housing crisis

Big Capital: Who Is London For?
by Anna Minton
Published 31 May 2017

‘Housing in London 2017’, London Datastore, GLA 10. Edwards, Michael, ‘The housing crisis and London’, City, Vol. 20 (2), pp. 222–37, 2016 11. ‘What are renters thinking?’, Briefing by Sian Berry, Green Party Member of the London Assembly, 2016 12. Skapinker, Michael, ‘London house prices push out the people the city needs the most’, Financial Times, 9 September 2015 13. Fifty Thousand Homes, ‘London’s housing crisis and what it means for business’, http://www.fiftythousandhomes.london/facts/ 14. Chakrabortty, Aditya, Keynote speech at ‘London’s Housing Crisis and its Activisms’ one-day conference, hosted by the University of East London and Birkbeck College at University Square, Stratford, 26 April 2016 15.

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But as she returned to her seat, she tripped up on a misplaced lead and fell, breaking her arm. It was an upsetting incident and felt to me like a disturbing metaphor for London’s housing crisis. I went home feeling that it was necessary to combine my work so far with a specific investigation of the housing crisis. At the same time, Bob Catterall, the editor of the brilliant multi-disciplinary journal City, had commissioned a Special Feature on the housing crisis, which I was co-editing with Paul Watt, Reader in Urban Studies at Birkbeck. I owe Paul a huge debt of gratitude for the work we did together on that Special Feature and the accompanying housing conference we hosted at the University of East London in spring 2016.

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Outside some of these buildings ‘anti-homeless spikes’ prohibit homeless people from sitting or sleeping on the pavement. Since 2008 much has been written about the housing crisis. Exploring the fallout from that year’s financial crash, which combined large increases in wealth in property assets for the richest with widespread austerity, Big Capital makes explicit the links between the sheer wealth at the top and the housing crisis, which does not affect just those at the bottom but the majority of Londoners who struggle to buy properties and pay extortionate rents. From the removal from their homes of people on low incomes to the use of property purely as profit and no longer as a social good, the active flouting of democracy by business and local councils alike, the scandal in housing benefit and the pressure on individuals and families at all income levels, this is a new politics of space.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency
by Vicky Spratt
Published 18 May 2022

Available at www.gov.uk/government/speeches/home-secretary-speech-on-an-immigration-system-that-works-in-the-national-interest ‘Immigration “causing housing crisis”’ (2003): Daily Mail, 20 July 2003, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-189224/Immigration-causing-housing-crisis.html ‘Revealed: How HALF of all social housing in England goes to people born abroad’ (2012): Gerri Peev, Daily Mail, 15 April 2012, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2130095/Calls-British-people-given-priority-social-housing-queue-revealed-foreigners-HALF-properties.html ‘We don’t have a housing crisis – we have a population crisis’ (2017): Richard Littlejohn, Daily Mail, 17 November 2017, www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-5091383/We-don-t-housing-crisis-population-crisis.html ‘Immigration has pushed house prices up by 20 per cent over a 25-year period, says Tory minister’ (2018): John Stevens, Daily Mail, 8 April 2018, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5592189/Immigration-pushed-UK-house-prices-20-cent.html no evidence that social housing allocation favours migrants: ‘Migrants and Housing’, Postnote 560 (August 2017), Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

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The State of Housing Having spent the past decade working as a journalist specialising in housing inequality, I have watched and listened as the term ‘housing crisis’ has been repeatedly used. I have used it myself hundreds of times; it is a convenient shorthand for an inchoate feeling of unfairness, a series of specific social and economic problems and myriad political failings. The very term housing crisis is problematic, though. It implies a sudden catastrophe. By their nature, catastrophes tend to blindside us, cannot be easily prevented and are usually temporary: a tsunami or an earthquake. That is not what this is. This was as predictable as it was avoidable. The housing crisis is made up of a series of distinct but related emergencies: the instability of the private rented sector; rising street and hidden homelessness; unaffordable housing enabled by our country’s economic reliance on the housing market; the hoarding of property wealth; and a lack of social housing.

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Available at assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/858908/Social_Mobility_Barometer_2019-2020.pdf ‘accumulative dispossession’: See Loretta Lees and Hannah White, ‘The Social Cleansing of London Council Estates’. nowhere affordable for key workers: ‘Camborne NHS nurse “may have to leave job” over housing crisis’, BBC News, 25 November 2021, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-59409301 companies are seeing staff members leave: Ben Chu, ‘London housing crisis forcing workers to quit their jobs, says CBI survey’, Independent, 26 April 2018, www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/london-housing-crisis-cbi-survey-workers-quit-capital-house-prices-rent-a8321551.html figures provided by housing officers in September 2020: Amanda Cameron, ‘New figures reveal exactly how many affordable homes have been built in Bristol’, Bristol Post, 18 September 2020, www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/new-figures-reveal-exactly-how-4530278 This was, in part, because of arbitrary caps: Darren Baxter and Luke Murphy, Priced Out?

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing
by Andrew Ross
Published 25 Oct 2021

See Feargus O’Sullivan, “Lisbon Has a Plan to Reclaim Housing from Airbnb,” Bloomberg CityLab, July 8, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-08/lisbon-s-plan-to-reclaim-vacation-rentals-for-housing. 32.  Matthew Desmond, “The Tenants Who Evicted Their Landlord,” New York Times, October 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/rental-housing-crisis-minneapolis.html. 33.  Peter Calthorpe and Joe DiStefano, “Revolutionizing Transit and Solving the Silicon Valley Housing Crisis,” Urban Footprint, August 17, 2018, https://urbanfootprint.com/revolutionizing-transit-while-solving-the-housing-crisis/. 34.  Harry Truman, “Special Message to the Congress upon Signing the Housing and Rent Act,” June 30, 1947, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/131/special-message-congress-upon-signing-housing-and-rent-act. 35.  

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Leilani Farha and Surya Deva, “Letter to Stephen Schwarzman” (March 22, 2019), https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Housing/Financialization/OL_OTH_17_2019; and Patrick Butler and Dominic Rushe, “UN Accuses Blackstone Group of Contributing to Global Housing Crisis,” The Guardian, March 26, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/26/blackstone-group-accused-global-housing-crisis-un. The same year, Raquel Rolnick, who succeeded Kothari in the UN position, published a book that drew on her experience reporting on the violent entry of globalized finance into housing in Europe and the Americas: Urban Warfare: Housing under the Empire of Finance (New York: Verso Books, 2019).

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Institute for Tourism Studies, “Disclosing the Economic Impact of the Vacation Home Industry on Osceola County,” prepared for Experience Kissimmee (Orlando: University of Central Florida, 2016), https://www.experiencekissimmee.com/sites/default/files/Vacation_Home_Impact_Study.pdf. 10.  Thorben Wieditz, “Addressing Toronto’s Housing Crisis?,” Fairbnb, January 9, 2019, https://fairbnb.ca/2019/01/09/addressing-torontos-housing-crisis/. 11.  According to a 2017 study, the increase in Airbnb listings nationally accounted for about one-fifth of rent growth and about one-seventh of housing price growth. Kyle Barron, Edward Kung, and Davide Proserpio, “The Effect of Home-Sharing on House Prices and Rents: Evidence from Airbnb,” Social Science Research Network, July 25, 2017, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back
by Guy Shrubsole
Published 1 May 2019

What remains, however, of the Church’s traditional commitment to using its resources to help the poor and homeless? ‘The Church of England remains a very large landowner,’ admitted Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in a TV interview about the housing crisis. ‘We need to be committed to housing development, and, most of all, to community building.’ Welcome as the Archbishop’s commitment is, I’m sceptical that the Church will help solve the housing crisis after researching how its Commissioners have managed their estate. In contrast to the financial mismanagement that’s characterised the Church’s loss of glebe land, the centralised estate of the Church Commissioners seems to have been very efficiently managed over the last seventy years.

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In 2016, the Church Commissioners gave permission to a fracking firm to carry out underground seismic surveys on their Ormskirk Estate in Lancashire, the first step towards fracking. The other major test facing the Church over the use of its land is how it responds to the ongoing housing crisis. Warm words from the Archbishop of Canterbury are all very well; but, having allowed vast swathes of land to be sold off, what can the Church practically do about it? It could make a start by confessing to its past sins – by submitting to a searching inquiry into how it permitted its glebe to be flogged off, and how its investment policies have exacerbated the housing crisis by gentrifying key parts of London. Next, the Church Commissioners, having invested heavily in digitising maps of their landholdings in recent years, should publish these maps as a resource for housing associations and local authorities seeking to find local land.

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And we need greater transparency around the planning system, with better online maps matching up land ownership, options and planning permissions, so the public can see who benefits from the planning process, and better engage with it themselves. 2. Fix the housing crisis: stop landowners hoarding land and leaving homes empty At its heart, the housing crisis is a land crisis. The real cost of a house isn’t the bricks and mortar, but the land underlying it – and land prices have spiralled upwards 400 per cent since 1995. Politicians can talk all they like about building more homes, or slashing planning regulations to free up developers.

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco
by Chester W. Hartman and Sarah Carnochan
Published 15 Feb 2002

The housing market is as tight as it has ever been.”44 One should not have excessive faith that the business turndown of 2000–2001 will spell much relief for San Francisco’s overburdened housing consumers. But these same forces creating a housing crisis in San Francisco have also produced probably the strongest local housing movement in the nation. San Francisco’s Housing Movement TOOR’s fight against displacement from the South of Market area and related struggles in the Western Addition were the 1960s forerunners of San Francisco’s housing movement. Starting in the early 1970s, the Tenants Ac- Housing Crisis and Housing Movement / 337 tion Group and later the San Francisco Tenants Union45 organized individual buildings around maintenance and repair issues and provided tenants’ rights counseling, mainly in the Haight-Ashbury and Fillmore neighborhoods, via a “hotline” and publication of tenants’ rights handbooks.

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In the early eighties, it was reported that “Mayor Feinstein wants to avoid turning the city into what she termed ‘a magnet for the homeless of the entire Bay Area, the state and the U.S.’ ”172 But it is highly unlikely that homeless folks just hanker to live on San Francisco’s streets as opposed to Chicago’s or Atlanta’s. The problem for the most part afflicts local residents who, due to poverty, the city’s housing crisis, and, for some, personal issues, are frozen out of the housing market. Sentiments such as those expressed by Feinstein are heard by city officials all over America and mask an unwillingness to provide the needed services. Paul Boden, director of the city’s Coalition on Homelessness, accurately notes: “I don’t know of one city in the country that doesn’t say it’s a magnet and that homeless peo- Housing Crisis and Housing Movement / 381 ple come from somewhere else. Fargo, North Dakota, was calling itself a magnet.

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City for Sale OTHER BOOKS BY CHESTER HARTMAN Between Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning Housing: Foundation of a New Social Agenda (with Rachel Bratt and Michael Stone) Challenges to Equality: Poverty and Race in America Double Exposure: Poverty and Race in America Paradigms Lost: The Post Cold War Era (with Pedro Vilanova) Housing Issues of the 1990s (with Sara Rosenberry) Winning America: Ideals and Leadership for the 1990s (with Marcus Raskin) Critical Perspectives on Housing (with Rachel Bratt and Ann Meyerson) The Transformation of San Francisco America’s Housing Crisis: What Is to Be Done? Displacement: How to Fight It (with Dennis Keating and Richard LeGates) Housing and Social Policy Yerba Buena: Land Grab and Community Resistance in San Francisco The World of the Urban Working Class (Marc Fried, with Chester Hartman) Housing Urban America (with Jon Pynoos and Robert Schafer) City for Sale The Transformation of San Francisco R E V I S E D A N D U P D AT E D E D I T I O N CHESTER HARTMAN with Sarah Carnochan University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd.

Home: Why Public Housing Is the Answer
by Eoin Ó Broin
Published 5 May 2019

Words and music © Leon Rosselson, 1975 The lyrics are derived from a seventeenth-century pamphlet attributed to the English Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley. ADVANCE PRAISE FOR HOME ‘In this hard-hitting and timely book Ó Broin exposes the failures in politics and economics that plunged Ireland into a housing crisis. He also argues that change lies in the hands of a new generation of politicians and activists and the question they face is this: are we to see homes as places to generate rent and interest from, or as places to live?’ Paul Mason, journalist and author of PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future ‘A wide ranging and thorough analysis of where we have gone wrong in housing in Ireland, followed by innovative ideas for putting things right.’

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Michelle Norris, Head of School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice, University College, Dublin ‘Ó Broin argues that the Irish housing system is dysfunctional because of successive governments’ over reliance on the private market to meet housing demand. He argues for a new form of State involvement in housing – public housing – as the only way of ensuring that everyone will have an opportunity to live in a good quality affordable home. This book is accessible to anyone who is interested in solutions to the current housing crisis.’ – Simon Brooke, adjunct assistant professor at Trinity College, Dublin Democratic Programme Adopted by Dáil Éireann 21.1.1919 We declare in the words of the Irish Republican Proclamation the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies to be indefeasible, and in the language of our first President, Pádraig Mac Phiarais, we declare that the Nation’s sovereignty extends not only to all men and women of the Nation, but to all its material possessions, the Nation’s soil and all its resources, all the wealth and all the wealth-producing processes within the Nation, and with him we reaffirm that all right to private property must be subordinated to the public right and welfare.

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From the slums of Manila, built alongside the sewers, to depopulated cities in the American Rust Belt like Gary, Indiana; to places like Barcelona, whose social fabric is being destroyed by Airbnb – I’ve reported the way neoliberalism has massively redrawn the map of human dwelling patterns. The lesson I take from it is: it can all be redrawn again, this time with the people in control. In this hard-hitting and timely book, Ó Broin exposes the failures in politics and economics that plunged Ireland into a housing crisis. He also argues that change lies in the hands of a new generation of politicians and activists, and the question they face is this: are we to see homes as places to generate rent and interest from, or as places to live? Paul Mason is a British journalist and author of the book Postcapitalism: A Guide to our Future Overture Inadequate Language Every day our attention is drawn to housing.

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 26 Jun 2013

(“The Death of the Fringe Suburb,” read one recent headline; “Struggling in the Suburbs,” said another; a third declared, “The Housing Crisis Could End Suburbia as We Know It.”) Meanwhile, a cache of articles, papers, and popular books has heralded the resurgence of cities. But what the headlines miss is that while much of the hurt can be blamed on the recent recession and its immediate effects, there are larger trends at work. Many of the suburbs affected by the housing crisis are not experiencing a temporary setback but a permanent one, the result of a powerful tectonic shift whose forces have been grinding away for quite some time

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As of this writing, we have a 4.4-month supply of existing homes, the lowest housing supply since early 2006. But the migration of wealth from suburb to city started well before Wall Street concocted the no-income, “no-doc” loans that led to the housing crisis. Cities’ renaissance started as early as the mid-1990s, urban housing prices have been rising since 1980, and crime rates have been falling for almost as long. Toll Brothers started moving into the New York City market in 2003. The trend might have been accelerated by the housing crisis, but it was happening already. Home valuations are now reflective of the shift inward. Christopher Leinberger, analyzing data from the online real estate database Zillow, found this to be the case by comparing real estate prices in center cities and inner suburbs with their far-out suburban counterparts in the late 1990s and today.

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One of the hottest areas is in multifamily construction—the market for apartment and condo buildings and other structures containing four or more housing units, whether in cities or in suburbs. Construction of this kind of housing has more than doubled since the housing crisis set in. Part of this growth is due to a boom in the market for rental housing. The number of renters surged by more than five million in the 2000s, the largest ten-year increase since World War II. Vacancy rates are down and rents are soaring across the country, even in markets with lots of foreclosures. The vast majority of multifamily housing starts these days are rentals, whereas in the height of the housing crisis they were predominantly condos for sale. Meanwhile, the urbanization of the suburbs has only just begun.

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
by Brett Christophers
Published 6 Nov 2018

In March 2014, the following headline appeared in London’s Evening Standard: ‘Sell Public Land to Solve Housing Crisis, Boris Johnson Is Told.’1 And in this case it was not Whitehall doing the telling. Johnson, then London mayor, was being instructed to privatize public land in the capital by London First, a business lobby group. He would hear the same message from the Berkeley Group, one of Britain’s leading property developers. In 2012, Johnson had commissioned the development analysts Molior to research barriers to housing delivery in London, which prompted Berkeley in 2015 to proffer its own diagnosis and advice regarding the same issue: ‘Despite the housing crisis and need for the public sector to raise funds, public sector land is not being released quickly enough for development’.

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Wallwork, ‘UK Government Pledges £5 Billion Towards Housebuilding’, Property Forum, 3 October 2016, at propertyforum.com. 2 Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), Accelerating the Release of Surplus Public Sector Land: Progress Report One Year On (London: DCLG, 2012), p. 5. 3 Cabinet Office, Government’s Estate Strategy, p. 4. 4 Local Government Association and Cabinet Office, ‘One Public Estate: Transforming property and services’, August 2014, p. 4, at local.gov.uk. 1 HL Deb 15 July 2014, c230GC. 2 DCLG, Accelerating the Release of Surplus Public Sector Land, p. 5. 3 See, for example, H. Osborne, ‘UK House-Building Crisis – and How to Solve It’, Guardian, 19 May 2014. 4 G. Trefgarne, ‘Planning Log-Jam “Has Created Housing Crisis”’, Telegraph, 15 January 2003. 5 K. Niemietz, Abundance of Land, Shortage of Housing, IEA Discussion Paper No. 38, April 2012 – pdf available at iea.org.uk. 1 D. Bowie, ‘Responses to the Housing Crisis in the UK’, paper presented at the RC21 ‘The Ideal City’ conference, Urbino, Italy, 27–29 August 2015. 2 Bowie identifies two in particular – Paul Cheshire and Alun Evans – and cites two studies: P.

