Question for Discussion: How do we take the power away from
phantom wealth and Wall Street and place it in the hands of
government and the real wealth economy?

Readings: Leopold, pp. 115-150; Stiglitz, "How to Prevent the Next Wall Street Crisis"; Posner, "We are in a Depression" ; Johnson, Who Caused the Economic Crisis"; Johnson, "Fix the Economy" ; Boone and Johnson, "The Next Financial Crisis"

Videos: DVD: Financial Meltdown--IMF Advisor on Financial Oligarchs;
DVD: Wall Street and Populism -- Black on Wall Street Fraud;
DVD: The Warning -- Born on the 2008 Financial Collapse;
Inside Job: 32-37, 49-57, 120-123, 137 (minutes)
You Tube: William Black on Profits from Fraud ;
You Tube: William Black on Bank Fraud

Alternative to Economic Globalization

• How to Prevent the Next Wall Street Crisis
• LTCM: It's a Short-Term Memory
• Finance before the Next Meltdown
• Greenspan Recants
• The Pillage People
• Posner, A Failure of Capitalism
• Krugman, The Madoff Economy
• The End of the Financial World as we Know It
• Krugman, Reagan Did It
• Reckless, part 1
• Reckless, part 2
• Saftey Nets for the Rich
• Johnson, Who Caused the Crisis
• Prins, Its Takes a Pillage
• Obama Speech to Wall Street
• The Death of Rational Man
• Johnson, The Next Financial Crisis
• A New Financial Foundation
• To Each According to his Greed
• Who will Rein in Wall Street
• Bill for Tarp could be Huge
• What else could our Bailout have Bought
• Why there was no depression
• What went wrong with Economics
• Krugman, What went wrong with Ecconomis
• Geitner and Wall Street
• Global Financial Crisis 2008
• All Fall Down
• The End of Wall Street's Boom
• Brown, All Together Now
• Krugman, Averting the Worse
• Feds Plans to Police Banks
• Krugman, Boiling the Frogs
• Spitzer, Break the Banks
• Bailout the Bailouts
• Capitalism the Remix
• If an Economists Fall in a Forest
• Changing the World
• Is American Dream dead
• Is the Conservative Era Over
• The Decline of the Middle Class
• Dumb Money Chapte 1
• Economists for an Imaginary World
• Government has a hand in the Economy
• Everyman's Depression
• FDR's lessons for Obama
• The Fed Ignored Evidencce
• The Roof Caved In
• Finding a Gatekeeper in the World of Finance
• Goldman Sachs a Welfare Queen
• Keynes can't Help Us Now
• Krugman, The Widening Gyre
• Hutton, Krugman's Fear for a Lost Decade
• Hightower, Madoff is not the Problem
• Gorbechez, We had our Perestroika
• Posner ?, The Myth of the Rational Market
• Reich, No downturn for Greed
• Gross, The Rich War on the Rich
• Lind, RX for the Economy
• Summers and Wall Street
• Reich, Why Wall Street Reform is STuck in Reverse
• The Big Bang of Bailouts
• The Lehrman Shock
• The Real AIG Scandal
• Spitzer, The Regulatory Charade
• Lind, The Social Fabric is Snapping
• Johnson, US Inequality during the Recovery Period
• Meyerson, Wall Street's Just Desert
• Brooks, We Need a Bailout Too
• Chait, Wealthcare
• Rothkoff, Where are the Leaders
• Rich Income in 2006
• Reckless Part One
• Reckless Part Two

• ---

Re-Building the Rules of the Global Economy

• Is the EuroZone about to Collapse
  
  
• Euro Debt Crisis Image: The Money Owed
  
  
• China Versus America share of World GDP
  
  
• Why has no one gone to Jail for Fraud as a result of the 2008 Financial Collapse?
  
  
• Ritzholtz, The Big Lie :
  (What Really caused the Financial crisis)
  
  
• Matt Taibbi , Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America [Nov. 2010]
  
  
• Robert Scheer, "The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street" [Sept. 2010]
  
  
• Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class [Oct. 2010)
  
  
• Banking Collapse of 2008 : Three weeks that changed the world ...
  
  
• You Tube: William Black on Profits from Fraud ;
  
  
• SEC allows Banks to Commit Fraud Again and Again
  
  
• Collateralized debt obligation - Wikipedia
  
  
• CDO Cash Flow Simplified chart
  
  
• CDOs and Mortgages Explained Chart
  
  
• DId CDOs cause the Financial Crisis
  
  
• Subprime mortgage crisis started the 2008 Collapse cycle
  (This is mortgage fraud -- selling mortgages to people
  who couldn't afford to pay for them)
  
  
• Multiple CDOs backed by Multiple Credit Default Swaps
  
  
• What role did credit rating agencies (CRAs) play in the financial Crisis
  
  
• How Moody's sold its ratings - and sold out investors | McClatch
  
  
• Banks That Bundled Bad Debt Also Bet Against It - NYTimes.com
  (Banks sold CDOs it knew were crap and bet against them
  with Credit Default Swaps)
  
  
• Goldman Sachs Misled Congress After Duping Clients Over CDOs
  
  
• Citigroup settles with SEC for $285 million - Oct. 19, 2011
  
  
• Money- Bank fined $285million for selling "dogsh!t
  and sucking in bailouts"
  
  
• Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report on Credit Ratings
  
  
• What Caused the Credit Freeze that Threatened Global Depression?
  
