Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Powell Will Hang Separately: The Federal Reserve Has Already Failed its Duty to Lisa Cook and the Constitution (Notes On The Crises)
• Analysis: Mass Deportations Are Starting to Hurt Agriculture: Labor statistics and food prices now show early signs of negative economic impact, according to a new report. (Civil Eats) see also Wilted Lettuce. Rotten Strawberries. Here’s What Happens When You Round Up Farmworkers. Our farmworkers — eeliable, skilled and experienced labor force — is overwhelmingly made up of immigrants. An estimated 80% of farmworkers were born outside of the United States, and around half are undocumented. (New York Times)
• How the Richest People in America Avoid Paying Taxes: A clever new paper puts concrete numbers to the taxes paid by members of the Forbes 400. (The Atlantic)
• ETF Slop: How Wall Street Flooded the Market With Gimmick Funds: Wall Street has launched nearly 700 ETFs this year, but much of the boom is built on gimmicks. (ETF.com)
• The $140 Billion Failure We Don’t Talk About. If the reconstruction of Lower Manhattan and the Marshall Plan are hailed as triumphs of American exceptionalism, then the response to Katrina belongs in a darker corner of U.S. history: the Afghanistan or Vietnam of rebuilding — painful, expensive and, ultimately, a failure. It is now a cautionary tale for every place in America that will one day face its own disaster. (New York Times) but see ‘Never seen before’: How Katrina set off an education revolution Twenty years after the hurricane, taking stock of the miracle in New Orleans schools. (Washington Post)
• An Industry Insider’s Changes at the E.P.A. Could Cost Taxpayers Billions: A Trump appointee has proposed rewriting a measure that requires companies to clean up “forever chemicals,” documents show. The new version would shift costs from polluters. (New York Times)
• The myths that made Putin’s war: The Alaska summit exposed the flawed history and personal vanity that fuel the conflict with Ukraine, argues Timothy Snyder.(Financial Times) see also Trump, Gabbard fired top CIA Russia expert days after Alaska summit: The CIA officer was due to take up a prestigious assignment in Europe approved by CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Instead, her security clearance was summarily revoked. (Washington Post)
• How vaccine misinformation led to an officer’s murder at the CDC: ‘In the face of danger … he ran into the fire’ black-and-white portrait of man in police uniform DeKalb county police officer David Rose. Illustration: Guardian Design/DeKalb County After a gunman reportedly deceived by anti-vaccine disinformation opened fire on the CDC and fatally shot David Rose, a community grieves as Trump officials remain silent. (The Guardian)
• Scams And Bribery Are Becoming the Foundation of Our Economy: It’s bad and you should be alarmed. (How Things Work)
• Trump just did the one thing the Supreme Court said he can’t do: Trump’s decision to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook is a test of the Republican justices’ submissiveness. (Vox) see also The Lisa Cook Case Could Be the Whole Ball Game: If the Supreme Court lets Trump replace Cook with a loyalist, he might soon achieve a full-blown takeover of the Federal Reserve. (The Atlantic)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, a subsidiary of Moody’s Corp. Dr. Zandi is a cofounder of Economy.com, which Moody’s purchased in 2005. He currently hosts the “Inside Economics” podcast.
What a sudden change in consumer sentiment says about us
Source: Washington Post
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