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Geoghegan, ‘Budget 2017: HCA to get new planning powers in expanded role’, 22 November 2017, at planningresource.co.uk. 4 Part of the reason compulsory purchase powers are considered inadequate as currently constituted (including subsequent to the modest measures announced in the November 2017 budget) is that, since the beginning of the 1960s, councils have been required to pay inflated prices (instead of existing value) for compulsorily purchased land, because the price must take into account potential planning permissions and infrastructure developments (see Chapter 2). Hence growing calls for local authorities to be able to acquire land at existing-use value, as they were in the 1950s – see, for example, J. Evans, ‘Major Land Reform Urged to Fix UK Housing Crisis’, Financial Times, 23 August 2017; D. Bentley, The Land Question: Fixing the Dysfunction at the Root of the Housing Crisis (London: Civitas, 2017). In early 2018, the Labour party explicitly nailed its colours to this particular policy mast, with the shadow home secretary, John Healey, drawing up proposals for a new Sovereign Land Trust empowered to compulsorily buy sites with the ‘hope value’ removed and thus at prices closer to those without planning permission – a move, he said, that would cut the cost of building council houses by nearly 40 per cent.

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America
by Conor Dougherty
Published 18 Feb 2020

These studies all: Richard Florida, “How Housing Supply Became the Most Controversial Issue in Urbanism,” City Lab, May 23, 2019, https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/05/residential-zoning-code-density-storper-rodriguez-pose-data/590050/; “Blanket Upzoning—A Blunt Instrument—Won’t Solve the Affordable Housing Crisis,” The Planning Report, March 15, 2019, https://www.planningreport.com/2019/03/15/blanket-upzoning-blunt-instrument-wont-solve-affordable-housing-crisis. “We can work together”: “Remarks by the President at U.S. Conference of Mayors,” Obama White House, January 21, 2016, http://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/01/21/remarks-president-us-conference-mayors.

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It’s the concentration of opportunity and the rising cost of being near it. It says much about today’s winner-take-all economy that many of the cities with the most glaring epidemics of homelessness are growing technology and finance centers where good-paying jobs are plentiful and industries of the future are on the rise. California, home of the nation’s worst housing crisis, has the dubious distinction of having somehow managed to produce some of the highest wages in America as well as the highest state poverty rate once the cost of housing is figured in. This didn’t happen all at once. It has become a popular narrative, at least in a certain kind of high-cost city, to say that the reason housing has become so expensive is that working-class neighborhoods are being gentrified, foreign investors are parking money in U.S. condominiums, houses and apartments are being commodified by hedge funds, and companies like Airbnb are turning rental buildings into hotels.

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When the country’s highest-growth regions become so expensive that it is considered an extravagant luxury for people to live near jobs and industries that everyone in America has played at least some role in building, that qualifies as a major national issue. Golden Gates is the story of how we got here and some of the early efforts to solve what is fast becoming a national housing crisis. It’s a story about one group of people searching for new homes while another group of people clings to the ones they have. The struggle at the center is the struggle to make space and coexist. This is fundamentally a struggle of politics, but those politics do not conform to a red/blue map. Cities are ultimately about people, so this book is too.

Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions
by Toby Segaran and Jeff Hammerbacher
Published 1 Jul 2009

Chapter 17, Superficial Data Analysis: Exploring Millions of Social Stereotypes, by Brendan O’Connor and Lukas Biewald, shows the correlations and patterns that emerge when people are asked to anonymously rate one another’s pictures. Chapter 18, Bay Area Blues: The Effect of the Housing Crisis, by Hadley Wickham, Deborah F. Swayne, and David Poole, guides the reader through a detailed examination of the recent housing crisis in the Bay Area using open source software and publicly available data. Chapter 19, Beautiful Political Data, by Andrew Gelman, Jonathan P. Kastellec, and Yair Ghitza, shows how the tools of statistics and data visualization can help us gain insight into the political process used to organize society.

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It could probably be argued that housing prices had a significant effect on the CPI throughout the period under study. With this basic overview in hand, we now drill down into the details. In the following sections we break the house sales into smaller groups, first by price and then by location. We are interested in finding out whether the housing crisis has affected some groups of homeowners more than others. The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Poorer Has the housing crisis equally affected the rich and the poor? Has the effect of the crisis been to improve or worsen the relative equality of these two groups? In this section, we will explore how the crisis has affected the distribution of housing prices.

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The correlation between price drop and commute time is weak, but note that all of the cities with the longest commute times (more than 35 minutes) have particularly large drops in price. It appears that the housing crisis has been relatively more damaging in poorer areas. The county-level census data contains more variables than the data for cities, so we analyzed the county data for further explanation of the housing crisis. The plot at the top of Figure 18-12 shows, for each county in which we had sales data, the percentage change in the number of housing units (from 2000 to 2006) plotted against the median sale price in 2008.

Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis
Published 1 Mar 2006

Although the dominant global pattern is the eviction of the poor from the center, some Third World cities reproduce US-style urban segregation, with the postcolonial middle classes fleeing from the core to gated suburbs and so-called "edge cities." This has long been the case in Kingston, where one quarter of a million poor people inhabit the crime-ridden but culturally dynamic Downtown, wThile the middle 40 David Glasser, "The Growing Housing Crisis in Ecuador" in Carl Patton (ed.), Spontaneous Shelter: International Perspectives and Prospects, Philadelphia 1988, p. 150. 41 Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanche%: Autobiography of a Mexican Family, New York 1961. 42 Kalinga Tudor Silva and Karunarissia Athukorala, The Watta-Dwellers: A Sociological Study of Selected Urban Tow-Income Communities in Sri Tanka, Lanham (Md.) 1991, p. 20. 43 Feng-hsuan Hsueh, Beijing: The Nature and the Planning of the Chinese Capital City, Chichester 1995, pp. 182-84. 

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As architect Djaffar Lesbet observes, however, this theoretically elegant balance between state aid and local initiative did not democratize access to housing: "The building plots have allowed those whom the system privileged to hold onto their lead, to achieve their own housing. They have also helped to reduce the dramatic and political tone of the housing crisis, by transforming this national issue into an individual problem."44 As a result, civil servants and others have acquired subsidized detached homes and villas, while the truly poor have ended up in illegal shacks in bidonvilles. Although lacking the revolutionary elan of Algeria, Tunisia also developed substantial state-subsidized housing, but 75 percent of it was unaffordable by the poor, who instead crowded into Tunis's sprawling slums such as Ettadhamen, Mellassine, and Djebel Lahmar.45 India illustrates the same trend in several different guises.

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Most of the site-and-service lots ended up in the hands of state employees and the middle class.12 Planning expert Charles Choguill says this is unsurprising because the minimum savings required by the World Bank to qualify for a construction loan was so high that it automatically excluded most of the squatters.13 Likewise, in another site-and-service scheme in Lusaka, only one fifth went to the target group, and roughly the same dismal result obtained in Dakar.14 Writing in 1993, the ILO's A. Oberai concluded that World Bank slum-upgrading and sites-and-services projects had largely failed to have visible impact on the housing crisis in the Third World: "Despite efforts to make projects replicable, the project approach ties up excessive resources and institutional effort in a few locations and has not been able to achieve the desired level of housing stock. The project approach is therefore unlikely to have a significant impact on solving the problem of shelter in most developing countries."15 Other critics pointed to the programmatic disassociation of housing provision from employment creation, and the inevitable tendency for sites-and-services schemes to be located in peripheries poorly served, if at all, by public transport.16 11 Greg O'Hare, Dina Abbott, and Michael Barke, "A Review of Slum Housing Policies in Mumbai," Gties 15:4 (1998), p. 279. 12 A.

Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World
by Brett Chistophers
Published 25 Apr 2023

In any event, English-language articles today routinely discuss housing crises – crises principally of availability and affordability – not only in all English-speaking countries, but also in countries ranging from Denmark to India, Germany, Israel, France, Sweden, Spain and Russia. Furthermore, the notion specifically of a global housing crisis is now very much abroad: the subject of numerous scholarly papers over the past decade, the purported global housing crisis has also recently been addressed in articles in popular media such as Bloomberg and Forbes, and in investigations by multilateral organisations such as the United Nations and World Bank. The second stand-out component of the perception of endemic contemporary crisis is of course the climate crisis.

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In mid 2021, Peter Freeman, the chair of Homes England (the government’s ‘housing accelerator’), announced that he was ‘keen to hear’ from institutional investors considering investment in the country’s affordable-housing sector.44 A few months later, Homes England launched a co-sponsored report designed indeed precisely to accelerate institutional investment in that sector – its chief investment officer, Harry Swales, insisting that such investment had ‘a critical role to play in addressing the undersupply of housing in the UK’.45 Two years earlier, Bloomberg TV had invited Kathleen McCarthy, Blackstone’s then co-head of real estate, to tell viewers about the group’s real-estate business and its own relationship to the housing crisis.46 The host, Erik Schatzker, was particularly keen to discuss housing affordability, which, he said to McCarthy, was ‘an enormous problem in some of the cities where you’re making a good number of your investments’. ‘How does Blackstone think about the affordable housing problem?’, he wanted to know. McCarthy meandered somewhat in her reply, but her core message was consistent: ‘We think’, she maintained, ‘we are part of the solution.’ That global asset managers such as Blackstone should claim they were part of the solution to the housing crisis, rather than part of the cause of it, was scarcely noteworthy.

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As we saw in Chapter 2, the idea of a systemic ‘infrastructure gap’ is largely a phenomenon of the new millennium: prior to the year 2000, the phrase ‘infrastructure gap’ appeared only very sporadically in public discourse. This is worth recalling here because the exact same ideational–discursive pattern is true of ‘housing crisis’. The number of articles indexed by Factiva that include this phrase in English has grown exponentially since the turn of the millennium, such that there were nearly twenty times as many such articles in 2021 (around 18,700) as in 2000 (970). On top of this, there are all those articles, including the one by McKinsey consultants with which I began this chapter, which discuss housing crises without labelling them explicitly as such.

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing
by John Boughton
Published 14 May 2018

On one hand, the cottage suburbs presented a more idealistic and generous response to working-class housing needs, but pressures of space and affordability seemed to compel the tenement as a feasible solution. This contest between multi-storey living – densification in current jargon – and low-rise persisted, fought out in the competing visions of architects and planners and the conflicting priorities of politicians. After 1914, the political class would find that the Great War created a housing crisis among a working class that it both needed and feared more strongly than ever before. This compelled a new, larger and far more generous state operation to manage housing. And so, in 1919, the first great age of council house building began. 2 ‘The World of the Future’: The Interwar Period The ‘Homes and Property’ section of the Evening Standard describes the Dover House Estate as ‘a charming enclave on the western edge of Putney’.1 In 1919, the local middle classes looked far less favourably on this new LCC estate.

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The kitchen had an Electrolux refrigerator, a New World gas stove, plenty of cupboards. There was a nice garden. It was like coming into a fortune. My wife said, ‘Start measuring for the lino’.4 Another expedient, begun under wartime emergency powers granted in 1939 but maintained through the post-war housing crisis, was requisitioning of empty properties to house those in need. A total of 71,493 properties were requisitioned during the war, and another 51,695 up to 1951.5 Some authorities, particularly Labour ones, used the powers enthusiastically. For example, in Hackney by 1950, 3,800 homes had been taken over to house those on the waiting list.

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But, Carlisle City Council, having overseen the demolition of good council housing, soon came to identify a net annual shortfall of 708 affordable homes over the next five years.50 I doubt that Carlisle – far away from the overheated housing markets and relative affluence of the South-East – has suffered an excess of gentrification, but the Alice in Wonderland logic of tackling a housing crisis by destroying solid, genuinely affordable and much-needed council homes seems plain. Despite that criticism, it’s nevertheless important to make one simple observation. I’ve probably seen more council estates (many of them no longer ‘council’, of course) than most people in recent years and the vast majority of them look good: well-maintained, attractively landscaped, overwhelmingly – unless my experience is very unrepresentative or Panglossian – quiet and respectable.

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 Apr 2016

BARBOUR, Elisa. (2006, February). “Time to Work: Commuting Times and Modes of Transportation of California Workers,” Public Policy Institute of California, http://www.ppic.org/main/publication.asp?i=660. BARKHAM, Patrick. (2014, October 1). “Britain’s housing crisis: are garden cities the answer?,” The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/01/britains-housing-crisis-are-gaden-cities-the-answer-ebbsfleet-kent-green-belt. BARRAGAN, Bianca. (2014, April 2). “Los Angeles is the Biggest Anti-Sprawl Success Story in the US,” Curbed Los Angeles, http://la.curbed.com/archives/2014/04/los_angeles_is_the_biggest_antisprawl_success_story_in_the_us.php.

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CHRISTOPHER, A.J. and TARVER, James D. (June 1994). “Urbanization during Colonial Days in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Urbanization in Africa: A Handbook, Westport: Greenwood Press, 46–7. CHU, Ben. (2014, February 9). “Britain is suffering from a housing crisis—who is to blame and how can we fix it?,” Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/property/house-and-home/property/britain-is-suffering-from-a-housing-crisis—who-is-to-blame-and-how-can-we-fix-it-9113329.html. CINCO RANCH LIFE. “Cinco Ranch History,” http://www.cincoranchlife.org/page/20251~312161/Cinco-Ranch-History. CITY LIFE. (2014, April 25). “Micro Units—The Newest Trend in Real Estate,” CitiesJournal, http://www.citiesjournal.com/micro-units-newest-trend-real-estate/.

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“Perth—Australia’s most diverse capital,” Committee for Perth, http://www.committeeforperth.com.au/pdf/Advocacy/ReleaseCulturalDiversityJan2013.pdf. MONTEFIORE, Simon Sebag. (2011). Jerusalem: The Biography, New York: Knopf. MOORE, Rowan. (2015, March 14). “Britain’s Housing crisis is a human disaster. Here are 10 ways to solve it,” The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/mar/14/britain-housing-crisis-10-ways-solve-rowan-moore-general-election. MORGAN, Edward. (2012, August 14). “Sex (Or Not) and the Japanese Single,” New Geography, http://www.newgeography.com/content/003019-sex-or-not-and-japanese-single. MOROZOV, Evgeny. (2011, January 8).

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future
by Joseph C. Sternberg
Published 13 May 2019

Boomers confronting a bad job market have often faced an agonizing choice between struggling to find work in the area where they’ve lived for years, or having to sell houses that might now be worth less than they paid for them just to have a chance at moving somewhere else where jobs are more readily available. Unquestionably the Boomers were hammered by a housing crisis. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Millennials have been, too. Or more precisely, Millennials have been hammered by all the steps the Boomers took to try to rescue themselves from their own housing crisis. Meet Generation Rent We all know the stereotypes about Millennial living arrangements—the basement-dwelling, couch-surfing, with-parents-living stuff of Boomer parents’ nightmares.

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The Boomers wouldn’t be where they are today if it weren’t for homeownership, and that’s true even after the financial crisis erased trillions of dollars of housing equity and pushed millions of mortgages into foreclosure. That’s why it’s a pretty big problem that Millennials can’t buy houses. And yes, there really is a Millennial housing crisis. This is the one area of any survey of Millennial misfortune where Boomers are likely to have the least sympathy. Millennials, who were too young to have bought houses in large numbers during the boom, didn’t see large amounts of home equity wiped out in the 2007 housing meltdown. Boomers and Gen Xers did.

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Now millions of people could enjoy the stability of a salaried job, while also having the means to accumulate wealth every month with their mortgage payments. The housing market had helped create a new middle class—and with it, a new American economy. The problem is that in the 1990s, as they came into their own politically, the Boomers got greedy. It all started with what at the time seemed like a housing crisis afflicting the Boomers. The homeownership rate started a gentle decline from above 65 percent in the late 1970s to less than 64 percent in the mid-1980s.29 Far more worrying, homeownership among younger buyers ages twenty-five to forty-four fell during the 1980s from just above 60 percent in 1980 to just below 56 percent in 1990, a level lower than it had been in 1960.

Automating Inequality
by Virginia Eubanks

* * * According to the system’s designers and funders, coordinated entry upends the status quo in homeless services that privileged stronger clients. It builds new, deeper bonds between service providers throughout Los Angeles, leading to increased communication and resource sharing. It provides sophisticated, timely data about the nature of the housing crisis that can be used to shape more responsive policy-making. But most crucially, by matching homeless people to appropriate housing, it has the potential to save the lives of thousands of people. One of those people is Monique Talley. I met Monique, a round-faced, freckled African American woman, at the Downtown Women’s Center (DWC), a nearly 40-year-old organization dedicated to addressing the needs of poor and unhoused women.

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South LA is very family oriented. My grandmother saw five generations here.” Surrounded by flatlands and low warehouses full of stitching garment workers, the shelter has a dramatic view of downtown, floating like a jeweled island three miles north. Pathways to Home is trying to bridge the gap between South LA’s housing crisis and its thoroughly inadequate resources, offering beds to approximately 315 men and 115 women nightly. It is a low, large, beige building packed wall-to-wall with bunk beds with about two hand-spans of space between them. Despite the staff’s attempts to make everyone feel welcome and to preserve clients’ dignity, it feels like what it is: a warehouse for people.

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There was a period of time, a lull of people being unresponsive to us. People were upset because—you come out here, you’ve been collecting information, what is the outcome?” Their cynicism is not unwarranted. It is not the first time the homeless have been offered a magic-bullet solution to the seemingly intractable housing crisis in Los Angeles. “There’s a lot of services out there where they will meet with you, ask you all of these questions, promise you something, and never come back,” says Richard Renteria. “So, they got all this information to create this database, talk about how many thousands of people are homeless, [but] never come back to serve them

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City
by Anna Minton
Published 24 Jun 2009

In Britain rough sleeping barely existed before the late 1980s. But by 1989, all along the Strand, in the heart of London’s theatreland, homeless people were bedded down in one doorway after another. This sudden flood of people on to the streets was a result of the crash which followed the ‘Big Bang’ and the consequent housing crisis, when thousands of homes were repossessed. Benefit cuts and policies on mental health also played a role, with the 1980s witnessing the closure of the old mental asylums, replaced by what became known as ‘care in the community’. Pressures on the NHS, which hit mental health particularly hard, meant that rather than being cared for in the community, many with mental health problems slipped through the net – and on to the streets.

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The process of introducing market forces into the part of the public sector which was once housing policy began with Mrs Thatcher and was stepped up by Labour. While the debate over health and education is fairly robust, there has been no debate over the future of housing. The result is effectively the end of social housing in Britain, a national housing crisis and the creation of new slums. HOW PUBLIC HOUSING WAS KILLED OFF In 1978, the last year before Mrs Thatcher came to power, the government built more than 100,000 council homes and the private sector built 150,000. 17 Since then the figures for private-sector house building have remained roughly stable – although that fell with the downturn – but the government builds hardly any, which is the simple reason why there is such a shortage of housing, not merely for people on low incomes but for many professionals.

