How to value the economic role that natural resources play and incorporate some of these external costs so that not only are we aware of the impacts, we can begin to start incorporate them into pricing.
Every day brings more reminders of the terrible unfairness that besets our country, the tragic reversal of fortune experienced by millions who once had good lives and steady jobs, now gone.
An article in the current issue of Rolling Stone chronicles “The Fallen: The Sharp, Sudden Decline of America’s Middle Class” and describes a handful of middle-class men and women made homeless, forced to live out of their cars in church parking lots in Southern California.
Following up on our last post on the link between climate change and extreme weather, a new scientific study was released that found that manmade climate change increases the probability of extreme weather patterns. The study was a joint effort between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S. and the Met Office in the U.K.
Even though it’s only the 9th of July, nearly 3,400 maximum and minimum temperature records have been tied or broken so far this month. Dozens of people have died and the lack of rainfall combined with the extreme heat is threatening the Midwest’s corn crop.
The movement has drawn some support from financial circles. Wallace C. Turbeville, a former Goldman Sachs banker who now is a senior fellow at Demos, a public policy research organization in New York,submitted testimony last month for the Senate Banking Committee in favor of more banking regulation.
One of the main reason alternative indicators are important is that they take things that we value on a visceral level, like the environment, and put them into the universal language of capital.
Ahead of Rio+20, advocates are coalescing around the idea that we need to change the way we measure what is important to achieve true sustainable development. Currently countries measure economic growth, which is often equated with progress, through GDP. However, growth in GDP is increasingly not resulting in progress.
As wary as the public may be of Wall Street, it is not wary enough because the financial industry rips people off even more than most of us realize -- specifically, in 401(k) fees.
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.
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.
It's no secret that Facebook's IPO will feed one of the most troubling trends in America today: the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite.
It’s hard to imagine that an industry that has spent over $28 million on federal and state campaign contributions this election cycle alone would be victimized by government regulation, but that is the cry coming from the oil and gas industry. Well, more accurately, that is the cry coming from politicians in the pockets of those industries.
Last summer, a Western Beef store in the East Tremont section of the South Bronx became the first supermarket in the city to receive funding through the city’s Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program. The FRESH initiative provides financial and zoning incentives to entice supermarket chains to build new stores in neighborhoods that lack access to fresh, wholesome foods.
Last summer, on her final day as the Chairman of the FDIC, Shelia Bair decried the short-termism that has overtaken both Wall Street and Washington, where “[o]ur financial markets remain too focused on quick profits, and our political process is driven by a two-year election cycle and its relentless demands for fundraising.” This short-termism has taken hold of the reins of our larger political system and increasingly characterizes policy initiatives at every level of government.
The derivatives industry is squeezing Washington like a python. Desperate to control the tone and thrust of derivatives regulation, industry lobbyists have been swarming over the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, each of which is writing derivatives rules as mandated by the Dodd-Frank reform law.
By now it's pretty clear that Mitt Romney's recent claim about female job losses during the Obama presidency has more to do with selective number fudging and electoral pandering than factual accuracy.