A government program meant to help struggling homeowners will at minimum help some struggling banks.
Big banks could rake in as much as $12 billion in revenue by refinancing the mortgages of homeowners that owe more on their homes than they are worth, according to an analysis by Nomura, a Japanese bank, cited by the Wall Street Journal. BLOG POSTS  | Robert Kuttner: Time to Put Finance Back in Its Cage
It's not that economies are too slow to appease markets. It's that the markets have too much power to destroy economies. Let's not forget -- this entire crisis was caused because markets mispriced risk. That's a polite, bloodless way of saying that a bunch of overpaid wise guys bet the farm on the premise that housing prices could never fall, and created opaque securities that made a lot of insiders rich and duped the rest of the economy at a cost of several trillion dollars. So if financial markets totally screwed up when they created collateralized debt obligations backed by sketchy mortgages and treated them like triple-A bonds, why do we think that the same financial markets are to be trusted when it comes to accurately pricing Greek or Italian or Spanish bonds? |  | Dean Baker: Liberals Working for the Right
Some say the left should tout the merits of "government." That is a great idea, if the point is to advance the conservatives' agenda. It is astounding how happy liberals are to work for the right by implying that conservatives somehow just want to leave markets to themselves whereas the liberals want to bring in the pointy-headed bureaucrats to tell people what they should do. This view is, of course, nonsense. Pick an issue, any issue, and you will almost invariably find the right actively pushing for a big role for government. However, for conservatives the goal is not ensuring a decent standard of living for the bulk of the population. Rather the goal is ensuring that money is redistributed upward. And, of course, the conservatives are smart enough not to own up to their use of the government. |  | Marty Kaplan: The End Is Nigh. Seriously.
The consequence of being a citizen who cares about issues like carbon footprints, peak oil and rising temperatures is a feeling of powerlessness. The oligarchs have us by the short hairs. If you aren't feeling impotent, you haven't been paying attention. |  | Joshua M. Brown: The 25 Most Dangerous People in Financial Media
Dangerous in a good way -- these are the financial media players who are making things very difficult for the establishment to maintain the status quo. |  | Evanne Schmarder: 5 Social Media Marketing Myths: Busted!
While seasoned digital marketers know better, several small business owners are just beginning to develop an online presence and may be pondering these five social media myths that simply refuse to go the way of the dinosaur. | | MOST POPULAR ON HUFFINGTONPOST.COM |
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