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It went on to say, ‘Shelter, the organization for homeless people, has said the move will increase the number of homeless people and decrease the number of homes available to accommodate them.’19 More than 1.5 million people did buy their homes and the policy, which was very popular with those who could afford to buy, became one of the emblems of the Thatcher government, continuing once Labour came to power. So did the housing shortages predicted by Shelter, which have affected millions more than those officially defined as homeless, fuelling the housing crisis in the process. There are currently more than 1.67 million households on the waiting list for social housing in England, a staggering figure which reflects a 64 per cent increase since 1997. More than 600,000 of these households are homeless, living in overcrowded, temporary or other unsuitable accommodation.20 ‘Right to buy’ was a justifiably popular policy.

Suburban Nation
by Andres Duany , Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck
Published 14 Sep 2010

But even architects should remain skeptical of the power of well-tested traditional models in the face of extreme social isolation. Diggstown, in Norfolk, Virginia: a neighborhood-style retrofit of a previously distressed inner-city project that epitomizes HUD’s new standards THE MIDDLE-CLASS HOUSING CRISIS Virtually all the thought brought to bear on the housing crisis has been directed toward the urban poor, and rightly so, for they inhabit an environment that most would find unbearable. But the housing crisis is a middle-class issue, too. It has become increasingly difficult for the middle class to own satisfactory housing. In 1970, about 50 percent of all families could afford a median-priced home; by 1990, this number had dropped below 25 percent.4 There are many reasons behind this phenomenon, but the most significant factor is evident in the image on the left.

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TWO WAYS TO GROW THE FIVE COMPONENTS OF SPRAWL A BRIEF HISTORY OF SPRAWL WHY VIRGINIA BEACH IS NOT ALEXANDRIA NEIGHBORHOOD PLANS VERSUS SPRAWL PLANS 2 - THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS WHY TRAFFIC IS CONGESTED WHEN NEARBY IS STILL FAR AWAY THE CONVENIENCE STORE VERSUS THE CORNER STORE THE SHOPPING CENTER VERSUS MAIN STREET THE OFFICE PARK VERSUS MAIN STREET USELESS AND USEFUL OPEN SPACE WHY CURVING ROADS AND CUL-DE-SACS DO NOT MAKE MEMORABLE PLACES 3 - THE HOUSE THAT SPRAWL BUILT THE ODDITY OF AMERICAN HOUSING PRIVATE REALM VERSUS PUBLIC REALM THE SEGREGATION OF SOCIETY BY INCOME TWO ILLEGAL TYPES OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING TWO FORGOTTEN RULES OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING THE MIDDLE-CLASS HOUSING CRISIS 4 - THE PHYSICAL CREATION OF SOCIETY ENVIRONMENTAL CAUSES OF A SOCIAL DECLINE DRIVERS VERSUS PEDESTRIANS PREREQUISITES FOR STREET LIFE 5 - THE AMERICAN TRANSPORTATION MESS THE HIGHWAYLESS TOWN AND THE TOWNLESS HIGHWAY WHY ADDING LANES MAKES TRAFFIC WORSE THE AUTOMOBILE SUBSIDY 6 - SPRAWL AND THE DEVELOPER THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN DEVELOPER THE INSIDIOUS INFLUENCE OF THE MARKET EXPERTS QUESTIONABLE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM STRUGGLES WITH THE HOMEBUILDERS A VISIT TO THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF HOME BUILDERS’ ANNUAL CONVENTION 7 - THE VICTIMS OF SPRAWL CUL-DE-SAC KIDS SOCCER MOMS BORED TEENAGERS STRANDED ELDERLY WEARY COMMUTERS BANKRUPT MUNICIPALITIES THE IMMOBILE POOR 8 - THE CITY AND THE REGION THE POSSIBILITY OF GOOD SUBURBS SUBURBS THAT HELP THE CITY THE EIGHT STEPS OF REGIONAL PLANNING THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT AS A MODEL 9 - THE INNER CITY THINKING OF THE CITY IN TERMS OF ITS SUBURBAN COMPETITION THE AMENITY PACKAGE CIVIC DECORUM PHYSICAL HEALTH RETAIL MANAGEMENT MARKETING INVESTMENT SECURITY THE PERMITTING PROCESS 10 - HOW TO MAKE A TOWN REASONS NOT TO, AND REASONS TO DO SO ANYWAY REGIONAL CONSIDERATIONS MIXED-USE DEVELOPMENT CONNECTIVITY MAKING THE MOST OF A SITE THE DISCIPLINE OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD MAKING TRANSIT WORK THE STREETS THE BUILDINGS PARKING THE INEVITABLE QUESTION OF STYLE A NOTE FOR ARCHITECTS 11 - WHAT IS TO BE DONE THE VICTORY MYTH THE ROLE OF POLICY MUNICIPAL AND COUNTY GOVERNMENT REGIONAL GOVERNMENT STATE GOVERNMENT FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ARCHITECTS CITIZENS SUBURBAN NATION Acclaim for SUBURBAN NATION APPENDIX A - THE TRADITIONAL NEIGHBORHOOD DEVELOPMENT CHECKLIST APPENDIX B - THE CONGRESS FOR THE NEW URBANISM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATIONS INDEX Notes Copyright Page PREFACE TO THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION THE STORY OF SUBURBAN NATION Now that Suburban Nation has managed to stay in print for a decade and sell close to 100,000 copies, it seems excusable to tell the story of how it came to be.

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This would be an important first step toward creating public spaces worthy of habitation. 3 THE HOUSE THAT SPRAWL BUILT THE ODDITY OF AMERICAN HOUSING; PRIVATE REALM VERSUS PUBLIC REALM; THE SEGREGATION OF SOCIETY BY INCOME; TWO ILLEGAL TYPES OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING; TWO FORGOTTEN RULES OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING; THE MIDDLE-CLASS HOUSING CRISIS Does anyone suppose that, in real life, answers to any of the great questions that worry us today are going to come out of homogeneous settlements? —JANE JACOBS, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES (1961) THE ODDITY OF AMERICAN HOUSING Sprawl is made up mostly of housing.

The Rich and the Rest of Us
by Tavis Smiley
Published 15 Feb 2012

The Wisconsin activists, who believe housing is a human right, seize and occupy abandoned homes for homeless families without consent. For years, consumer advocates, human-rights and political activists, and others have called on the Obama administration to aggressively investigate and prosecute bankers and lenders whose actions led to the worst housing crisis in decades. We now know that the housing and subprime mortgage bonanza was rife with fraud and deception. This complicated enterprise included bankers, appraisers, notaries, investors, and disreputable middlemen who fabricated, altered, and cobbled suspect documentation together to sell properties quickly—whether people could afford them or not.

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Unoccupied, blighted, and foreclosed properties are “health hazards” to the community, Fleming said. Since no one’s forcing the banks to come to the table and discuss rates that poor and struggling people can afford, “the people of the community are house sitting or community sitting.” It’s called the “community economic development plan,” Fleming added. The housing crisis has endangered the American Dream—where every family can own a home or simply have a decent place to live and raise their families. Say what you will about the home occupiers’ tactics, they have the courage to speak truth to power—and they refuse to be powerless. They have the audacity and courage to take on a multibillion-dollar institution.

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Smith Goes to Washington” passion and purity. But too often, once lobbyists begin to exert their extraordinary influence, previously principled men and women sometimes become pawns in a game that only the spineless survive. This is why there has been such an absence of serious investigation into the housing crisis and no indictments against the multibillionaire bankers who profited from the subprime lending boom. In his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama said that he plans to create a federal mortgage crisis unit charged with investigating the alleged wrongdoings of bankers related to real estate lending.

The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021
by Greg Clark
Published 31 Dec 2014

Travers T (2012b). Devo Max for London? Urban Government and Fiscal Autonomy. Presentation. Available at www2.lse.ac.uk/government/research/ resgroups/BGatLSE/Documents/Devo-max-for-London.pdf. Accessed 2013 Mar 14. Travers T (2013a). London’s housing crisis triggers a culture war. Evening Standard. Jan 29. Available at www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/tony-travers-lon dons-housing-crisis-triggers-a-culture-war-8471038.html. Accessed 2013 March 1. Bibliography 217 Travers T (2013b). Tony Travers on how Ed Koch’s style paved the way for Britain’s mayors. The Guardian. Feb 1. Available at www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/ 01/ed-koch1?

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It is particularly gratifying that Greg sees London: World City with a legacy that persists, leading to a fresh agenda for 2021: updated challenges to be addressed if London, a quarter of a century on, is to retain and enhance its global xii Foreword leader status in the face of today’s competitor cities – the same intention and some familiar themes, although some of the challenges are new. Chapter 13 sets out eight ‘imperatives’ – critical policy priorities. They include a worsening housing crisis, seen as ‘perhaps the single major concern’: a worsening imbalance between need and supply, with issues of affordability, tenure and quality, in danger of becoming a serious drag on London’s future success. Related to this is the lack of any mechanism for relating London within its administrative boundary to its wider functional (in housing, labour market and transport terms) region in south-east England, requiring the creation of a fit-for-purpose governance structure: a challenge for the next Government.

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Paul Cheshire, Professor of Economic Geography at LSE, has warned that the shortage of good-quality, affordable long-tenure accommodation may create 106 The evolution of London, 1991 to 2015 knock-on effects on salary demands and in effect render the city less competitive. There are also risks of serious price volatility brought about by the combination of inelastic supply and tied-up wealth (personal communication, 9 December 2013). There is no consensus on the appropriate spatial solutions to the housing crisis. On the one hand, the National Trust, the Campaign to Protect Rural England and suburban lobby groups have found allies in pro-city supporters of densification. Conversely, economists and opponents of the planning system support the social and commercial rationale behind housing development on underdeveloped land, including the possible creation of ‘garden cities’ in the south east (Travers, 2013b).

Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants
by Bethany McLean
Published 13 Sep 2015

The analysis was very similar to that in a paper called “Fannie Mae Insolvency and Its Consequences” that was circulating among senior officials at the National Economic Council and the Treasury. Even the language was similar. “A government seizure is inevitable,” it began. It noted the same accounting concerns, and even ended with a version of the same conclusion: “A fully government owned guarantor of mortgage debt might be exactly what is called for given the current housing crisis . . . without the need to satisfy a fiduciary duty to shareholders, Fannie might finally be able to perform its affordable housing mission in a helpful and proactive manner.” The Monday after the Barron’s story ran, Fannie’s stock fell 13 percent. Then, in mid-July, stories appeared in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

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Later, in a 1936 speech to the National Association of Real Estate Boards—which would become the politically powerful National Association of Realtors—Roosevelt said, “We have not yet found a satisfactory solution to one of the most fundamental of our economic problems—the provision for all American citizens of the kind of homes in which they have a right to live. I know you, with me, will not be content until a sound housing program is established for the whole nation.” The attempts to fix the housing crisis brought about by the Depression, which became the roots of the housing finance system we have today, actually began with President Herbert Hoover. In the summer of 1932, Congress passed the Federal Home Loan Bank Act; the idea was that federally backed regional banks would make cash advances to their local member banks, thereby encouraging those banks to lend.

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Less than ten minutes later, Geithner fired back a letter saying that the GSEs’ own analysis showed that principal reduction could help up to half a million borrowers and save several billion dollars. The core difference was in their views of the risk of strategic defaults, which Treasury argued was minimal. “You have the power to help more struggling homeowners and heal the remaining damage from the housing crisis,” Geithner wrote to DeMarco. But DeMarco would not budge. Treasury officials, and at least some of the National Economic Council economists, thought DeMarco’s view was ridiculously narrow. Taxpayers, after all, would benefit from what benefited the broader economy. “The White House couldn’t believe it,” says a former official.

The Passenger
by AA.VV.
Published 23 May 2022

With few exceptions, the only building projects in California that manage to respect both town-planning regulations and overcome the much feared and often constraining residents’ consultations are those for new single-family or two-family homes: those classic detached houses with gardens that fit in with the American suburban landscape, which cost a lot and represent particularly inefficient land use, especially in a state that is experiencing a dramatic housing crisis. Politicians are trying to put a sticking plaster on it after decades of inaction: in September 2021 a state law was passed permitting the construction of two-family houses (also called duplexes) on land originally zoned for single-family homes and permitting the transformation of single-family homes into duplexes, an option that promises to be very tempting for those intending to sell. Something is changing, in other words, but it will take some time before the limited effects of this change are felt. This is also because the housing crisis in California is aggravated by real-estate taxes; these came about following a controversial referendum in 1978 (see “Proposition 13” on page 21), which established that property owners could not be taxed more than 1 per cent of the market value of their buildings and, furthermore, that the market value would only be updated at the moment of an eventual sale.

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A demonstration in Sunnyvale outside the building where the annual general meeting of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was taking place. Workers and activists were protesting over a series of issues, including contractors’ rights and the tech giant’s activities in China. A HOME OF ONE’S OWN At the root of many of California’s problems – from the housing crisis to growing urban sprawl in fire-risk areas – lies the American Dream of the detached family home, a dream fiercely defended by those who have made it a reality by means of development plans that are often discriminatory. “Single-family zoning”, which sets aside an area exclusively for detached family homes (and therefore rules out terraces, duplexes or apartments), is a Californian invention – with clear segregationist origins.

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For almost nine months the family had been living out of their Toyota Sienna in various fields and parking lots throughout Salinas, the industrial and economic center of Monterey County. In this part of the country, there was nothing especially dramatic or exceptional about their plight or the circumstances that led them to be without a roof over their heads. Frankie’s parents were well aware of the worsening housing crisis that had dragged tens of thousands of Californians into a similar fate. But still, Candido said, it sometimes felt as though they were the only ones out there. Finding a place to park the van was harder than expected. At first, the family tried the parking lot of a Food 4 Less grocery store.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

Concrete tubes just over eight feet wide, with a bench that turns into a bed, could be your solution,” Daily Mail, January 15, 2018, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5271411/8ft-concrete-tubes-solution-housing-crisis.html; James Heartfield, “Britain’s Housing Crisis: The Places People Live,” New Geography, January 28, 2013, http://www.newgeography.com/content/003432-britains-housing-crisis-the-places-people-live. 50 Maggie Shen King, An Excess Male (New York: Harper, 2017), 11. 51 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 52 Office of the New York Comptroller Scott M.

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CNN, May 6, 2017, https://money.cnn.com/2017/05/26/news/economy/mark-zuckerberg-universal-basic-income/index.html; Chris Weller, “Elon Musk doubles down on universal basic income: ‘It’s going to be necessary,’” Business Insider, February 13, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-universal-basic-income-2017-2; Patrick Caughill, “Another Silicon Valley Exec Joins the Ranks of Universal Basic Income Supporters,” Futurism, September 8, 2017, https://futurism.com/another-silicon-valley-exec-joins-the-ranks-of-universal-basic-income-supporters; Sam Altman, “Moving Forward on Basic Income,” Y Combinator, May 31, 2016, https://blog.ycombinator.com/moving-forward-on-basic-income/; Diane Francis, “The Beginning of the End of Work,” American Interest, March 19, 2018, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/03/19/beginning-end-work/. 14 “The YIMBY Guide to Bullying and Its Results: SB 827 Goes Down in Committee,” City Watch LA, April 19, 2018, https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/los-angeles/15298-the-yimby-guide-to-bullying-and-its-results-sb-827-goes-down-in-committee; John Mirisch, “Tech Oligarchs and the California Housing Crisis,” California Political Review, April 15, 2018, http://www.capoliticalreview.com/top-stories/tech-Oligarchs-and-the-california-housing-crisis/; Joel Kotkin, “Giving Common Sense a Chance in California,” City Journal, April 26, 2018, https://www.city-journal.org/html/giving-common-sense-chance-california-15868.html. 15 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans.

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genericContentID=249797&channelID=311; Joel Kotkin, “The Progressives’ War on Suburbia,” New Geography, November 16, 2014, http://www.newgeography.com/content/004773-the-progressives-war-suburbia. 5 Patrick Condon, “Government should supply housing for up to 40 percent of Vancouver wage earners,” Think Pol, December 3, 2017, https://thinkpol.ca/2017/12/03/condon-govt-should-supply-housing-for-up-to-40-percent-of-vancouver-wage-earners/; Edward Ring, “The Density Delusion,” California Policy Center, August 20, 2019, https://californiapolicycenter.org/the-density-delusion/. 6 “A home truth for the Tories: fix the housing crisis or lose power for ever,” Spectator, April 21, 2018, https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/04/a-home-truth-for-the-tories-fix-the-housing-crisis-or-lose-power-for-ever. 7 Joseph Chamie, “The Rise of One-Person Households,” Inter Press Service News Agency, February 22, 2017, http://www.ipsnews.net/2017/02/the-rise-of-one-person-households/; Eric Klinenberg, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (New York: Penguin, 2013), 38–39; Council on Contemporary Families, “Reminder: Marriage Is No Longer the Mode,” September 12, 2017, https://contemporaryfamilies.org/singles2017factsheet/. 8 Jan Woronoff, Japan: The Coming Social Crisis (Tokyo: Lotus Press, 1984), 349–50. 9 Choe Sang-Hun, “A Writer Evokes Loss on South Korea’s Path to Success,” New York Times, September 8, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/08/world/asia/shin-kyung-sook-mines-south-koreas-sense-of-loss.html. 10 “All the Single Ladies: China Leads World in Unmarried People—Report,” Sputnik International, December 21, 2016, https://sputniknews.com/art_living/201612211048842308-china-unmarried-people/; Chamie, “The Rise of One-Person Households.” 11 Joel Kotkin, “The Rise of Post-Familialism: Humanity’s Future,” Chapman University and Civil Service College of Singapore, 2012, https://www.chapman.edu/wilkinson/_files/the-rise-of-post-familialism.pdf. 12 Mary Eberstadt, “‘The Great Scattering’: How Identity Panic Took Root in the Void Once Occupied by Family Life,” Quillette, August 27, 2019, https://quillette.com/2019/08/27/the-great-scattering-how-identity-panic-took-root-in-the-void-once-occupied-by-family-life/. 13 Klinenberg, Going Solo; Liz Greene, “Why Millennials Are Choosing to Be Child-Free,” Role Reboot, February 6, 2019, http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2019-02-why-millennials-are-choosing-to-be-child-free/; Claire Cain Miller, “Americans Are Having Fewer Babies.