  
• Johnson, The Middle Class Pays
  
  
• New Data Paints a Grim Picture of Poverty in the US
  
  
• Posner, "We are in a Depression"
  
  
• Johnson, Who Caused the Economic Crisis"
  (Look at argument over Bank Fraud)
  
  
• Johnson, "Fix the Economy"
  
  
• Foreclosure Fraud: It's Worse Than You Think - CNBC
  
  
• Foreclosure Fraud: Who Owns Your House? Where's the Note
  
  
• Alan Grayson Explains the Foreclosure Fraud Crisis
  
  
• Matt Taibbi Investigates Florida's Foreclosure 'Rocket Dockets'
  
  
• Matt Taibbi: Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners
  
  
• Black, "Liars Loans, Part 1"
  
  
• Black, "Liars Loans, Part 2"
  
  
• William Black on Bankers' Fraud
  
  
• You Tube: William Black on Profits from Fraud (use)
  
  
• PBS interviews William K Black
  
  
• Korten, "The Case for a New Economy
  
  
• Wall Street Markets vs. Main Street Markets
  
  
• Ziuek, "To Each According to His Greed" ;
  
  
• What does Korten Mean by Phantom Wealth:
  
  "Money created by accounting entries or the inflation
  of asset bubbles unrelated to the creation of anything
  of real value or utility"
  
  
• The theory that financial speculation and the inflation of financial
  bubbles create real wealth and make us richer....[But] financial
  speculation was not creatinfg real wealth at all. Rather, it was
  merely increasing the claims of financial speculators on the
  shrinking pool of everyone else's real wealth (9)
  
  
• In 1950,manufacturing accounted for 29.3 percent of the
  U.S. domestic product and financial services for 10.9 percent.
  By 2005, manufacturing accounted for only 12 percent of
  GDP and financial services for 20.4 percent. (Korten)
  (Discuss why these numbers are so different)
  
  
• From 1990 to 2006, the GDP share of the financial sector in the broad sense increased in the United States from 23% to 31%, or by 8 percentage points. During the same period, the increase in the GDP share was in excess of 10 percentage points in the United Kingdom but significantly less - around 6 percentage points - in both France and Germany. Graph 3 shows the development of the share of the financial sector in GDP for selected major advanced economies since the middle of the 1980s. The figures on profits are even more striking. For example, the financial services industry's share of corporate profits in the United States was around 10% in the early 1980s but peaked at 40% last year. (See Graph 3)
  
  
• Korten's next book should be: When Wall Street Rules the World.
  "The real economic power in this country resides with Wall Street
  institutions that buy and sell major corporations as if they were
  mere commodities. If the corporation is Wall Street owned, they are
  bound to serve Wall Street interests, and their employment is soley
  at Wall Street's pleasure."
  
  
• Korten: "The publicly traded limited liability corporation is more
  accurately described as a pool of money with special legal rights
  and protections. Even the CEO and the directors can be dismissed
  without notice or recourse....In effect, management is hired by
  money to nurture money's growth and reproduction in disregard
  of all other considerations. The result is a capitalist economy
  destructive of both life and the human soul." (29)
  
  
• Korten, The Edmunds Fallacy
  
  
• Credit Default Swaps : The Next Crisis? - TIME
  
  
• How Credit Default Swaps Became a Timebomb | Newsweek Business
  
  
• The Total Value of Global Derivatives Market
  
  (The total global currency is now 17 times global GDP and about
  17 times the total value of all the companies on the global stock markets. Total global currency value is $1, 168 trillion. There is
  more money chasing money than there are real assets that back
  that money up. So there is a 17 to 1 spread of Phantom money
  chasing Real money. The Phantom money is based on the movement of stocks and securities on the Global markets that actually reflects only $65 trillion of Real Money in actual value of real goods and services produced by the global economy. It was this difference that was bound to blowout Wall Street. There simply wasn't the real assets to pay the financialcommitments that this Phantom Wealth had created.)
  
  
• Korten: What was lost during the Financial Collapse
  ($16 trillion lost on the global stock markets and costs
  U.S. $7.4 trillion to bail out Wall Street. There were $55
  trillion in credit defaut swaps and $648 trillion in
  derivatives. )
  
  
• AIG bailout Monies
  
  
• All That Money You Lost - Where Did It Go? - CBS News
  
  
• Gross, If the economy's stagnant, why are stocks up ?
  
  
• How might the current financial crisis shape financial sector
  
  
• UN Study: World Wealth 2006
  
  
• Wealth and Income Inequality in the USA
  
  
• Vail Valley Voices: Top 1 percent pretty much owns us .
  
  
• Alperovitz, Taking the Offensive on Wealth
  
  
• Naomi Klein: Wall St . Crisis Should Be for Neoliberalism
  What Fall of Berlin Wall was for Communism
  
  
• Stiglitz, "How to Prevent the Next Wall Street Crisis"
  
  
• Fernholz, The Myth of too Big to Fail
  
  
• Ritholtz, Bailout Nation: "The obvious solution--put the insolvent
  banks into FDIC receivership, fire management, liquidate holdings,
  sell the assets off, wipe out shareholders, and pay the bondholders whatever was left over--was simply unthinkable" (p. 221)
  
  
• This is what the Resolution Trust Corporation did with insolvent
  S & L's in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They then sold the reconstituted S & L's to new investors. This was not an option for Paulson, though.
  
  
• Boone and Johnson, "The Next Financial Crisis"
  
  
• Wall Street Markets vs. Main Street Markets