"Words that make actions speak louder."
The White House pay czar isn’t reforming Wall Street. He’s cutting deals with it. We need to understand the difference. Responsible people can do reckless things, most often when emotion clouds their better judgment — and no emotion probably clouds judgment any more regularly than greed. Wave enough dollars in our faces, and we’ll be […]
Can excess on Wall Street ever be ended? Maybe. Some lawmakers in France have a plan that could end it. America’s biggest banks, amid the shakiest economic times since the 1930s, last week announced record profits — and deposited record billions into bonus pools for their top executives and traders. How did U.S. lawmakers and […]
In closely knit communities, people care about each other and help each other, too. But healthy “social fabrics,” as the expression goes, can tear. Inequality can tear them. The wider the income gaps between us, the less we share in common, the less we care about those around us. Over time, in a deeply unequal […]
An average American family would have to work thousands of years to amass a billion-dollar fortune. America’s super rich, the new data on our richest 400 make clear, can lose a billion and barely notice. Tsunamis, we learned this past week, amount to equal-opportunity destroyers. Against a surging 20-foot wave, an opulent beachfront manse offers […]
A conservative world leader and two world-famous economists who challenge conservative world leaders have joined up to call for a totally new global economic yardstick. And they want that yardstick to measure inequality. Sometime early this fall, new statistics are almost certainly going to show “positive” growth in gross domestic product, or GDP, for 2009’s […]
Hard times, a rash of new media reports now assures us, are significantly narrowing the gap between the rich and everybody else. So why are so many super rich still smiling? Job worries have you down? Bills piling up? Nothing left in your retirement stash? You need a reason to feel a bit better about […]
All the big banks in the Netherlands, pressed on by the Dutch finance minister, have agreed on a serious plan to restrain banker bonuses. And now the Dutch want the rest of the world to sign on. Remember that fabled Dutch boy who stuck his finger in a dike and saved family and friends from […]
Top execs in high finance, says the Institute for Policy Studies, have turned hard times — for the American people — into a springboard for still another round of huge pay windfalls. Is the CEO pay bubble now beyond popping? Researchers at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C., have […]
Across the pond, in the UK, the idea of capping income is suddenly starting to make a respectable splash. The Great Depression gave us the minimum wage. Might we now see a “maximum wage,” thanks to the Great Recession? That prospect now seems to have entered into the realm of political possibility. Last week, in […]
In 2007, the year before the Great Recession began, America’s awesomely affluent partied — as never before. The evidence? We look at the year’s freshly crunched income numbers. Emmanuel Saez, the Berkeley economist who many now consider the world’s top authority on the incomes of the super rich, has never been one for sweeping statements. […]