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World
by Michal Zalewski
Published 11 Jan 2022

I grew up in communist Poland, a once-proud nation razed to the ground in the final days of World War II, then subjugated by Stalin and unceremoniously subsumed into the Soviet Bloc. I remember childhood tales of distant relatives vanishing without a trace, and I recall long lines and ration cards for basic necessities like sugar and soap. Later, when I came to the United States, I lived through the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, and then through the housing crisis of 2007 to 2009. I watched friends go from earning cozy six-figure salaries to having their cars and homes repossessed. I kept telling myself this would never happen to me—all the way until, through a stroke of bad luck, I almost ended up on the street. In the end, my fascination with emergency preparedness isn’t rooted in a mean militaristic streak or a bleak outlook on life; it stems from a simple realization that disasters aren’t rare today, just as they weren’t rare in days gone by.

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In a highly cited 2015 survey published by Bankrate.com, about two-thirds of Americans indicated they didn’t have enough savings to cope with an unexpected expense of $1,000.3 Although the findings of that study are also sometimes overstated by commentators, the underlying problem is real. During the 2007–2009 housing crisis (a comparatively mild recession next to some of the earlier crashes of the 20th century), the number of foreclosures in the United States exceeded 1.6 million,4 with a peak at more than five times the normal annual rate. Part of this involved investors or house flippers purposefully walking away from underwater nonrecourse mortgages, but part involved genuine tears and pain.

…

Filburn, a landmark Supreme Court case that greatly expanded the reach of the federal government. But both sides spend little time discussing the dynamics of the money supply in that era, or the contents of the balance sheets of multiple large banks that went bankrupt in the run-up to the crash. The housing crisis of 2007–2009 is another well-remembered instance, and so is its European counterpart—a sovereign debt crisis accompanied by bank closures and limited-scale deposit confiscations in the Eurozone (euphemistically dubbed bail-ins).11 But the analysis of its causes is entirely subservient to the political narrative too.

$2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
by Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer
Published 31 Aug 2015

Those concerned about the affordable housing crisis often focus a spotlight on rising rents. Clearly, a few million additional government rental subsidy vouchers would help. In addition, there is a place for investment in the building or rehabbing of more affordable housing. There’s actually already an underutilized mechanism in place at the federal level that could help with this—the National Housing Trust Fund. The NHTF is supposed to act as a pot of money that could be tapped by states to help support the building of affordable housing developments. Yet the recent housing crisis derailed efforts to fully fund the NHTF, and the federal government has yet to build the program up.

…

At some point, if the authorities were to find out that Kaitlin and Cole were sharing a room, Jennifer would be at risk of losing custody due to “neglect.” By today’s standards of child well-being, Jennifer can’t move into a studio apartment to help balance her family’s budget. The most obvious manifestation of the affordable housing crisis is in rising rents. Between 1990 and 2013, rents rose faster than inflation in virtually every region of the country and in cities, suburbs, and rural areas alike. But there is another important factor at work here that is an even bigger part of the story than the hikes in rent: a fall in the earnings of renters.

…

And yet they are America, as much as any other place in the country. Though these forgotten places are indeed a world apart, much of what the extreme poor in other regions experience is reflected in the experiences of these families, too. In the central Delta, welfare is just as dead as it is in the rest of the country, if not more so. The affordable housing crisis and the perils of doubling up are also richly evident in the Delta. So is the stubborn spirit of those with nothing to survive by any means necessary. But a key difference between other places and the economically distressed small towns and rural regions concentrated in the Deep South and Appalachia is the combination of a virtually nonexistent cash safety net and the virtual lack of any formal-sector jobs.

House of Debt: How They (And You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again
by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi
Published 11 May 2014

From 2007 to 2009, one out every six Tennessee workers producing these goods lost their job. The sharp drop in household spending in California, Florida, Nevada, and New York directly affected Tennessee workers. We cannot be certain of the number of jobs in Tennessee that would have been saved by policy efforts to mitigate the housing crisis elsewhere. But the view that helping troubled home owners in California and Florida was “terrible public policy” from the perspective of Tennesseans is suspect. When it comes to problems associated with levered losses, it does not matter where you live. As we’ve said, the ripple effects on the labor market mean that we are all in this together.

…

However, DeMarco’s position as head of the GSEs was different. The GSEs by this time were a public entity and effectively belonged to taxpayers. It was DeMarco’s responsibility to act in the wider interest of the American public and pursue principal write-downs. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and the failure to respond adequately to the housing crisis was likely the biggest policy mistake of the Great Recession. Some have argued that debt restructuring would have had little benefit because spending out of housing wealth, even for indebted households, is too small to have made a significant contribution to GDP.21 This is a narrow view. As we explained in the first part of the book, the collapse in spending by indebted households infected the entire economy through foreclosures and employment.

…

Further, such an intervention would have cost very little taxpayer money—only the trustees would have needed to be compensated. The proposal would have allowed for more efficient renegotiation of mortgages that would have reduced debt and left both home owners and MBS investors better off—at little taxpayer cost. Another proposal put forth at the beginning of the housing crisis was the allowance of mortgage cram-downs by judges in Chapter 13 bankruptcy. In a Chapter 13 bankruptcy, an individual with too much debt submits a debt payback plan to a bankruptcy trustee in order to reduce his overall debt burden.36 Chapter 13 bankruptcy allows people to reduce debt that is not explicitly secured by some collateral.

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley
by Cary McClelland
Published 8 Oct 2018

And that realization, that nobody has designed this experience for you—it’s terrifying. LESLIE DREYER We meet near City Hall and I make a joke about the number of times she’s probably protested outside this building. Part artist, part activist, she came to San Francisco to build a life with her partner. Then, the financial crisis hit in 2008, and the San Francisco housing crisis followed. Many of my friends were being evicted. Rents were skyrocketing. Starting in 2010, 2011, it was just a huge upward curve. And at the same time, the Google buses were all over the streets, the program had really amplified in those two years. So that was on the tips of people’s tongues.

…

Recently, the Board of Supervisors reclassified “affordable housing” to be for people earning 100 percent to 120 percent of the median income. That is no longer affordable; that’s just a developer giveaway. But developers fund their campaigns. It’s just this constant squeeze. It’s a global crisis. In Austin and Seattle—tech companies are growing there and a housing crisis along with it. Berlin and Barcelona and London and all these places are trying to deal with deregulated housing markets because of “home sharing” companies like Airbnb. The Bay Area’s history of resistance is helpful, but it seems the minute the movement gets in the way of capital, then it gets blocked or coopted.

…

The whole idea of taxing a business located in your jurisdiction is to offset the impact of the workers on housing availability, transit, parks, other city services. Today, cities like Palo Alto and Menlo Park are collecting business taxes from tech companies headquartered there, but they aren’t dealing with the impacts of the workers on housing. The link is ironic: the money to offset the housing crisis just isn’t available. The old rules are meaningless against the new technology—it allows these companies to pretend they are ungovernable. That’s why everybody is confused. There are virtually no protests at City Hall because nothing is being voted on. The crisis isn’t driven by decisions at City Hall or the planning commission.

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare
by Ryan Dezember
Published 13 Jul 2020

Many of these young adults will appreciate that they can live in a well-maintained, family-sized suburban home and send their children to good public schools without committing to decades of mortgage payments, tying up their savings in down payments, or risking entrapment in another market collapse. By renting, though, they forsake the method through which most Americans build wealth. Last decade’s housing crisis threatens a more lasting and far-reaching impact on American society than other historic market meltdowns because the previous crashes have generally been in the stock market and share prices mostly affect the rich. The behavior of voters and consumers might be swayed by the direction of stock prices, but most people don’t own much in the way of equities.

…

Even if Phillips was winning in court, the reception from buyers for the finished product at San Carlos was not a good sign for other towers topping out along the beach. It was clear the air was whooshing out of the condo bubble, but I still hadn’t made the connection between surgeons trying to wriggle out of a regrettable investment over some mildew and my own fortunes. 12 OVER THE HEDGE A timeline of the housing crisis prepared by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis points to February 27, 2007, as an early sign of the brewing calamity when Freddie Mac announced that it would no longer buy the riskiest types of subprime mortgages. For me, the first hint of trouble was the smell of hot garbage wafting over the hedge.

…

NOTES Much of the reporting for this book was undertaken by the author for newspaper articles published by the Mobile Register, which was renamed the Press-Register in late 2005, and The Wall Street Journal. Included in each chapter’s notes are the relevant articles in the order in which the reporting first appears in the narrative, along with more specific citations for work that was not produced by the author. 1. THIS IS THE ONE Ryan Dezember, “My 10-Year Odyssey Through America’s Housing Crisis,” Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2018. The collapse of the U.S. housing market wiped out Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report,” New York: PublicAffairs, 2011, xv. At its depths, more than twelve million Americans CoreLogic, “New CoreLogic Data Shows Second Consecutive Quarterly Decline in Negative Equity,” news release, August 26, 2010.

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration
by Jake Bittle
Published 21 Feb 2023

When the status quo of climate change became untenable, it was these places that were sacrificed, these places that were the first victims of the logic of retreat. The rivers that run through the two towns may start far apart from each other, but they empty into the same ocean. CHAPTER THREE Burnout WILDFIRES, INSURANCE, AND THE HOUSING CRISIS Santa Rosa, California I. The Fire on Tubbs Lane Even five years later, the precise facts of the Tubbs Fire incident remain unknown. Here is what we can say for sure. Early on the evening of October 8, 2017, the wind started to blow in Northern California. This wind had begun as a high-pressure system rotating clockwise over the deserts of Nevada and Utah, but the descending jet stream had given it an extra push, boosting it over the Sierra Nevada and into California.

…

Almost every major city in the United States faces a housing shortage of some kind or another, but California’s combination of restrictive laws and rapid growth has made homeownership burdensome for middle-class families and all but impossible for low-income households. According to one estimate, the shortage exceeds four million units, which means ten million people need a home but do not have one. Although the housing crisis originated in the meteoric growth of the Bay Area and Los Angeles metroplexes, its tentacles have spread to every corner of the state, raising costs in the agricultural towns of the Central Valley and in remote mountain towns like Greenville. Santa Rosa is more than an hour away from San Francisco by car, but the region is still well within the reach of the Bay Area’s economy, and over the past thirty years it, too, has felt the pain of the region’s housing shortage.

…

Even so, the primary factors in the decision were economic. The Trans might have considered moving to a similar neighborhood with lower fire risk, and their insurance company would have been more than happy to see them use their claim payout to go somewhere safer, but there was no such neighborhood in Santa Rosa or indeed in all of Wine Country. The housing crisis had squeezed the area’s middle class almost to the point of nonexistence, and for the Trans, moving elsewhere would have meant upgrading to a much more expensive property. Their insurance policy gave them only enough money to build a Coffey Park–caliber house, and there was only one Coffey Park.

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification
by Peter Moskowitz
Published 7 Mar 2017

Despite the warning, the day felt like a victory. For now, they’re safe, and each has placed a red sign in the window that in big block letters reads “No Buyouts.” New York City is in the midst of a housing crisis. New York is also, because of its liberal politics, its wealth, and its semi-strong welfare state, in possibly the best position, at least compared with other US cities, to handle a housing crisis. And unlike in other cities, where the electorate is still split on how to solve the gentrification problem (San Francisco mayor Ed Lee ran unopposed except by a few protest candidates who garnered low percentages of the vote and who were not backed by party money; mayors of other cities will not even mention the G-word), New Yorkers appear nearly united in their desire for a progressive solution.

…

Around the same time, Baruch College and New York 1 (a local news station) conducted a survey that found 65 percent of all New Yorkers feared being priced out of their homes in the next few years. The findings cut across economic and racial lines: low-income residents, Latinos, and black New Yorkers were more likely to be worried about rising rents, but everyone, including a majority of people making over $100,000 a year, feared they were next in line. This is what a housing crisis looks like. If the middle class and even some upper-income people can barely afford New York, what does it mean for the working class and the poor? My brother and sister-in-law are lucky they’re able to afford more, even if it does strain their budget to remain in this city. I am flexible. I’m young, I have money, and I have no immediate family.

…

Even the city’s private developers have been pleasantly surprised by how pro-development the de Blasio administration is. His deputy mayor for housing and economic development, Alicia Glen, came not from a lefty think tank or nonprofit but from Goldman Sachs, where she oversaw $3 billion in investment in cities. In 2015, I got a chance to sit down with Glen and ask her about the city’s housing crisis. Our interview made it clear that she saw the need for action, but that her solution would not fundamentally challenge gentrification. De Blasio and Glen are progressives, but without challenging the fundamentals of real estate capitalism, their vision is severely limited. I asked her if she understood people’s concerns about being priced out of neighborhoods that were rezoned by the administration she works for.

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival
by Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan
Published 8 Aug 2020

This has, as was intended, led to a dramatic increase in debt ratios, both in the public and private sectors. The main exception in recent years has been the reduction in the leverage ratios of banks, whose dangerous level in 2007/2008 was a major factor in causing the GFC, and household leverage in countries where this sector has gone through a housing crisis. Although debt ratios have risen dramatically, there is not enough concern about leverage. That’s because debt service ratios have not risen along with debt ratios, thanks to an almost exact inverse correlation between rising debt ratios and declining interest rates. This is set out in Chapter 11.

…

The speed at which the labour market adjusted is also striking. GDP growth fell from 6% in 1989 to −2% in 1994. The unemployment rate rose from around 2% in 1990 to 3% by 1995. It is only by 2003 that the unemployment rate peaked at just 5.4%. By contrast, the unemployment rate infamously rose to 10% in the USA during its own housing crisis. The unambiguous message from the labour market is that if there is one part of Japan’s economy that does not participate in economic adjustment, it is employment, i.e. the Phillips curve has always been flat in Japan, more so than in other advanced countries. The origins of Japan’s labour customs: World War II changed Japan’s labour market.

…

As a result, in countries like Canada, Australia and Sweden, households across North Asia, Poland and Chile have seen double-digit increases in household debt. Household debt in China, Korea, Malaysia and Thailand has risen around 20–25%. Household debt to GDP ratios in Malaysia and Thailand now are closer to levels seen in advanced economies, while the household leverage in Korea is not far from that in the USA on the eve of the housing crisis. With the personal sector in sizeable surplus, and asset markets very strong, the wealth of the household sector increased in the post-GFC decade far faster than its liabilities (n.b. the same was true in the previous decade 1997–2007). The problem, both then and now, is not with the general level of household indebtedness, but with that group, mostly young families, where debt is high, albeit temporarily because of age profile or unemployment, relative to income.

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America
by Danielle Dimartino Booth
Published 14 Feb 2017

I arrived at work bursting to discuss alarming economic data erupting on all fronts. Stock market volatility, the collapsing subprime mortgage industry, and the mountain of household debt was unnerving. And not a sounding board for miles. My new colleagues shrugged, uninterested. They believed any housing crisis would be regional. After all, their boss Bernanke had said just that. Their indifference—and subtle hostility—was maddening. As far as I could tell, none of them watched CNBC in the morning. Of course they read the financial newspapers, if they bothered to check their mailboxes. I was often unnerved to find days of the Financial Times stacked up in someone’s box.

…

However, once inside, I confronted an uncomfortable question: Why were so many of its highly-educated and well-paid economists oblivious as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression was about to break over their heads? Why had Greenspan been so resolutely blind to the housing bubble his low-interest-rate policies had created? Why didn’t Bernanke sound an alarm instead of repeatedly opining that the housing crisis was “likely to be contained”? Why was Janet Yellen, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, astonishingly clueless as the housing market in her region imploded? And later, why couldn’t Yellen—an economist known for her brilliant forecasting skills—foresee the consequences of the Fed’s disastrous zero-interest-rate policies after she succeeded Bernanke as Fed chairman?

…

In 2002, Bernanke, while on the Board of Governors, had paid tribute to Milton Friedman at a conference at the University of Chicago. Acknowledging Friedman’s work on the Depression and his criticism that the Fed’s tight monetary policy had deepened its deprivations for millions of Americans, Bernanke told Friedman, “We did it. We’re very sorry. But we promise not to do it again.” After years of downplaying the housing crisis, Bernanke had finally awakened to the imminent danger. The markets were in turmoil, with the S&P 500 Index down over 16 percent by the third week of January. On Monday, January 21, Martin Luther King Day, Bernanke went into his office believing dramatic action by the Fed was needed before the next FOMC meeting, scheduled for January 30.

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger
by Matthew Yglesias
Published 14 Sep 2020

But it would greatly benefit America’s children and make it much easier for middle-class people to have the number of kids they say they want. As a policy reporter, I’m much more a generalist than a specialist. And I like doing stories about solutions. Like many people, when I look at something long enough I start to see patterns in it. The solution to America’s new urban housing crisis is to build more houses so more people can move to in-demand cities. The solution to the illegal immigration crisis is to let more people come legally, not tie ourselves into knots trying to stop the flow. Both America’s vast rural hinterland and many of its aging northeastern and midwestern cities need an influx of people to prevent their current priceless assets from wasting away.

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The return of land scarcity It’s no mystery why a house might cost more to buy than to build—it’s because houses usually come with land attached and land can be expensive. Given the right setting, even a broken-down shack can sell for huge sums of money. A few years back, an eighty-year-old, nine-hundred-square-foot house in Palo Alto sold for more than $2.5 million and became the poster child for how land scarcity drives the housing crisis.* At the dawn of the economics profession, land scarcity loomed extremely large as a consideration. To the nineteenth-century British economist David Ricardo, diminishing returns were the central fact of economics. He felt that as a country’s population grows, people would increasingly need to move not to places where incomes were highest but to places where land was cheapest.

