Working Life

   Panic continues to be the word for the day in the financial markets. The big news is the cratering of the shares yesterday of the two big mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times lead with the stories. Here’s the Journal: Investors dumped shares […]

Read the full story

   The collapse of the housing market–preciptated by a bunch of greedy people who drove a speculative market over a cliff–has opened up a gasping financial wound for the vast majority of people nearing retirement. Already devoid of any real, true pensions (meaning, defined benefit pensions that guarantee a specific amount of money that a […]

Read the full story

    If you think the home value situation couldn’t get worse, think again: American homes are losing their value at the fastest rate in two decades, according to a closely watched report released on Tuesday. In the 12 months ended in February, the Case-Shiller home price index, which measures the value of single-family homes in […]

Read the full story

    Millions of workers have already been facing their own personal recession for a long time, whether or not the classic definition of a national recession has been met, or found, by the official prognosticators. But, speaking of prognosticators, my friends at the Center for Economic and Policy Research have just released a paper entitled […]

Read the full story

    Millions of workers have already been facing their own personal recession for a long time, whether or not the classic definition of a national recession has been met, or found, by the official prognosticators. But, speaking of prognosticators, my friends at the Center for Economic and Policy Research have just released a paper entitled […]

Read the full story

    As you continue to digest your Thanksgiving meals, remember that there are the fortunate and the unfortunate. In America, that means that the fortunate are the CEOS of Wall Street and the unfortunate are housing tenants who are losing their homes thanks to the greed of the very CEOS on Wall Street.     First, […]

Read the full story

Subprime mortgages, foreclosures and the housing bubble have been discussed a great deal on this blog and elsewhere so I thought I would take the opportunity to focus on how this crisis has affected one community and what the community is doing to fight back. North Minneapolis is a neighborhood with working class roots that […]

Read the full story

The scam is going to get worse in the housing market. I mean the scam that will let the predators and hucksters, who lured people into bad deals, off the hook, either via Congressional bailouts or actions by the Federal Reserve. And the outcry has to build now so that we don’t let, once again […]

Read the full story

    I was struck today by two trends underway that are, on the one hand, not connected but, in another way, are connected because they paint a picture of what government can do and what it shouldn’t do.     On the one hand, take this story from the Associated Press, printed as a brief in […]

Read the full story

Before I cite a few reports on yesterday’s collapse in markets around the world, let me pause for these two observations: 1. This was all predictable. My colleague Dean Baker warned of the housing bubble as far back as 2002. And you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist, or even an economist, to feel […]

Read the full story