Everything you always wanted to know about CDOs in 6 minutes
What are CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), anyway? Paddy Hirsch of Marketplace explains how financial institutions used them to build the house of cards that came tumbling down five years ago and plunged the world into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Source: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/whiteboard/crisis-explainer-uncorking-cdos
Top dogs and low lifes
Check out this new research on the psychology of privilege and greed (or what some economists dub “rational behavior”):
Source: PBS News Hour.
Why GDP fails to measure economic well-being
A primer on the defects of GDP as a measure of economic well-being, from Econ4’s James Boyce:
Source: The Real News Network.
Unlocking our climate wealth
Econ4’s James Boyce on how to translate good principles into good practice:
Source: http://tedxtraversecity.com/videos/
Austerity’s emperors have no clothes
Stephen Colbert skewers the Harvard economists whose flawed research underpins austerity politics:
Check out Colbert’s interview with UMass-Amherst economics graduate student Thomas Herndon, who showed that austerity’s emperors have no clothes:
Who’s got the world’s wealth?
The world’s richest 300 people have as much wealth as the poorest 3 billion:
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWSxzjyMNpU
Wealth inequality in America: seeing reality
Check out the differences between (i) what 9 out of 10 Americans think is the ideal degree of wealth inequality; (ii) what they think wealth inequality really is; and (iii) what it really is.
Source: New Economics Institute.
What a deal
The fiscal cliff deal was a “crony capitalist blowout,” in the words of the Wall Street Journal. Bill Moyers explains why:
Source: http://billmoyers.com/segment/bill-moyers-essay-the-crony-capitalist-blowout/.
Race to the bottom
Econ4’s Jerry Epstein breaks downs the fallacy of ‘tax incentives’ as a lure to investment:
Source: The Real News Network.
Read the New York Times story on corporate tax giveaways here.