…

In other words, you can make a town allow duplexes but if the town says a duplex is going to need ten off-street parking spaces then nobody is going to build any. These concerns are not merely hypothetical. Way back in 2002, the California State Legislature attempted to address the state’s housing crisis by allowing single-family homeowners to build “accessory dwelling units” (aka granny flats or mother-in-law apartments). But as Margaret Brinig and Nicole Stelle Garnett showed, local governments simply responded by “imposing burdensome procedural requirements that are contrary to the spirit, if not the letter, of the state-law requirement that ADUs be permitted ‘as of right,’ requiring multiple off-street parking spaces, and imposing substantive and procedural design requirements.”* It was only about fourteen years later that a new, stronger pro-housing coalition emerged in the state legislature, passed a series of new rules designed to allow ADUs, and an ADU boom began.* Then in 2019, the legislature responded by passing a package of five new ADU laws—four aimed at further knocking down local barriers, and one allowing homeowners to build two ADUs rather than just one—fueling a further boom.* ADUs alone aren’t going to solve the California housing crunch.

Hollow City
by Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg
Published 1 Jan 2001

Below is the rest of the shark: a 13 who have art, activis just the new American economy HOLLOW 14 in which most of us thing will be ble. faster, will CITY be poorer, a few will be more homogenous and more far richer, and every- controlled or controlla- The technology boom and the accompanying housing crisis have fast- forwarded San Francisco into the newest version of the American future, a version that also is being realized in Boston, Seattle, and other cities from New York and Atlanta to Denver and Portland. A decade ago Los Angeles looked like the future —urban warfare, segregation, despair, injustice and decay, open the new corruption— ^but future looks like San Francisco: a frenzy of financial speculation, covert coercions, overt erasures, a barrage of novelty-item restaurants, websites, technologies and trends, the despair of numbness of incessant work hours and homes and neighborhoods. this country is in the a ripple effect Napa and Sonoma sive the anxiety of destabilized jobs, Bay Area, along with 30 percent of the multimedia/ boom that started in Silicon Valley has pro- throughout the region from south of San Jose to in the north. ^ San Francisco has had the most expen- housing of any major American city in the nation for but in the past few years housing prices —^both skyrocketing, along with commercial rents. at a hectic pace, and they in turn generate sales two decades, and rents —have been New businesses are coming in new boutiques, restaurants and bars that displace earlier businesses, particularly nonprofits, and the industry's workers have been outbidding out from under tenants at a for rentals breakneck pace.

…

All over the city, and replaced with bigger ones, long-vacant built and into dot-com sold, old industrial buildings offices Program puts and upscale down buildings are being torn lots are being filled in, and former nonprofit condos offices turned As San Francisco's Urban Habitat lofts. "The growing gap between low wage and high wage it, workers and the scarcity of housing, especially affordable housing for low income households, is resulting in the displacement of by middle and high income households ties of color."^ San Francisco and ing this housing crisis new jobs without many in historically traffic by encouraging the influx of new technology was the sprawling suburban enterprises and live capital and an aggravation in the nation. of the first become both a bedroom community for the Val- highly paid workers and the capital of the next technological wave the Internet, aka multimedia, with biotechnology about to huge presence in Mission Bay.

…

yuppies, and there is definitely tension Some on both filled the people have focused on sides of that divide —those who know they are considered yuppies, and those who hate whoever qualifies as a yuppie in their eyes. Some people have said that it's not the fault of those who came here looking for a job that there's a housing crisis, and it's the local politicos, real estate speculators, greedy landlords and developers who should be targeted. Some human need —housing— exists largely as a need takes back seat to profit. My own a fault a system in which a basic free-market commodity, so that writing has been about culture and politics in other senses.

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business
by Rana Foroohar
Published 16 May 2016

You look at the cost-benefit analysis, and my dream is to take this issue, not just from the compassion argument, but to the finance ministers of the world, and say we cannot afford to not invest in the access to adequate, affordable nutrition for all of humanity.”69 It’s a laudable goal. However, tackling it will first require not only compassion from world leaders, but real change in Wall Street’s business model. In the midst of the housing crisis and Great Recession a few years back, I spent a lot of time traveling through the Inland Empire, a large metropolitan area in the middle of Southern California. It stretches an hour or two east of Los Angeles and Orange County, but is about as far away from the tony “OC” lifestyle as you can imagine.

…

In the early 2000s, predatory lenders flocked to the area, offering dicey deals to the largely minority and lower-middle-class white populations who, unable to afford housing on the coast, still craved the American Dream of homeownership. It ended, as it did in so many neighborhoods and cities across America, in tears and massive foreclosures, turning entire cities into ghost towns of derelict properties. As recently as 2012, when I visited the Del Rosa neighborhood of San Bernardino, one of the hardest-hit cities in the housing crisis, remaining homeowners’ efforts to keep their properties up were being thwarted left and right. Groups of young men and school-age kids with pit bulls in tow hung out in front of corner bodegas at midday. For every well-kept bungalow with freshly cut grass and potted plants on the porch, there was an abandoned building spray-painted with gang graffiti or strewn with dirty mattresses and empty liquor bottles.

…

Home values began rebounding from their post-financial-crisis trough in the beginning of 2012, and by July 2015, home sales had increased to their highest pace in eight and a half years.6 But the percentage of Americans who can call themselves homeowners is still declining from its peak in 2004, and many experts expect it to fall further as credit continues to be tight, young people struggle with higher-than-average levels of unemployment, and baby boomers begin moving into retirement housing.7 Fixing this housing crisis, as Warren Buffett once told me, is a fundamental prerequisite for fixing our economy. And yet, nearly eight years after the crisis of 2008, we aren’t there yet. The national housing market is in recovery, but like the larger economic recovery, it is incredibly bifurcated. Sections of Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles are booming, while Detroit, Atlanta, and California’s Inland Empire are still coping with foreclosures and mortgages that are underwater.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
by Matthew Desmond
Published 1 Mar 2016

The remaining 67 percent—2 of every 3 poor renting families—received no federal assistance.32 This drastic shortfall in government support, coupled with rising rent and utility costs alongside stagnant incomes, is the reason why most poor renting families today spend most of their income on housing.33 Imagine if we didn’t provide unemployment insurance or Social Security to most families who needed these benefits. Imagine if the vast majority of families who applied for food stamps were turned away hungry. And yet this is exactly how we treat most poor families seeking shelter. — A problem as big as the affordable-housing crisis calls for a big solution. It should be at the top of America’s domestic-policy agenda—because it is driving poor families to financial ruin and even starting to engulf families with moderate incomes. Today, over 1 in 5 of all renting families in the country spends half of its income on housing.34 America can and should work to make its cities livable again.

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In 2013, the Bipartisan Policy Center estimated that expanding housing vouchers to all renting families below the 30th percentile in median income for their area would require an additional $22.5 billion, increasing total spending on housing assistance to around $60 billion. The figure is likely much less, as the estimate does not account for potential savings the expanded program would bring in the form of preventing homelessness, reducing health-care costs, and curbing other costly consequences of the affordable-housing crisis.56 It is not a small figure, but it is well within our capacity. We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners.57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance.

…

On foreclosures of rental property, see Gabe Treves, California Renters in the Foreclosure Crisis, Third Annual Report (San Francisco: Tenants Together, 2011); Vicki Been and Allegra Glashausser, “Tenants: Innocent Victims of the Foreclosure Crisis,” Albany Government Law Review 2 (2009); Matthew Desmond, “Housing Crisis in the Inner City,” Chicago Tribune, April 18, 2010; and Craig Karmin, Robbie Whelan, and Jeannette Neumann, “Rental Market’s Big Buyers,” Wall Street Journal, October 3, 2012. Real estate investment manuals promoted investing in foreclosed and damaged properties long before the crash. “Distressed properties can literally make you rich,” one advised in 1998.

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
by Alec MacGillis
Published 16 Mar 2021

Regional inequality was making parts of the country incomprehensible to one another—one world wracked with painkillers, the other tainted by elite-college admission schemes. It was making it difficult to settle on nationwide programs that could apply across such wildly disparate contexts—in one set of places, the housing crisis was about blight and abandonment, while in the other, it was all about affordability and gentrification. Inequality between regions was also worsening inequality within regions. The more prosperity concentrated in certain cities, the more it concentrated within certain segments of those cities, exacerbating long-standing imbalances or driving those of lesser means out altogether.

…

In his acceptance speech, Rubenstein said that as he was contemplating what to say, Andrew Carnegie had written him a letter from the beyond. “‘Good philanthropists invariably live very long lives,’” the “letter” read, “‘and when their time is up they are warmly welcomed into a special place in Heaven.’” * * * Seattle’s housing crisis had been building for half a decade—ever since Amazon had started building that enormous headquarters in South Lake Union—but the Seattle Times headline on April 6, 2017, still had the power to shock: SEATTLE’S MEDIAN HOME PRICE HITS RECORD: $700,000, DOUBLE 5 YEARS AGO In fact, the Seattle region had the fastest-rising home prices of any metro area in the country for the prior five months.

…

Hyper-prosperity was not only creating the side effects of unaffordability, congestion, and homelessness, but injecting a political poison into the winner cities. The cranes kept going up—there were fifty-nine in the air in April 2019, still the most in the nation. Work resumed on the tower that Amazon had threatened to cancel. Meanwhile, the company announced that it was taking steps to address the housing crisis it had helped create—philanthropically, that is. It would donate $5 million to an affordable housing developer and set aside eight floors in one of its new buildings for a 200-bed homeless shelter for families, complete with its own health clinic. It was far less than the $500 million that Microsoft had previously announced it was investing in local housing, but it was something.

White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa
by Sharon Rotbard
Published 1 Jan 2005

The return had not proved any easier since many of the apartments in Jaffa had been destroyed in their absence or requisitioned by new Arab tenants. Secondly, floods of Jewish immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe after World War I (an immigration wave known as the ‘Third Aliya’) had only increased what was fast becoming a serious housing crisis.114 In the short period between September 1920 and May 1921 alone, 10,000 Jewish immigrants entered through the ‘Gates of Zion’ (or infested the ‘Bride of the Sea’, depending on one’s ethno-religious allegiance).115 Lastly, and most importantly however, was the ideological make-up of this latest batch; having survived their infancy in among the pales and pogroms of Tsarist Russia and their adolescence absorbing the revolutionary fervour of 1917, these immigrants were considerably more radical than previous influxes.

…

It was no longer possible to try to keep a mixed, double or in-between identity, like that of Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche. Jews had nothing to look for in Jaffa, and the city had been transformed from a cosmopolitan city into an Arab one. Jewish enclaves within Jaffa, such as the Feingold Houses in Manshieh, had gradually deteriorated, atrophied and been abandoned. The housing crisis in the region initially caused by the waves of immigrants from Europe had worsened due to the massive departure of the Jewish population from Jaffa, and soon, the whole region of Tel Aviv and Jaffa was swamped in tent encampments.129 As a result, Tel Aviv’s population in the 1920s multiplied twenty-fold, from 2,084 inhabitants at the beginning of the decade, to 42,000 at its end.130 Mass overcrowding encouraged more land acquisitions and the majority of deals for plots in what is today considered part of Tel Aviv were conducted during this period.

…

Some were new immigrants, some were internal refugees having fled Arab neighbourhoods in the wake of the May Day riots, and nearly all were homeless, living in tents. In light of the increasingly untenable situation in Jaffa, which had been twitching with rancour ever since the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and the severe housing crisis developing in Tel Aviv, this displaced collective understood the necessity of starting over. The members of the association decided to unite as a collaborative corporation, to purchase a tract of land, and to build a new neighbourhood south of Tel Aviv. Neve Sha’anan in the 1930s, as seen from south to north-east.

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America
by Giles Slade
Published 14 Apr 2006

World War II improved the situation greatly, as 16 million young service men and women shipped out to the European and Pacifi theaters. But this improvement was only temporary. After demobilization, the situation worsened again. In Chicago in 1946, for example, the housing crisis was so bad that over 100,000 veterans—mostly unemployed young men—were homeless.24 In their book Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened, Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen eloquently illustrate just how acute the housing crisis had become:“In Atlanta,2,000 people answered an advertisement for one vacancy. A classifie ad in Omaha newspaper read, ‘Big Ice Box 7 by 17 feet. Could be fi ed up to live in.’”25 In 1933, under FDR, the federal government responded to the crisis with a series of experimental moves that would ultimately render old techniques and styles of housing construction obsolete.

…

They were one example of what the sociologist Sharon Zukin calls liminal spaces—public areas for meeting, mixing, and transit.33 For low-income inner-city tenants, these liminal spaces, including front stoops, hallways, parks, sidewalks, squares, bus stops, and train terminals, can be sites of uncomfortable interactions—elevator silences, excessive noise, physical aggression. Especially during a depression or other housing crisis, liminal spaces are always overcrowded. Unemployed adults spend long hours there, as do children, poor relatives, and newlyweds forced to bunk-in with family members because they cannot afford their own apartment. The appeal of the porchless suburban house was the escape it offered from intense, overcrowded interaction with one’s neighbors.34 Contrary to popular myth, the urban working class was not driven to Levittown by crime; it was lured there by the promise of space and privacy offered by a detached home.

…

There was no communal path, no common service area.”35 Alfred, who was the exact opposite of his gregarious brother, was obsessed with privacy in housing design and expressed his belief that it could be made compatible with the mass production of homes. “Without even a trial balloon you guess in advance just how far you could push and persuade [people] to take either open planning or living in a fis bowl until the landscaping grows to give them privacy.”36 After 1948,when the housing crisis eased somewhat,the Levitts committed themselves to constructing detached housing for veterans. They could hardly lose. The government guaranteed veterans’ mortgages and made them available without any down payment at all. So, just as competition was entering the Levitts’ new downscale market, Alfred redesigned the Cape Cod to make it attractive to a middle-class clientele.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
by Owen Jones
Published 14 Jul 2011

The problems of the 'white working class' were ascribed to their whiteness, rather than their class. argued against this false portrait. Indeed, working-class communities and workplaces are more likely to be ethnically diverse than their middle-class counterparts. Problems faced by working-class people who are white-s-like the housing crisis, the lack of good jobs, poor rights at work, declining living standards, safe communities--are to do with class, not race. These are problems shared by working-class people of all ethnic backgrounds. Where race does come into it is the fact that working-class people from ethnic minority backgrounds suffer from other forms of oppression and exploitation.

…

Aside from the millions who are spending years of their lives on waiting lists, the number of people in temporary accommodation soared by a stunning 135 per cent between 2001 and 2008. And the government might not be spending much on social housing, but instead it spends £21 billion a year on housing benefit, much of which ends up subsidizing private landlords. With the housing crisis worsening year by year, and with accommn, dation so central to people's lives, why did a Labour government leave the whole policy to go to rot? I asked Hazel Blears, whose fonner department when in the Cabinet included responsibility for housing. She accepted that New Labour had failed to build sufficient capaciry.L but with caveats.

…

Things like crime and drug addiction are more common in working- class areas than in the average middle-class suburb. A working-class teenager is considerably more likely to give birth than her middle-class peer. But the reality is rather different from the vicious generalizations and victim-blaming that accompanies chav-hare. Poverty, unemploy- ment and a housing crisis provide fertile ground for a range of social problems. These are working-class communities that took the brunt of a class war first unleashed by Thatcher three decades ago. Indeed, it would be far more startling if life had gone on, much like before, even as the pillars of the community collapsed one by one

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality
by Brink Lindsey
Published 12 Oct 2017

Heim, “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality,” unpublished working paper, April 2012, https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/BakijaColeHeim JobsIncomeGrowthTopEarners.pdf. 4.See Tyler Cowen, “The Inequality That Matters,” American Interest 6, no. 3 (January 1, 2011), http://www.the-american-interest.com/2011/01/01/the-inequality-that-matters/. 5.http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/must-read-steve-teles-the-scourge-of-upward-redistribution-2/. 6.William Lazonick, “Profits without Prosperity,” Harvard Business Review (September 2014), https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity. 7.See Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein, “The Growth of Finance,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 3–28. 8.Justin Lahart, “Number of the Week: Finance’s Share of Economy Continues to Grow,” Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2011, http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/12/10/number-of-the-week-finances-share-of-economy-continues-to-grow/. 9.General Accounting Office, “Financial Audit: Resolution Trust Corporation’s 1995 and 1994 Financial Statements,” July 1996, http://www.gao.gov/archive/1996/ai96123.pdf. 10.See David Min, “For the Last Time, Fannie and Freddie Didn’t Cause the Housing Crisis,” The Atlantic, December 16, 201l, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/for-the-last-time-fannie-and-freddie-didnt-cause-the-housing-crisis/250121/. 11.Charles W. Calomiris and Stephen H. Haber, Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 207. 12.Calomiris and Haber, Fragile by Design, p. 253. 13.See Min, “For the Last Time, Fannie and Freddie Didn’t Cause the Housing Crisis.” 14.See Neil Bhutta, “GSE Activity and Mortgage Supply in Lower-Income and Minority Neighborhoods: The Effect of the Affordable Housing Goals,” Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics 45, no. 1 (2012): 238–61. 15.

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It
by M. Nolan Gray
Published 20 Jun 2022

New York City, for example, built fewer new units in the recovery boom of the 2010s than it did in the Great Depression of the 1930s.8 In the smaller suburbs that dot regions like the great bays of California and Massachusetts, zoning has emerged as an effective tool for blocking any and all development, locking many communities in amber. As a result, many coastal housing markets now operate in a context of permanent housing crisis. Relatively little housing is built, and where it is built at all, the housing is kept prohibitively expensive by unnecessary mandates and a costly permitting process.9 With restrictive zoning already on the books in those cities that remain somewhat affordable—usually thanks to an increasingly scarce supply of undeveloped land—the housing affordability crisis is unlikely to remain an exclusively coastal phenomenon for long.

…

Molly Boesel, “Home Prices Reached Highest Annual Growth Since 1979,” CoreLogic, August 3, 2021, https://www.corelogic.com/intelligence/home-prices-reached-highest-annual-growth-since-1979/. 2. Erick Trickey, “How Minneapolis Freed Itself from the Stranglehold of Single-Family Homes,” Politico, July 11, 2019, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/07/11/housing-crisis-single-family-homes-policy-227265/; Todd Gill, “Fayetteville Eliminates Minimum Parking Requirements,” Fayetteville (AR) Flyer, October 7, 2015, https://www.fayettevilleflyer.com/2015/10/07/fayetteville-eliminates-minimum-parking-requirements/; Angie Schmitt, “Hartford Eliminates Parking Minimums Citywide,” Streetsblog, December 13, 2017, https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/12/13/hartford-eliminates-parking-minimums-citywide/. 3.

