Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. (AP Photo / Matt Rourke) I’m going to posit something radical: The most vocal support for Hillary Clinton comes from women in the commentariat, very much like myself, who have had to fight sexism to succeed in public-facing, white-collar professions and relate to Hillary’s struggle to do the same. Many…
By Charles G. Koch February 18 at 5:44 PM Charles G. Koch is chairman and chief executive of Koch Industries. As he campaigns for the Democratic nomination for president, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) often sounds like he’s running as much against me as he is the other candidates. I have never met the senator,…
(Amy King/The Washington Post; iStock) Three years ago, Jay Porter, a former restaurant owner who abolished tipping at his restaurant, made a powerful case against the practice, an industry standard in the United States. Everything at his establishment, he wrote in a 2013 Op-Ed for Slate, improved after he enforced a mandatory 18 percent service charge—the…
The only part of David Cameron’s EU renegotiation likely to attract public interest is his plan to limit in-work benefits for migrants. No.10 adopted the policy after focus groups found that it had more “cut-through” than a limit on numbers. Reports at the weekend suggested that Jeremy Corbyn, who is in Brussels for a meeting of the Party…
It’s hard not to feel a little thrown when you walk into a public space that’s become a camp for homeless people. At first there may be a moment of shock that economic reality has shown up and made a park or plaza a more complicated place to stroll. But what most people hopefully feel is…
Federal Reserve policy makers are beginning to worry that a corporate-credit squeeze will constrict the economic expansion. With banks tightening standards on business loans and investors demanding higher yields on some corporate debt, companies may find it harder and more expensive to raise the money they need to grow. The concern is that could prompt…
Republican presidential candidate John Kasich has promoted himself both as a friend of the working poor and as a foe of Hillary Clinton, but as House Budget Committee chairman in the 1990s, he worked with the Clintons to roll back welfare programs, helping double extreme poverty in America. In 1996, the Clinton administration and congressional…
Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist to Vice President Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and author of the new book ‘The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity.’ (Pete Marovich/Bloomberg) Given that it’s Presidents’ Day, it seems like an opportune moment to talk federal fiscal policy through the…
For Bitcoin evangelists, every economic disaster is also an opportunity to, well, promote Bitcoin. From Greece to South Africa, Bitcoin has been vaunted as a technology with world-saving power, either by replacing a broken money system wholesale or just making it easier for people living in the West to send money back to their families…
Remember the vicious cycle that threatened the entire European banking sector in 2012? It went something like this: over indebted sovereigns depended on domestic banks to buy their debt, but when yields on that debt spiked, the banks took a hit, inhibiting their ability to fund the sovereign, whose yields would then rise some more,…