standpoint. For four decades now, the General Social Survey has asked Americans how they identify themselves from a class perspective. While it was always quite common for less fortunate folks to identify themselves as “working class,” there … Read more