…

On top of the tens of thousands of dollars the applicant had to spend on a team of environmental consultants, any local opponent of the project with a couple hundred dollars to spare will also have standing to further delay the project with a frivolous lawsuit challenging the environmental review in court. 26. Combined with the risk of creditors or partners dropping out of the project, these delays can and often do kill projects. 27. As Katherine Levine Einstein, David M. Glick, and Maxwell Palmer, Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) find, those who speak at public hearings in opposition to housing are often highly unrepresentative of their communities, both demographically and in their opposition to new housing. The authors find that speakers at public hearings are systematically more likely to be elderly male homeowners and to be far more opposed to housing than the average local resident. 28.

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism
by William Baker and Addison Wiggin
Published 2 Nov 2009

It sounds unthinkable, but the few who are beginning to do this will be better off than those who reach out for the government lifeline, prolonging high payments for 30 years. The outcome would be a shorter recession, for the housing market would quickly readjust rather than suffer from the agonizing slow-motion erosion in prices and perpetually high inventories that are occurring today. Socialism’s solution to the housing crisis is reminiscent of the Japanese perpetual recession, where a bear market in equities has run 19 years and counting. The moral hazard that has been built into the nation’s mortgage market is a function of the structure of the system, something that the liberal Keynesian economist Paul Krugman drives home in his nostalgic plea to return to a simpler, 1950s-style banking system.

…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan:The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007), 229–252. A sprightly discussion of this is in The Black Swan’s Chapter 15: “The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud.” Notes 383 14. Zillow, The Majority of U.S. Homeowners Thinks Their Home is Insulated From the Housing Crisis (August 6, 2008), http://zillow.mediaroom.com/index. php?s=159&item=64. Chapter 3: The Rise and Fall of Hard Money 1. Laurence H. Meyer, Remarks by Governor Laurence H. Meyer, December 5, 2001, www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2001/20011205/default. htm. 2. Murray N. Rothbard, The Case Against the Fed (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1994), 42. 3.

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W., 201 Bush, George W., 202, 339–340 Business as a System of Power (Brady), 178 Butler, Robert, 335 Butler, Smedley, 86–88 Byrne, Patrick, 140 Caesar, Julius, 248 Caligula, 258–259 Calomiris, Charles, 212 Campos, Roel, 329 Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), 72 Capitalism: democracy as threat: and economic stress, 233–235 overview, 232–233 Roman Empire as example, 235–236 evolution of, 241–243 INDEX Roman Empire as example building wealth, 243–245 collectivism, 252–256 money supply, 245–249 squandering wealth, 249–252 See also Roman Empire, decline of Carnegie Foundation, 178 Carter, Jimmy, 221, 230–231 The Case Against the Fed (Rothbard), 354 Cassidy, John, 118, 119 Cato Institute, 336 Catsoulis, Jeannette, 335 Center for a Responsible Budget (CFRB), 226–227 Center for Responsible Politics (CRP), 184–185, 186 Chavez, Hugo, 365 Chemical Bank, 55, 56 Choudhri, Ehsan, 94–95, 96, 98, 99 Chrysler, 235 Citibank, 124 Citicorp, 211 Citigroup, 57 Clifford Chance LLP, 318 Clinton, Bill, 186, 201, 330, 340 Clinton, Hilary, 202 Coleman, Thomas, 311 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), 127, 147, 149, 212 Conant, Charles, 62, 280 Conda, Cesar, 160 Considius, Q., 248 Conspiracy of Fools (Eichenwald), 223 Council on Foundations, 176 Counterfeiting, 38, 53 Countrywide Financial, 212, 214 Cramer, Jim, 141–142, 143, 145–146, 289, 303 Crawford, Michael, 246 Credit Crisis of 2008–2009: forced lending, 128–133 Index overview, 116–121 “too big to fail” policy, 121–128 See also Housing Crisis Crispus, Gaius Sallustius, 248 Culture of irresponsibility: chilling of inquiry, 293–296 moral vacuum, 296–299 morality, 290–292 overview, 277–281 rationality, 285–290 secular society, 281–285 See also Moral hazard; Self-indulgence Cuneo, Jonathan W., 326–327 “Curveball,” 363 Damn Yankees, 303 Dawes Plan, 62 The Debt Deflation Theory of Great Depressions (Fisher), 131 Deflation: Making Sure “It” Doesn’t Happen Here (Bernanke), 117 Democracy Alliance, 185 Derivatives, 22.

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work
by Richard Florida
Published 22 Apr 2010

Six regions, all in the Sunbelt, posted ratios of 15 or greater. Another twelve metropolitan areas, again all in the Sunbelt, had ratios above 10. Las Vegas’ ratio was 9, Miami’s 8.4, and Phoenix’s 7.2, all sky-high by any standard.9 With their debt-fueled economies driven by housing, it’s no surprise that the housing crisis has brought severe economic pain to many Sunbelt cities. According to a study by the Brookings Institution, of the twenty worst-performing regions in the country, fourteen were in the Sunbelt, including Las Vegas and Miami.10 Both Las Vegas and Phoenix saw their economic Stress Index value—a composite measure of economic hardship developed by the Associated Press—more or less double between December 2007 and March 2009.11 At the peak of the crisis the Sunbelt states and cities witnessed something that had once been unthinkable: after a century of unchecked growth, many locations had their first taste of mass outmigration and population decline.

…

We’ve seen the ways in which the importance of home ownership became overblown and began to undermine the economy; how it consumed an ever-larger share of income for far too many, constraining their lifestyle and sometimes even bankrupting them; and how it encouraged massive, unsustainable growth in places where land was cheap and the real estate economy dominant. We could well look back on this moment in history as a time when people lived like indentured servants, with their own homes as lord and master. For too many, the dream of home ownership turned into an economic trap, one of our own making. The most staggering damage caused by the housing crisis may not be the impact on the financial markets; it may be the long-run competitive disadvantage caused by the inability to relocate the labor force to where the jobs of the future lie. It’s not that home ownership per se is bad, it’s that home ownership on the scale it has grown to is plainly ill suited to today’s postindustrial economy.

…

Even though prices have declined somewhat, it’s still very expensive to buy a home in many of these places. More people have no choice but to rent in those cities. Renting is much more prevalent in metro areas such as New York, where 66 percent of residents are renters, as well as D.C. and Chicago, where more than half (56 and 51 percent, respectively) rent their homes.11 The housing crisis creates additional opportunities for rental housing. Across the country, there is an accumulation of foreclosed homes and failing condo projects that could be turned into rentals. With prices down 30 or 40 percent or more in some places, this kind of conversion increasingly makes economic sense.

Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street
by Kate Kelly
Published 14 Apr 2009

This was the issue most bothering Geithner and Paulson that night. Bear wouldn’t fail in a vacuum, they knew. The crisis of confidence among lenders and clients would likely spread to the next most vulnerable firm—be it Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch. Both firms were thought to be overexposed to the housing crisis, Lehman had its large commercial real-estate portfolio as well as its sprawling mortgage-origination and packaging activities, and Merrill was invested heavily in enormous underwater investments in CDOs. If skeptical investors and frightened customers and lenders were able to sink Bear, a series of dominoes could fall after it—potentially taking down most or all of Wall Street.

…

“Well, our financial institutions, our banks and investment banks, are very strong,” Paulson said. “And I’m convinced that they’re going to come out of this situation very strong. Our markets are resilient. They’re flexible. I’m quite confident we’re going to work our way through this situation.” Apparently having exhausted his Bear questions, Stephanopoulos moved on to the housing crisis. It was a grueling television circuit. Paulson’s other two interviewers, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace and CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, grilled him about both the Fed loan and the state of the banking business in general. An overwhelming number of economists polled by the Wall Street Journal thought the economy was in a recession, they pointed out, and with Bear’s teetering status, the entire Wall Street business model seemed potentially at risk.

…

Paulson at Goldstein, Michael Grasso, Dick Great Depression Greenberg, Alan (“Ace”) Buffett’s friendship with Cayne’s relationship with as chairman Glickman’s relationship with market-risk gatherings of ousted as CEO partner memos issued by post-CEO role of spending curbs of Greenberger, Mala Greene, Maryann Greene, Tim Greenspan, Alan Greenwich Capital group Griffin, Ken Harrington, Donald Harrison, William Harriton, Richard Harvard University hedge funds Bear balance reduced by failure of see also specific funds Hernandez, Carlos High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund Hill, Jeremy Hogan, John Hom, Dennis housing boom housing crisis HSBC Iger, Bob IndyMac Federal Bank ING insurance, against debt default International Swaps and Derivatives Association investment banks: demise of discount window and see also specific investment banks IPOs (initial public offerings) Japan Jardine Strategic Holdings Limited J.C.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
by Safiya Umoja Noble
Published 8 Jan 2018

Conversely, the reporters found it was much more likely to predict that White criminals would not offend again, despite the data showing that this was not at all accurate. Sitting next to me was Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist and the author of the book Weapons of Math Destruction, who has an insider’s view of the way that math and big data are directly implicated in the financial and housing crisis of 2008 (which, incidentally, destroyed more African American wealth than any other event in the United States, save for not compensating African Americans for three hundred years of forced enslavement). Her view from Wall Street was telling: The math-powered applications powering the data economy were based on choices made by fallible human beings.

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See also Google PageRank; Kandis Ali, Kabir, 80 Alphabet, 34–35; cultural imperialism, 86; expansion into surveillance technologies, 28 Anderson, Benedict, 136 Angwin, Julia, 27 Anonymous (hacker group), 112, 194n4 Anti-Defamation League, 42, 44, 157, 160 “antidiversity” manifesto, 2 Apple: labor condition in China, 164, 199n43; profiling in store, 163 Arreola, Veronica, 155 artificial intelligence, 1–2, 148; financial and housing crisis of 2008 role, 27; future criminality predictions, 27 ArtStor, bias in metadata management, 145–47 Ascher, Diana, 29 Associated Press v. United States, 190n57 Baartman, Sara, 94–96, 100 Bagdikian, Ben, 41 Bar-Ilan, Judit, 47 Barlow, John Perry, 61 Baron, Jill, 134 Battelle, John, 148 Berger, John, 58 Berman, Sanford, 139, 143–44 bias.

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See also “right to be forgotten” Punyanunt-Carter, Narissra M., 89 purchasing products online, 175 racial and gender profiling, 28 racial categories: PubMed/MEDLINE, 95; South Africa, 95 The Racial Contract (Mills), 60 racial formation theory, 84 Racialicious (blog), 4 racism and sexism, 9, 186; application program interface (API), 187n5; Black people as a problem, 142–43; “colorblindness” and multiculturalism, 167–68; contributions of African Americans erased, 108; fantasy of postracialism, 108, 168; financial and housing crisis of 2008, 27; first search results, 5; future criminality of White and Black defendants, 27; #Gamergate comments, 63, 191n96; Google’s default settings, 88–89; history of enslavement and exploitation, 92, 96–98; impact of stereotypes, 105, 155; internet as a tool, 89; internet marginalization of Blacks and women, 58, 108, 165; Jezebel image, 70, 96, 98; male impact online, 58; Mammy or Sapphire image, 70, 98; n*gger application program interface (API), 4–5; race hierarchy theory, 79–80; recognition of, 25; search engine bias, 29, 31–32; traditional media images replicated, 55–56, 59.

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism
by Wendy Liu
Published 22 Mar 2020

In the meantime, the rest of the world was crumbling, too. Donald Trump had just been elected President of the United States, and in my shocked dismay I made an effort to catch up on everything I hadn’t noticed while submerged in my failing startup. Everywhere I looked, things seemed dark. One ecological catastrophe after another. A housing crisis in nearly every major city. People in the richest country in the world dying because they couldn’t afford insulin. All of which seemed like the morbid symptoms of a decaying socioeconomic order. Meanwhile, the tech industry was in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons: a cascade of sexual harassment lawsuits; billion-dollar companies revealed to be built on fraud; founders climbing up the billionaire charts while their precarious workforce sank deeper into poverty.

…

I think about the gig workers who have been killed on the job, whose families are apparently owed nothing by the company that profits from their work. And I think about the shareholders of these companies — founders, investors, early employees — who are going to cash out massively when their company gets acquired or goes public. As the tech industry booms, so does the Bay Area’s housing crisis. Houses aren’t being built fast enough to counter the increase in demand by homebuyers and would-be landlords looking for a safe investment vehicle; in 2019, the median home price in San Francisco was $1.3m for condos and $1.7m for single-family homes.17 At the same time, the city counts between 8,000 and 10,000 homeless residents, depending on how you define the term; the broader Bay Area counts over 20,000.18 There are no numbers on how many people who would have preferred to stay here have been priced out.

…

The mainstream assumption is that you’re either a pro-developer YIMBY, or you’re selfish and don’t want any new houses to be built. The pro-developer argument goes something like this: if developers are permitted to build enough new units to meet demand, then supply and demand will equalise, and prices will stabilise; eventually, the housing crisis will fix itself. In the meantime, it’s sad that people are being priced out of their homes, but the best way to fix it is to allow the market to do what it does best. But what is the market really good at optimising for? Given the current excess of global capital, the market’s most pressing task is finding new investment opportunities.

The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Coming Currency Crisis With Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments
by Charles Goyette
Published 29 Oct 2009

See Treasury bonds Deflation bailout, effects on economic impact of myths about “pushing on a string” argument De Gaulle, Charles Deng Xiaoping Digital gold currencies GoldMoney Dollar as currency reserves deterioration, and oil-pricing alternatives devaluation and Fed overseas holdings Dollar standard benefits to U.S. global dumping of Economic collapse, signs of Economic crisis (2008- ) bailouts command economy threat credit crisis and dollar standard federal debt government actions. See Federal Reserve housing crisis impact of and interest rate cuts Iraq war, cost of and job losses See also specific topics e-gold Elements ETNs Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008), operation of Energy independence, myth of Energy trusts, recommendations Enerplus Resources Fund Trust (ERF) Engelhard England coinage debasement, impact of goldsmith as banker inflation and paper money See also Great Britain Erhard, Ludwig Ethanol Euros euro ETF (FXE) replace dollar Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) bond cautions about commodities-based foreign currency-based gold-based nationalization risk oil-based silver-based trading/operation of Exchange-traded notes (ETNs) commodities-based Elements ETNs Fannie Mae China/Japan holdings Federal debt amount of (2009) debt ceiling, increase foreign holders of hidden debt infinite horizon discounted value concept inflation as remedy interest expense on Medicare Part D, unfunded liability example monetizing debt percentage of GDP in trillions Federal deposit insurance Federal Reserve auditing of bailout funds cooling economy, actions for criticisms of system and debt monetization and devaluation of dollar federal funds rate fractional reserve banks inflation, creating by interest rate cuts and monetary policy and mortgage meltdown open market operations and Plunge Protection Team and politicized money public/private nature of secrecy related to stimulating economy, actions for as unconstitutional Federal Reserve Act (1913) Federal Reserve Notes Fiscal policy, defined Fisher, Richard Florin Food production demand, future view See also Commodities as investment Ford, Gerald Foreign currency, hard currencies Foreign currency as investment digital gold currencies exchange-traded funds (ETFs) speculative nature of Foster, Richard S.

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See also Gold coinage rise in price (2002-2008) Gold as investment broker, finding bullion bars coins commissions to seller digital gold currencies exchange-traded funds (ETFs) gold/silver ratio gold stocks index-type fund percentage of portfolio premium price forecasts pricing rare coins, avoiding sale, IRS reporting requirements storage, physical Gold coinage authentic, identifying to buy, recommendations and development of civilizations rare coins U.S., historical view Goldman Sachs GoldMoney Gold Reserve Act (1934) Goldsmiths, as bankers Gold standard abandoned, United States Bretton Woods agreement Grant, James Great Britain gold standard nationalization oil reserves of Great Depression Greenbacks Greenspan, Alan on dollars held abroad on housing bubble interest rate cuts on WIN program Gresham’s law Gross domestic product (GDP), federal debt in Gulf War Hard Assets Producer (HAP) fund Hard currencies Hayek, F.A. He Fan Hickey, Fred Hitler, Adolf Housing crisis and Fed and interest rate cuts jingle mail Hunt, Bunker Hunt, Herbert al-Husseini, Sadad Hyperinflation and “crack-up boom,” features of Israel past periods of political implication of Index-type fund, gold-based India, poverty, decline of Indian rupee ETF (ICN) Infinite horizon discounted value Inflation as alternative to taxation and coinage debasement core inflation rate and distortion of market double-digit.

…

See Hyperinflation Federal Reserve, creation of historical view inflationary recession and malinvestment as monetary phenomenon official explanations of persistence of and price ceilings and price increases as remedy to debt as remedy to inflation and stagflation as theft Interest rate cuts economic impact of and housing crisis to stimulate economy Interest rates and bond prices raising, to cool economy and stagflation Investment recommendations bonds commodities foreign currencies gold gold/silver ratio information/resources for investors oil silver Iran, oil, pricing in euros Iraq war cost of and global rejection of America nonsupporting countries IRS bank transactions, reporting to financial behavior, reporting to See also Taxation Isaac, William iShares COMEX Gold Trust (IAU) iShares Silver Trust (SLV) Israel, hyperinflation James II, King of England Japan Fannie and Freddie holdings yen payable Treasuries, call for Japanese yen ETF (FXY) Johnson, Chalmers Johnson, Lyndon B.

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything
by Jason Kelly
Published 10 Sep 2012

The largest deal was the $8.5 billion purchase of HD Supply, the contractor-oriented arm of Home Depot, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Perhaps to underscore Conway’s own point, that deal turned into one of the more troubled of the boom era, struggling mightily in the teeth of the U.S. housing crisis. Conway is, at his core, a deal guy, and widely regarded as one of the smartest investors in private equity. He is affable and physically imposing, and while charming and self-effacing, he is arguably the most feared person inside the firm. A practicing Catholic who attends Mass most days, he grew up in New Hampshire and earned his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth.

