Media

On April 19th, a coalition of national voting rights groups working on behalf of Georgia residents and advocacy groups secured a landmark settlement to ensure that voter registration opportunities are offered to all public assistance applicants, as is required by the National Voter Registration Act.  

The J.P. Morgan Chase JPM -0.68% & Co. unit whose wrong-way bets on corporate credit cost the bank more than $2 billion includes a group that has invested in financially challenged companies, including LightSquared Inc., the wireless broadband provider that this month filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The full details of JP Morgan’s trading strategy aren’t known, but Wallace Turbeville, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker and currently a fellow with public policy think-tank Demos, doesn’t buy the bank’s explanation that it was simply hedging. “How can you possibly lose that kind of money on a hedge?” he asks. “The answer is, they weren’t off setting risk.

Americans have been successful at getting some of their debts off their backs, but many still have a long way to go.

The Boston Review recently hosted a forum titled, How Markets Crowd Out Morals, in which Michael Sandel wrote the lead essay, arguing that we as a society should be questioning which institutions we allow to be defined by market norms.

A trade war is brewing over renewable energy imports between the U.S. and China. Last October, several U.S. solar firms filed a federal trade complaint against Chinese companies for “dumping” solar products on global markets to artificially lower prices with a glut of supply. The complaint also alleged that China unfairly subsidized its industries with land grants, contract awards, trade barriers, financing breaks and supply chain subsidies.

The story as it now stands for Facebook's IPO supports a broader narrative depressingly familiar to most Americans: Which is that the stock market is a rigged game.

David Brooks is no economist and that shows in his recent column about private equity, in which he claims that private equity firms have pushed corporate America to get leaner and smarter. As Paul Krugman pointed out today, nothing of the sort happened -- because, in fact, productivity has not been higher since the advent of LBOs and private equity, starting in the 1980s.

The best defense of private equity is that this industry does both good things and bad things.

Sometimes private equity firms rescue troubled companies, pump in new capital and management talent, and make them better and more productive -- saving or creating jobs along the way.

Other times, though, today's LBO artists buy companies, load them with debt, suck them dry, and accelerate their path to bankruptcy. The bad things private equity firms do are pretty bad; just read Josh Kosmen's book, The Buyout of America.