“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Dean Baker: The Fed’s Urge to Raise Interest Rates
The Federal Reserve Board’s Open Market Committee (FOMC) decided not to raise interest rates at its meeting last week. However, the FOMC also made clear that a rate hike was still an option for its June meeting.
The decision to put off a rate hike is good news, but the real question is why the Fed is even considering a rate hike. Just to remind everyone, the point of raising interest rates is to slow the economy. Higher interest rates discourage home buying, investment, and act in other ways to slow the economy.
It is reasonable to raise rates if there is a threat that the economy is growing too rapidly and there is a risk that inflation could start spiraling higher. Does anyone really believe the economy is growing too fast right now?
Richard North Patterson
Closing Polls and Slamming Doors: John Roberts’ Race-based Agenda
A sharp bone of contention in the contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders is who cares more about the lives of African Americans. One area of concern is minority voting rights — last week, a conservative federal judge upheld a repressive North Carolina voter ID law, passed by Republicans, clearly aimed at suppressing black turnout. This provides yet another pointed reminder of why the supporters of both candidates should unite come November — to stop Chief Justice Roberts and his allies from further gutting measures to protect minorities.
We should not mince words. The Roberts court has not simply been racially obtuse — quite deliberately, it has dismantled affirmative action and diminished voting rights — upholding measures specifically designed to disadvantage Democrats by disenfranchising minorities, the poor, and the young.
Eugene Robinson: Trump Fills a Vacuum Left by the GOP
The Donald Trump rampage—still hard to believe, after nearly a year—is a symptom of something deeper and more profound: the Republican Party’s slide into complete incoherence.
Rarely has a major party’s establishment been so out of touch with its voting base. Rarely have so many experienced politicians (Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Rick Perry et al.) been so thoroughly embarrassed, and so cruelly dispatched, by a political neophyte. Rarely have feelings been so raw that one leading Republican (John Boehner) would publicly describe another (Ted Cruz) as “Lucifer in the flesh.”
What does the GOP believe in? There was a time when anyone with a passing interest in politics could have answered that question. Today, who knows?
This ideological disintegration has been years in the making. I believe one fundamental cause is that after winning the allegiance of millions of “Reagan Democrats”—mostly white, blue-collar, Southern or rural—the party stubbornly declined to take their economic interests into account.
Robert Reich: The Third Way: Share-the-Gains Capitalism
Marissa Mayer tells us a lot about why Americans are so angry, and why anti-establishment fury has become the biggest single force in American politics today.
Mayer is CEO of Yahoo. Yahoo’s stock lost about a third of its value last year, as the company went from making $7.5 billion in 2014 to losing $4.4 billion in 2015. Yet Mayer raked in $36 million in compensation.
Even if Yahoo’s board fires her, her contract stipulates she gets $54.9 million in severance. The severance package was disclosed in a regulatory filing last Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In other words, Mayer can’t lose.
It’s another example of no-lose socialism for the rich — winning big regardless of what you do.
Amanda Marcotte: Let’s all laugh at the sexist pig: Hillary’s negative campaign against Donald Trump will be easy — and true
Bernie Sanders’s continued demands for attention are keeping Hillary Clinton from turning to the general election, but some pundits are understandably impatient to get the Trump v. Clinton showdown going already. As the wait drags on, some have turned to speculation. Peter Beinart of the Atlantic predicts that Clinton is chomping at the bit to run a full-blown negative campaign against Trump.
“Rope-a-dope isn’t Clinton’s style,” Beinart writes. “When facing political threats, her pattern has been to strike first—and with great force.” [..]
It’s easy to paint someone as sexist when they spend every waking moment going out of their way to prove it for you. It’s almost unfair to call it “going negative” when Clinton highlights Trump’s sexism against her. Calling sexism out for what it is should only be read as a positive thing that pays off dividends beyond just getting Clinton into office.
David Dayen: Yet another way borrowers are getting screwed: Inside the long-lasting disaster of American loan serviving
It shouldn’t be terribly difficult to accept a monthly loan payment from a homeowner or a student borrower, and to manage day-to-day operations on the loan. This is the job function of a servicer, a company that handles loans on behalf of the ultimate owner, funneling payments through the system and deciding how to manage defaults.
Why this has become the most impossible business in America doesn’t make a lot of sense. But with evidence mounting up, we should acknowledge that servicers either don’t know what they’re doing or can’t turn a profit on their operations without doing so at the expense of their customers. And we must start thinking about alternatives to the current servicing model, which appears to be hopelessly broken.
Recent Comments