…

In 2009, at the depths of the credit crisis, private equity deals were less than 7 percent. By 2011, they’d regained their place, accounting for just less than 17 percent. Any explanation of the leveraged buyout boom of 2005 to 2007 inevitably includes the phrases “cheap debt” or “easy credit.” The parallels to what led to the housing crisis are hard to ignore. Just as financing was available for homebuyers to buy houses beyond what they thought they could afford, so too was debt available for private-equity firms to eye targets, bid up prices and buy companies that had previously been far beyond their reach. Part of it was the size of the equity funds they’d collected from pensions and endowments eager, and in some cases desperate, for the returns buyout firms had historically delivered.

…

CD&R paid $1.5 billion for the business and eventually took it public in 1995. CD&R has largely stuck with the business of carve-outs, buying Hertz with Carlyle from Ford and US Foods from Royal Ahold in well-timed deals, and the contractor supply business from Home Depot (called HD Supply), in a very poorly timed deal at the onset of the financial and housing crisis. In its modern iteration, CD&R has become a full- or part-time home for some of the highest-profile former chief executives of global companies, including Jack Welch, arguably the most famous CEO of all time. After Welch joined as a senior advisor in 2001, CD&R added A.G. Lafley, who ran Procter & Gamble, and former Tesco CEO Terence Leahy.

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 15 Mar 2015

But it is the poor, and African-Americans, who are most likely to spend their late teens and early twenties in prison, rather than at school.1 The article takes up the issue in the context of America’s housing crisis, and one aspect of it in particular: the “robo-signing crisis.” In their rush to issue bad mortgages, banks didn’t pay attention to record keeping. When the inevitable housing crisis arrived, and it came time to throw people out of the homes for which banks had gladly lent them money only a few years earlier, the banks’ records of who had repaid what were a mess. Many states have a system in which banks can simply sign an affidavit that they have examined the records and that the individual who is being declared in foreclosure does in fact owe the money alleged.

…

We could have prevented the mortgage crisis, if we had only more effectively enforced laws already on the books, regarding predatory and discriminatory lending—and if the Fed had lived up to its responsibilities in enforcing standards of lending in the mortgage market. “The One Housing Solution Left,” written with Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s, argues that there were alternative ways of handling the housing crisis, after it emerged—borrowing an idea that had worked in the Great Depression and that would have cost the government nothing. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon introduced a bill, Rebuilding American Homeownership, which would have accomplished this. And there was even a strategy for doing this within the political constraints of the time.

…

Then comes bewilderment: How could we let this happen again? Officials promise to fix things. Something is done about the most egregious abuses. People move on, reassured that the crisis has abated, but suspecting that it will recur soon. The crisis that is about to break out involves student debt and how we finance higher education. Like the housing crisis that preceded it, this crisis is intimately connected to America’s soaring inequality, and how, as Americans on the bottom rungs of the ladder strive to climb up, they are inevitably pulled down—some to a point even lower than where they began. This new crisis is emerging even before the last one has been resolved, and the two are becoming intertwined.

The Origins of the Urban Crisis
by Sugrue, Thomas J.

There were African American-run savings and loan associations that financed black homebuyers, but because they were undercapitalized, they made little impact. Blacks looking for their own homes were left to turn to loan sharks or to buy homes using land contracts at high interest rates.43 Urban Redevelopment Postwar highway and urban redevelopment projects further exacerbated Detroit’s housing crisis, especially for blacks. Detroit’s city planners promised that the proposed system of cross-city expressways would dramatically improve the city’s residential areas, as well as bolster the city’s economy. For the thousands of blacks who lived in the path of Detroit’s first expressways, both promises were false.

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The debates over housing in the 1940s were to have profound ramifications for the fate of federal policy in the city for the next twenty years and would set the terms for debate on—and limit—the next generation of social policy, the Great Society.5 A New Deal in Housing From the 1930s through the early 1950s, the federal government, city officials, and housing reformers looked to an alternative to Detroit’s private market to solve the city’s housing crisis. In place of inferior accommodation for the poor, government-subsidized developments would be built throughout the city. The construction of public housing, argued its advocates, would eliminate the city’s overcrowded, dangerous slums. Not only would public housing offer workers and the poor clean, new, affordable shelter, it would serve as a tool of social engineering.

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Official approval of segregation, he argued, “has a detrimental effect,” fostering “distrust and disbelief in government on the part of minority and liberal” groups, and giving “official sanction to the prejudices of others.”106 During the Cobo administration, DHC policy remained unrelentingly segregationist, as officials defended “the right of the landlord to operate his property as he wishes or take the tenants he wants to take in.”107 In response to pressure from civil rights orgnaizations, city officials began the token integration of public housing projects in 1953 and 1954, but not until 1956, after the Detroit Branch of the NAACP won a lawsuit that challenged the city’s racial policy, did the city open all public housing to blacks, and even then desegregation was haltingly slow. As late as the early 1960s, four public housing projects were virtually all-white, with token black residents, and two projects were all-black.108 The dilemma of the housing crisis for Detroit’s poor was still unresolved in the late 1950s. The city directed blacks needing homes to its already crowded center-city projects, and defended the concentration of blacks as the necessary consequence of slum removal. James Inglis, director of the City Housing Commission in 1949, stated that black housing projects were by necessity high-density because of the high land prices in the center-city areas where slum housing had been cleared.

Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age
by Lizabeth Cohen
Published 30 Sep 2019

After he led groundbreaking urban renewal efforts in the deteriorating cities of New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1950s, and Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1960s, Logue was hailed as the savior of New York State’s troubled cities—until the UDC’s sudden downfall. In his defense, Logue stressed the UDC’s undeniable accomplishments. Faced with an acute housing crisis and New York voters’ repeated rejection of referenda to remedy it, the UDC had innovated a new public-private funding approach. In place of old-style urban renewal, which depended on federal funds in ever shorter supply with the rising costs of the Vietnam War, Logue and Rockefeller had developed a new paradigm for urban revitalization.

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As I watched events unfold in New Orleans, the debates that animated Logue’s story—who’s in charge, who should have a say, who benefits, and who pays the bill—took on real-life resonance before my eyes. Similarly, the Great Recession of a few years later, with its massive wave of foreclosures and talk of shrinking cities, gave me another ringside seat from which to watch urban decline and strategies of revival. As my writing of this book neared its end, the urban housing crisis of our own time became more pressing. And the United States elected a real estate developer for its forty-fifth president, with yet unknown long-term consequences for urban policy. This history of making and keeping American cities viable remains relevant in the twenty-first century because many cities are still challenged by formidable problems.

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Margaret’s keenness for modern design was interspersed in her letters with political commentary condemning racial segregation and endorsing liberal candidates in Smith’s mock Democratic Party convention, indicating that all were a part of a consistent worldview. A year later, as Margaret contemplated their next move to Hartford, she wrote, “I’d love a Lustron home,” referring to the innovative, prefabricated, porcelain-enameled steel houses developed to meet the housing crisis after World War II.120 Soon after the Logues returned to New Haven in 1953, they decided to build a new house in the modern style. They hired Chester Bowles’s son Ches, who had recently graduated from the Yale School of Architecture, to design it. “We live in the only modern house in our part of town,” Logue proudly reported to his Yale class secretary.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers
by Stephen Graham
Published 8 Nov 2016

Such properties, the Observer’s Alex Preston argues, ‘have become lavishly upholstered safety deposit boxes’66 – buildings that consume iconic views for largely absentee owners while appreciating vast speculative profits. As in Vancouver and New York, many will remain unoccupied, their darkened façades and empty rooms looming arrogantly and absurdly over a population experiencing its worst housing crisis in living memory. London also provides a classic example of the ways in which simplistic critiques and representations of the supposed failures of vertically built mass social housing have paved the way for the proliferation of towers for the super-rich. Speaking of one of the forty-three-floor elite housing towers in Stratford, one legacy of London’s Olympics-based ‘regeneration’ in 2012, architecture critic Juston McGuirk ponders that the building is the ‘sort of high-rise that was supposed to be unpopular in this country [the UK], discredited architecturally and politically, at least when it was called council [social] housing.’67 In 2013, 85 per cent of all housing purchases in inner London – largely those in the higher and ‘super-high’ price brackets – were being snapped up by non-UK nationals (mainly nationals from China, Singapore, Malaysia, Russia and Hong Kong, places where London real estate agents hold lavish prebuild sales events).68 Such frenzied speculation, often as a means of anonymously recycling money derived from corruption in a city now widely regarded as the world capital of money laundering,69 is pushing already-astronomical prices further ‘into the stratosphere’.70 Startlingly, as in New York, the numbers of residential super-high towers in London are rapidly overtaking the more traditional towers of corporate and banking headquarters.

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Meanwhile, the totally inadequate production of affordable or social housing means that London’s poorer and middle-class populations are either displaced altogether or squeezed into ever more overcrowded and overpriced accommodation within the rest of London’s housing stock. Between 2012 and 2015, over 50,000 low-income families were physically displaced from inner London because of the housing crisis combined unprecedented cuts in welfare funding.75 Many low-wage workers who remain are pivotal to the functioning of the city, but are crammed into tiny, illegally rented and often dangerous spaces in attics, basements, sheds and garages. Often highly overcrowded, with no provision for decent sanitation or fire escapes, and with no official record on maps and statistical registers, such improvised dwellings become extremely vulnerable to fires.

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, Too Much, 14 March 2014. 74Knight Frank, ‘Tall Towers’, London, 2012. See knightfrank.co.uk/research/tall-towers-2012-1101.aspx. 75Daniel Douglas, ‘Over 50,000 Families Shipped Out of London Boroughs in the Past Three Years due to Welfare Cuts and Soaring Rents’, Independent, 29 April 2015. 76Antonio Olivo, ‘Housing Crisis Drives Families into Overcrowded Living Conditions’, Chicago Tribune, 28 March 2010. 77Rowan Moore, ‘London Is Being Transformed with 230 Towers: Why the Lack of Consultation?’ Observer, 29 March 2014. 78Mira Bar-Hillel, ‘What Does the Skyrocketing Price of Property in the Capital Mean for Society?’

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement
by Amy Lang and Daniel Lang/levitsky
Published 11 Jun 2012

Oscar is living with friends, so the idea of escaping a full house and staying with the Ogawa community for the night was appealing. Though he didn’t think that there were very many people there in the same position as he, he did feel very welcome and at home. Oscar had been out of work since the housing crisis began three years ago. Though he considered Occupy Oakland a good start, he was skeptical about whether the system could be changed at all. He wasn’t sure if he would stay another night, though I did see him there later after sunset setting up a tent. The space had attracted some homeless people as well who seemed to have a mixture of practical and political reasons for being there.

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One of the speakers representing Move On, Charles Davidson, was someone I had interviewed in April at the US Uncut tax day demonstration.2 I remembered that at that time he expressed frustration at the national Move On organization, and was dissatisfied with some of their capitulations and their retreat on US wars and occupations. I asked him via email if he had a statement about the issue. Davidson wrote that the march was focused on budget cuts on healthcare, social programs and infrastructure, and on pressuring Congress to create jobs and address the housing crisis. Davidson also stressed that he did not trust the Democratic Party, and that he didn’t support Move On’s alliances with the party in general, but that he did support certain progressive Democrats such as Barbara Lee and Dennis Kucinich. He also stressed that there were many Move On members who’d been involved in political activism for years, and that the Occupy movement should try to embrace, rather than alienate, them and the union members that would be involved in the event.

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People are living too long There have also been a rash of stories recently in the UK, scapegoating old people for just about every economic woe we have. First, there are too many pensioners and we can’t afford them – so they need to pay more, work for longer and get less.6 Then, a report by the Intergenerational Foundation told us that the housing crisis was down to these pesky old-timers living in houses that were ‘too big’ and were therefore off limits to young families.7 That’s right, it’s not a property bubble. It’s not that all the council houses were sold off to bribe some working-class people into thinking they were Tories. It’s nothing to do with extortionate house prices and unachievable deposits.

Artificial Whiteness
by Yarden Katz

In North and South America, Europe, and Asia, Blackstone has acquired buildings and converted them into rental units, which tenants have demonstrated are often uninhabitable. As the company increases rent prices, it ruthlessly evicts those who cannot pay, and in the United States, Blackstone has also been fighting against rent control. The United Nations’ housing advisor has flagged Blackstone as a major contributor to a global housing crisis in which tenants increasingly find themselves at the mercy of “faceless corporations.”46 Blackstone has also extended its reach into the Amazon rainforest. Blackstone-owned firms develop ports and roads, thereby fueling the hostile takeover of lands by agribusiness that damages indigenous land and sovereignty.47 Blackstone’s practices fit within a long history of dispossession sanctioned by state violence and international government alliances.

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New York University, “New Artificial Intelligence Research Institute Launches: First of Its Kind Dedicated to the Study of Social Implications of AI,” press release, November 20, 2017, https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/new-artificial-intelligence-research-institute-launches.   46.   Patrick Butler, “UN Accuses Blackstone Group of Contributing to Global Housing Crisis,” Guardian, March 26, 2019.   47.   Ryan Grim, “A Top Financier of Trump and McConnell Is a Driving Force Behind Amazon Deforestation,” Intercept, August 27, 2019.   48.   Jon Lee Anderson, “Jair Bolsonaro’s Southern Strategy,” New Yorker, April 1, 2019.   49.   See Group of MIT students, faculty, staff and alumni, “Celebrating War Criminals at MIT’s ‘Ethical’ College of Computing,” Tech, February 14, 2019; Danny McDonald, “MIT Group Calls for University to Cancel Celebration of New College, Apologize for Henry Kissinger Invite,” Boston Globe, February 18, 2019; Zoe Sheill and Whitney Zhang, “Protesters Gather Against College of Computing Celebration,” Tech, March 7, 2019.

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Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.” In Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency 81 (2018): 1–15. Butler, Patrick. “UN Accuses Blackstone Group of Contributing to Global Housing Crisis.” Guardian, March 26, 2019. Campolo, Alex, Madelyn Sanfilippo, Meredith Whittaker, and Kate Crawford. AI Now 2017 Report. AI Now Institute, January 2017. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/ai-now-2017-report/. Caplan, Robyn, Alex Rosenblat, and danah boyd. “Open Data the Criminal Justice System and the Police Data Initiative.”

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead
by Alan S. Blinder
Published 24 Jan 2013

As we shall see, these three problems—plus a myriad of details—made mortgage modifications look economically difficult, legally problematic, and politically toxic. HAVEN’T WE SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE? Once before in history, America experienced the frightening double whammy of a megarecession coupled with sharp declines in home prices. That was during the Great Depression. Back then, President Franklin Roosevelt and Congress reacted to the housing crisis with a burst of policy activism that put the governments of 2007–2010 to shame. The New Deal housing programs included establishing the FHA to insure home mortgages, Fannie Mae (then the FNMA, a government agency) to create a secondary market in mortgages, the Federal Home Loan Banks to provide funds to mortgage lenders, and the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation to insure deposits at thrift institutions.

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And I sketched a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggesting that the new HOLC, like the original, could turn a modest profit in the end. I was not alone in doing so. Economists Paul Davidson and Alex Pollock had the idea of reviving the HOLC before I did, and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) advocated something similar. By coincidence, a few days later I attended a meeting of House Democratic leaders where the then-budding housing crisis was on the agenda. My HOLC idea came up in passing—but, believe me, only in passing. It was rejected instantly as being wildly too expensive. At that stage, the TARP was still eight months away, and neither politicians nor their constituents were thinking about committing hundreds of billions of dollars of public money.

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The banking plan that Treasury Secretary Geithner sketched in his first major speech on February 10, 2009, had four main components. One of them was the bank stress tests. Two others were new programs meant to accomplish the original stated purposes of the TARP: buying troubled assets. The fourth was, in Geithner’s words, “a comprehensive plan to address the housing crisis.” Unfortunately, he also added, “We will announce the details of this plan in the next few weeks,” which led all hell to break loose in the jittery financial markets. After all, the new administration had been in office for three weeks already, and their plan was not complete! It took Geithner only eight more days to finish the job.

Global Financial Crisis
by Noah Berlatsky
Published 19 Feb 2010

THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS The Global Financial Crisis Other Books of Related Interest: At Issue Series The American Housing Crisis Introducing Issues with Opposing Viewpoints Series Globalization Opposing Viewpoints Series Consumerism Debt The Global Financial Crisis Noah Berlatsky, Book Editor Christine Nasso, Publisher Elizabeth Des Chenes, Managing Editor © 2010 Greenhaven Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning Gale and Greenhaven Press are registered trademarks used herein under license. For more information, contact: Greenhaven Press 27500 Drake Rd. Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535 Or you can visit our Internet site at gale.cengage.com ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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The Weakness of Banking Regulations Caused the Crisis Vince Cable Some British banks have grown too big to fail, and perhaps too big for regulators to handle. Yet they want freedom from regulation and freedom to persue high risk investments. But the British taxpayer should not be responsible for financial risks taken outside the nation’s borders. 42 5. Low Interest Rates Caused the Crisis Tito Boeri and Luigi Guiso 53 The housing crisis was fueled by the actions of the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, who kept interest rates low. These circumstances encouraged people to borrow too much to pay for homes they could not afford. 6. Abandoning the Gold Standard Caused the Crisis Dominic Lawson 59 If currency is not backed by gold, politicians and bankers will simply print money, resulting in inflation and a cycle of boom and bust.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World
by Aaron Hurst
Published 31 Aug 2013

Whereas the Baby Boomers and Gen X “divorced” their professional lives from personal and civic arenas, Millennials have blurred the line between professional development and personal self-expression (for example, using social media to deliberately leverage their individuality) and eagerly seek out to reconcile their personal values and desire to serve others in a professional setting. Millennials were raised to believe that “they can be whatever they want to be” and don’t want to settle for a less-than-meaningful life. In a major study of Millennials, the Pew Research Center recently concluded: “Whatever toll a recession, a housing crisis, a financial meltdown and a pair of wars may have taken on the national psyche in the past few years, it appears to have hit the old harder than the young.…Millennials [are] confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.”4 Millennials were not only born into a world of much more perceived affluence than prior generations, but also into one in which these values and aspirations were gaining traction.

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The threat is no longer distant; we no longer look outside our immediate communities to see people suffering devastating consequences from our warming climate, the scarcity of freshwater, or the infiltration of our reservoirs by toxic wastes. The threats are omnipresent. The economic disaster and housing crisis of 2008—the “Great Recession”—has also forced many people and companies to change their behavior as consumers and employers. The impact of this recession still isn’t entirely clear, but Millennials, who came of age in this reality, developed a different set of priorities in response to this new context.

