Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Signed, Sealed, Deposited

February 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO: TOMASZ SZYMANSKI/SHUTTERSTOCK)

How bad have things gotten for America’s national mail delivery system? The US Postal Service lost $1.3 billion last quarter, and this was regarded as good news. The venerable agency has been saddled with significant financial problems since a 2006 law forced it to pre-fund 75 years of employee retirement benefits, something no other public agency or private company has to do. This cash crunch (the Postal Service gets no money from the federal government and must survive on the revenues it generates) has led to austerity measures for the nation’s second-largest employer (right behind ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
Tags: ,

Simon Johnson Critiques Democracy vs. Financialization

December 6, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

For many on the right side of the U.S. political spectrum, the financial meltdown that began in 2008 resulted from a government push to bring the American Dream of home ownership to the masses. And while President Clinton made home ownership a central tenet of his economic plan — a goal George W. Bush also embraced — there were greater forces at work, according to Simon Johnson, professor of Global Economics and Management at MIT and the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. In his 2010 bestseller, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and The Next Financial ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
Tags: , , ,

#OWS: What Took So Long?

October 24, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Among the many issues raised by the Occupy Wall Street movement, perhaps the most basic is: What took so long? Why did three years elapse between the time reckless financial traders nearly brought down the global economy and large numbers of people began collectively expressing outrage? A new psychological study provides at least a partial answer. It finds people are strongly motivated to perceive the socioeconomic system they live under as fair and just, and links this pro-status-quo impulse with a reluctance to protest against the Wall Street bailout. “It is extremely difficult for ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Findings
Tags: , , , , , , ,

What’s So Funny About Tightwad’s Money?

November 29, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

The 70 or so inhabitants of Tightwad — Tightwadians, as it were — dispute the exact origination of the name of their west-central Missouri village. There is general agreement that it occurred during the early 1900s and had something to do with a store clerk, a postal official, a watermelon, by some accounts a chicken, and 50 cents. Regardless of its exact genesis, Don Higdon, formerly president of Reading State Bank, a small Kansas-based institution with one office 160 miles west of Tightwad, Mo., saw financial potential in the name. Enough so that Higdon made what in the very ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
Tags: , ,

Bank Tax, We Hardly Knew Ye

July 14, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

In June, most Western governments, more or less in unison, mulled a "bank tax" that promised to spare taxpayers another trillion-dollar bailout for investment banks in case of another credit crunch. And most Western governments, more or less in unison, turned it down. Why? By the end of June, the tax had dropped out of the financial reform bill moving through Congress; it had dropped off the G20 agenda in Toronto; it had found support, and then resistance, in Canada and the U.K. But the tax is a fundamentally sound idea. Forged and applied in Sweden, after a credit crunch there in the '90s, ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, European Dispatch
Tags: , , , ,

The New Trans-Atlantic SWIFT Agreement

April 7, 2010 • By • 1 Comment

The skirmish earlier this year between Washington and the European Union over who can spy on whose bank data may lead to a new, formal system of eavesdropping that lets Europeans investigate bank transactions within the United States. Washington was eavesdropping on European bank transactions in 2006, secretly, when The New York Times and other newspapers uncovered a post-9/11 regime called the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program. Part of the TFTP involved issuing subpoenas to a Belgium-based company called SWIFT, which funnels trillions of dollars per day in bank-to-bank ... Read More

More like this: CAROUSEL, European Dispatch, Legal Affairs, Politics
Tags: , , ,

US Tax Havens – Partisans Seek Safe Harbor

July 23, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

Offshore tax havens, traditionally masters of the very discreet low profile, have found themselves pitched center stage under the glare of bright lights and uncomfortably intense scrutiny. Politicians in the U.S. and Europe, themselves squirming beneath the burden of sagging economies and disgruntled voters, have rallied popular support by declaring open season on tax shelters, branding them as yet one more example of corporate malfeasance and loosely linking them with the departure of American jobs to other countries. At stake is the tax revenue from an estimated $13 trillion of untaxed ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
Tags: , , ,

A Nation of Savers?

November 12, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment

If the 1946 film classic It’s a Wonderful Life depicts the conservative, community-focused financial ethos of an earlier generation, today’s overriding fiscal virtues — spending through debt and self-expressive consumption — might be defined best by the get-rich-quick TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. “Americans once had boundaries and standards of financial behavior imposed upon them by local banks and other community institutions. We don’t anymore, yet we need to re-instill in Americans the importance of thrift, of living more responsibly,” said Robert D. Manning, ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
Tags: , , , ,

Money Talks — But What If You Can’t Hear?

May 22, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment

People with disabilities encounter scores of little man-made obstacles every day, many of which are built on the foundation of ignorance laid by the nondisabled. Two years ago, Jim and Jeanene Meisser began chipping away at one such obstacle by chartering a bank on a principal unique to such an effort: accessibility. The bank aims to serve the estimated 31 million Americans considered deaf or hard of hearing. Their Lake Shore Bank plan is based on the sort of employee education and one-on-one interactions that have given way to automation. The Meissers, husband and wife, envision a ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
Tags: ,

The Crisis That Swallowed the Credit Union Debate

March 28, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment

At least two sectors of the financial services industry are boasting their ability to weather the current economic ebb. Credit unions contend, in a series of releases and speeches doled out by the Credit Union National Association’s (CUNA’s) economists in the first quarter, that the subprime mortgage fiasco — which they did not cause but with which they too must deal — might actually benefit them and their customer-members further into 2008 and beyond. Their reasoning invokes the philosophical mission of credit unions in the U.S., solidified through the Great Depression: to ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
Tags: