BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS by Meg White National Public Radio’s economic show Marketplace is often host to conservative commentators arguing against consumer protection or elucidating the evils of Keynesian theory. But I’ve never heard them kowtow so low to Wall Street as they did Wednesday evening. In a commentary titled, “Don’t Subject Payday Lenders to Reform,” [...]

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS by Meg White In case you missed it over the holidays, there’s been a fair amount of internecine conflict over FireDogLake.com founder Jane Hamsher’s decision to target White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s supposed misdeeds on the board of the troubled semi-governmental lending entity known as Freddie Mac in the early [...]

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS by Meg White Yesterday when I was downtown interviewing protesters at the Showdown in Chicago, which continues today, I asked Keith Scribner, president of UE local 1174, how the protests against the big banks were different from the healthcare protests earlier this year. He looked at me with this surprised expression and [...]

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS by Meg White As the U.S. stock market opened this week, investors were treated to plummeting prices due to poorly-performing regional banks. While the “too big to fail” banks are trying to decide how massive their bonus checks should be and how best to avoid new regulations from the federal government, the [...]

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS by Meg White In tough times such as these, it can be comforting to slip into nostalgia and fantasy, which has got me thinking about Congress in late 1999. Lawmakers were falling all over themselves praising the passage of the landmark Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which effectively repealed much of the Glass-Steagall regulations [...]

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS by Meg White There are a lot of convincing economists out there calling for nationalizing the U.S. banking industry. Aside from my favorite economist, there’s this other Nobel prize-winning economist, this economics journalist, this former economist for J.P. Morgan and dozens more. And what about this professor of economics or these [...]

PART FOUR OF A BUZZFLASH SERIES ON THE GOP ECONOMIC WAR AGAINST AMERICAN WORKING FAMILIES by Meg White Republicans like to paint themselves as champions of the free market, but only when it makes them money. After years of bad investments and wild spending, the government is asking Congress to give $700 billion of our [...]