The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want
by Diane Mulcahy
Published 8 Nov 2016

According to Wolff, both the increasing gap in wealth inequality and the financially fragile state of the middle class stems from their overinvestment in their homes. The overconcentration in housing and the high levels of debt the middle class carry in their homes hurt them badly in the Great Recession and housing crisis of 2008. Wolff looked particularly at the years 2007 to 2013 to assess the impact of these two events and found that they hurt the broad middle class the most: “The sharp fall in median net worth and the rise in overall wealth inequality over these years are traceable primarily to the high leverage of middle-class families and the high share of homes in their portfolio.”

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Housing has delivered persistently low rates of return relative to other asset classes like stocks and mutual funds.5 The middle class has overinvested in an asset that underperforms. The long-term rate of return (from 1983–2013) for financial assets like stocks has been about 9 percent, compared to the 3.5 percent return on residential real estate over that same time period. During the Great Recession and housing crisis (2007–2010), residential real estate returns fell by about 7 percent, twice as much as financial assets returns, which declined by only 3.7 percent. And real estate has been slow to recover. After the recession, from 2010–2013, residential real estate returned nearly 5 percent, but financial assets have delivered more than double the returns—over 12 percent.

The Passenger
by The Passenger
Published 27 Dec 2021

You had to let it melt respectfully away even if it stuck like gum to the roof of your mouth and you had to tease it down quietly with your tongue before swallowing. I recently described this video to the author Catherine Dunne, sitting in her bright home in Dublin city filled with bookcases and artworks. We were meeting to speak about the difference between our generations when it came to religion in Ireland, but the housing crisis was the first thing we talked about, with me in my early thirties renting with three other people the same age or older, and with most people I know generally priced out of the life our parents had. My generation faced an ever-deepening economic inequality while growing up in an Ireland that was at least breaking free from a de facto theocracy, further pursuing opportunities and rights that were long fought for.

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This installation is my most purposeful series of house-like structures to date; from 2017 to 2018 I sat for four or five hours most evenings cradling these small structures – first carving and later assembling them, and later again painting and repainting them. As I worked I would listen to the radio, and it was only towards the end of the project that I realised how the national news stories that had dominated that twelve-month cycle concerned the worsening housing crisis. CRUMBLING DREAMS For many years now housing has been central to Ireland’s public debate. Investment in bricks and mortar has always been very popular on the island, and even before the Celtic Tiger boom Ireland had one of Europe’s highest rates of property ownership, something that was further accelerated by easy access to credit that in time led to the real-estate bubble.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

Indeed, the proportion of tenants who receive Housing Benefit is typically higher in ex-council properties that are now privately rented than it is across the private rented sector as a whole; in 2015, in Renfrewshire in Scotland, some 43 per cent of Housing Benefit claimants in the private rented sector were found to be living in properties purchased under Right to Buy.56 Another state-facilitated mechanism of gain realization for rentiers has involved public bodies buying back, at inflated prices, the very land that they had previously privatized at a discount. This has happened with housing land: in the face of a mounting housing crisis, numerous local authorities have reacquired homes sold under Right to Buy – Ealing council in London, for instance, spending over £100 million buying back 516 properties originally sold for less than £20 million.57 And this has happened with other types of land as well. A striking example is railway freight sidings and yards.

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And yet the very same credit-fuelled boom in residential land prices that made many people feel like neoliberalism’s winners – and helped them to ride out its vicissitudes – has ultimately pushed homeownership beyond reach for younger generations, dragging owner-occupancy rates back down to around 60 per cent and crystallizing the grievances of millions of renters who not only feel but know themselves to be neoliberalism’s losers.113 The Resolution Foundation estimated in 2016 that the UK’s millennial generation born between 1981 and 2000 will on average have spent £44,000 more on housing rent by the time they reach 30 than the baby-boomer generation born between 1946 and 1965 did.114 ‘The current housing crisis’, Will Self is therefore right to conclude, is not so much emblematic of a transmogrification from a social market economy to a neoliberal one. It is constitutive of that process: the asset transfer from the state to the rich; the pump-priming of the value of those assets; the forcing of the poor into more expensive private rental accommodation – all of which measures are underpinned by a financial system heavily dependent on mortgage lending.115 In a sense, Right to Buy, in aiming to reduce levels of rentierism (albeit public-sector rentierism), was always a contradictory, doomed project.

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See, for example, M. Watson, ‘House Price Keynesianism and the Contradictions of the Modern Investor Subject’, Housing Studies 25 (2010), pp. 413–26. 24. M. Stephens, ‘Mortgage Market Deregulation and Its Consequences’, Housing Studies 22 (2007), pp. 201–20, at p. 211. 25. M. Robertson, ‘The Great British Housing Crisis’, Capital & Class 41 (2017), pp. 195–215, at p. 199. 26. Oren and Blyth, ‘From Big Bang to Big Crash’, pp. 610–11. 27. Bush et al., ‘Why Is the UK Banking System So Big’, p. 386. 28. M. Singh and J. Aitken, ‘The (sizable) role of rehypothecation in the shadow banking system’, IMF Working Paper WP/10/172, July 2010, p. 4 – pdf available at imf. org. 29.

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Published 2 Oct 2017

A month after Obama entered the White House, a CNBC personality named Rick Santelli took to the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and denounced the president’s efforts to help homeowners endangered by the housing crisis. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” Santelli asked the assembled traders. He asserted that Obama should “reward people that could carry the water” as opposed to those who “drink the water,” and denounced those in danger of foreclosure as “losers.” Race was implicit in Santelli’s harangue—the housing crisis and predatory lending had devastated black communities and expanded the wealth gap—and it culminated with a call for a “Tea Party” to resist the Obama presidency.

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And since the late 1970s, William Julius Wilson and other sociologists following in his wake have noted the disproportionate effect that the decline in “hardworking” manufacturing jobs has had on African American communities. And if anyone should be angered by the devastation wreaked by the financial sector and a government that declined to prosecute the perpetrators, it is African Americans—the housing crisis was one of the primary drivers in the past twenty years of the wealth gap between black families and their country. But the cultural condescension and economic anxiety of black people is not news. Toiling blacks are in their proper state; toiling whites raise the specter of white slavery. Moreover, a narrative of long-neglected working-class black voters, injured by globalization and the financial crisis, forsaken by out-of-touch politicians, and rightfully suspicious of a return of Clintonism, does not serve to cleanse the conscience of white people for having elected Donald Trump.

Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices
by Robert McNally
Published 17 Jan 2017

.: UC San Diego, Department of Economics, 2009. Hammes, David, and Douglas Wills. Black Gold: The End of Bretton Woods and the Oil Price Shocks of the 1970s. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=388283. Harrington, Mark. “Oil Credit Crunch Could Be Worse than the Housing Crisis.” CNBC Commentary. January 14, 2016. http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/14/oil-credit-crunch-could-be-worse-than-the-housing-crisis-commentary.html. Harvey, Fiona. “World’s Climate Pledges Not Yet Enough to Avoid Dangerous Warming–UN.” Guardian, October 30, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/30/worlds-climate-pledges-likely-to-lead-to-less-than-3c-of-warming-un.

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The Bank for International Settlements noted an “intense debate” about how falling oil prices would impact economies, flagging in particular the high debt burden of the oil and gas sector, which had grown by 250 percent from 2006 to 2015 and stood at roughly $2.5 trillion.99 Some worried that crashing oil prices could trigger a banking crisis and downturn as the Lehman crisis had spectacularly done six years earlier. “Oil credit crunch could be worse than the housing crisis,” blared one commentary headline on CNBC.100 Others noted that while the oil crisis was leading to losses at Wall Street banks that had lent producers sizable sums, comparisons with the mortgage crisis were overblown as the scale, complexity, and direct economic impacts were less severe in the case of shale oil debt.101 Whatever the true extent of the risk, crashing oil prices in January and early February 2016 exhibited a reminder that there is a downside to price busts, even for economies that ought to benefit from cheaper oil prices.

The City on the Thames
by Simon Jenkins
Published 31 Aug 2020

The Broadgate development in the City was no sooner declared open by the Queen than its developer, Rosehaugh, went into receivership with debts of £350 million. An extraordinary one-third of office accommodation in the City and Docklands was reported vacant. The residential market peaked and home ownership experienced ‘negative equity’. Housing ‘crisis’ had once meant soaring prices, but now meant plummeting ones. They did not recover until 1994. None the less, London’s economy was firmly set on a new course, with financial services in the driving seat. The City Corporation was able to claim that the number of foreign banks in London, seventy-six in 1959, had reached 580.

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All was forgiven when the games were declared a success, with the prime minister, David Cameron, promising they had been worth £13 billion in exports, an absurd figure. But there was no question a pride surged over London that summer, as Nero’s bargain held, of ‘bread and circuses’ for public contentment. London 2012 saw a curious inversion of London’s traditional modesty. Housing crisis – or not A sense of suspended hysteria followed the 2012 Olympics, including much controversy over their ‘legacy’. Tourism did not rise, sports activity fell and a huge site at Stratford stood aching for reuse. On one thing all agreed, the legacy must have to do with housing, for housing was ‘in crisis’.

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Such investment could only divert resources from those in real housing distress. They were not those eager for a cheaper ‘more affordable’ home, as the jargon put it, but those in genuine need of adequate housing. As in the nineteenth century, policy seemed to concentrate on the ‘deserving’ poor. London’s housing ‘crisis’ lay in distorted housing policy not a lack of house-building. The inevitable consequence for councils wishing to continue building for social rent was to cross-finance ‘affordable units’ by selling parts of their old council estates to the private sector. This was the case with the large Pepys estate in Lewisham, and Heygate in Southwark.

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

Figure 4.7 reproduces the same data. The authors of the original graphic noted that the bottom 60 per cent of Americans had 65 per cent of their net worth tied up in their homes. The top 1 per cent, in contrast, had just 10 per cent of their wealth locked up in the bricks and mortar of their property. Consequently: ‘The housing crisis has no doubt further swelled the share of total net worth held by the super-rich.’99 Taxing the rich through their property holdings alone may not be enough. Figure 4.7 Wealth in the USA: it’s the Inequality, Stupid By 2012 it had become apparent that these graphics, publicised widely in the US during 2011, were badly out of date.

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Allen, ‘Home Buyers Left Behind in Britain’s Two-Speed Housing Market’, Financial Times, 18 January 2014. 44. M. Griffith, ‘Foreign Demand Comes with Risks’ (letter), Financial Times, 5 March 2014. 45. B. Goldacre, ‘Generation Game’ (letter), The Times, 29 November 2013. 46. M. Duell, ‘All Aboard My New Home! The Shipping Containers Being Rented Out for £75 a Week to Try to Solve London’s Chronic Housing Crisis’, Daily Mail, 9 October 2013. 47. N. Shaxson, J. Christensen and N. Mathiason, ‘Inequality: You Don’t Know the Half of It’, Tax Justice Network, 19 July 2012, at taxjustice.net. 48. L. Slater, ‘Keeping Up with the Zahoors: Inside the Super-Rich World of Londongrad’, Times Magazine, 23 November 2013, p. 41. 49.

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity
by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.
Published 24 Sep 2019

I agreed with the city’s engineer’s recommendation to, essentially, go big or go home: make the larger strategic investments now and the city was going to have financial rewards in the future. It was option (c), with my hunch that the bypass would prove to be the most profitable. I was at a total loss when the results were presented. This was before the 2008 housing crisis, thus optimism was built into these calculations. Even so, for every dollar potentially to be invested by Pequot Lakes, here is the projected return on investment in each scenario: Through Town Alternative Required Improvements: –$7.34 Required and Maintenance Improvements: –$34.32 Required, Maintenance, and Growth Improvements: –$46.63 Bypass Alternative Required Improvements: +$1.43 Required and Maintenance Improvements: –$3.11 Required, Maintenance, and Growth Improvements: –$12.62 The city of Pequot Lakes was expected to lose money on all but one scenario.

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With the enthusiastic support of contractors, developers, trade unions, and others involved in the business of construction, the ASCE regularly calls for large increases in all levels of infrastructure spending. They boldly cite the obvious benefits of more infrastructure, claims that are parroted nearly unquestioned by politicians and media outlets. For example, in 2011, as governments everywhere were having their budgets hammered by the lingering effects of the housing crisis that began three years earlier, the ASCE published a report called Failure to Act,8 an analysis of the economic impacts of infrastructure investment trends. In this report, the ASCE detailed the hundreds of billions our failing infrastructure is costing American families and businesses. At that point, ASCE estimated that families and businesses had lost $130 billion due just from deficiencies in transportation systems.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information
by Frank Pasquale
Published 17 Nov 2014

Sophisticated investors could vet their purchases.20 Computer models could identify and mitigate risk. But the replacement of regulation by automation turned out to be as fanciful as flying cars or space colonization. 106 THE BLACK BOX SOCIETY Machine Dreams Consider the role of computer models in a critical part of the housing crisis: mortgage-backed securities. While investors may not be interested in any one particular mortgagor’s stream of payments, an aggregation of such payments can be marketed as a far more stable income source (or security) than, say, any one loan. Think, for instance, of the stream of payments coming out of a small city.

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Journalists and legal scholars help the persistent to peer into fi nance’s black box. They need a stronger voice in a regulatory process too often dominated by the few who profit from opacity. To be sure, there are many conscientious souls working on Wall Street. But their voices and values matter little if they can be summarily overruled by their bosses. The aftermath of the housing crisis has exposed a critical mass of unethical and hugely costly deals. It has created a presumption of suspicion for large firms—particularly those that now enjoy “too big to fail” status. Black box finance ranges from the crude to the cunning, the criminal to the merely complex. Countless narratives and analyses of the crisis have tried to pin down whether bankers, mortgage brokers, regulators, and insurers knew or should have known that the mortgage industrial complex was building a house of cards.

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Although 50 separate states run Medicaid programs, antifraud programs appear to be unifying these once-disparate sources of data. The data miners can also compare findings of noteworthy activity in the Medicare program across states.159 Functionality of this kind, spotting repeated patterns of mortgage fraud around the country, would have been very helpful in the run-up to the housing crisis. Just as a network of fusion centers can readily transmit suspicious patterns of criminal intelligence horizontally (to other state- or local-level agencies) or vertically (to national agencies), state Medicaid Integrity Programs both empower and are empowered by rapid data flows.160 The Medicare-Medicaid Data Match Program breaks down the barriers between the surveillance and analysis done by each program.161 Its successes should be a model for the entities now comprising the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), which may be able to find efficiencies (and new insights) by sharing data.

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization
by Michael O’sullivan
Published 28 May 2019

As a result, instead of earnings growth coming from more organic and tangible sectors of the economy (e.g., manufacturing of aerospace equipment, recruitment agencies, luxury goods, or technology and telecom providers), it came from the use of financial products and services to leverage underlying economic activity. Formally, in national accounts, financial products are treated as activity, though in reality they simply involve the purchase and reallocation of risk, and by 2007, this risk was not well allocated. The housing crisis was a great case in point. Cheap money boosted house prices, high house prices boosted transaction leverages, and exotic and ultimately dangerous derivative instruments magnified the impact of the housing sector on the economy. All the while, banks made money at each of these turns, and by 2006 nearly 40 percent of all the earnings of corporate America came from finance (as an aside, technology now occupies this role, and potentially, from a regulatory point of view, technology may be the new banking sector).

…

Then, also, Ireland needs to develop more acumen in the governance and management of state-related enterprises, needs to approach them from a position of principle (i.e., that education and health are public goods), and needs to better oversee the state’s role as an economic actor and procurer of services. The second issue is that Ireland still regularly suffers from imbalances in its economy, the most obvious one today being that house prices and rental charges are higher than during its bubble period, and that there is a resulting housing crisis. Ireland’s overheated property market is one area where it can learn from other small countries. In the past it has found it too easy to copy the policy model of the United Kingdom and has ignored the lessons of other small open countries (notably, the Scandinavian banking crisis of the 1990s came to the notice of Irish policy makers only after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger).

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For example, if eurozone interest rates were very low by the standards of the Irish economy and produced a housing bubble, the Irish central bank then could increase the deposit-to-loan ratio on mortgages or the finance ministry could increase the tax on property transactions so as to dampen the risk of a housing bubble. In a sign that Ireland has not fully learned the lessons of its housing crisis, it is now enduring its second housing bubble in ten years, with housing affordability very stretched and homelessness a very public social problem. Allowing, encouraging, and helping individual states to use policy tools like this would allow them to exist in the eurozone in a more stable way.

World Cities and Nation States
by Greg Clark and Tim Moonen
Published 19 Dec 2016

É urgente renegociar a dívida de São Paulo. Escola de Governo: Artigos. Available at http://www.escoladegoverno.org.br/artigos/1984‐qe‐urgente‐renegociar‐a‐divida‐ de‐sao‐pauloq. Accessed 2016 Feb 12. Holmes, C. (2016). São Paulo Is Betting Better Urban Planning Can Solve a Housing Crisis. Next City. Available at https://nextcity.org/features/view/sao‐paulo‐housing‐crisis‐master‐ plan‐zeis‐haddad‐habitat‐iii. Accessed 2016 Feb 12. IBGE (2016). Population projection for Brazil and federal units. Available at http://www.ibge. gov.br/apps/populacao/projecao/index.html. Accessed 2016 Jan 20. Jovem Pam (2014). Dilma elogia resultado de privatização do aeroporto de Guarulhos, SP.

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There has been no broad framework resembling a ‘national urban policy’ in the US for over 30 years, with national urban programmes instead focusing upon small‐area‐based initiatives for community‐led housing and eco­ nomic development. The federal government did previously play a substantial role in investing in affordable housing programmes and many of these were uti­ lised in New York City. The gradual loss of this investment stream into New York over the past 20 years has contributed to New York’s affordable housing crisis. The federal tier has also withdrawn from many financing responsibilities and focused primarily on security, immigration and healthcare challenges. Instead, it is the federal support that New York City tends to receive in response to major crises that emerges as a recurrent theme of this chapter.

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises
by Timothy F. Geithner
Published 11 May 2014

But I wasn’t ready to provide much detail yet. We hadn’t figured out how the stress test would work. And the rest of my speech was just as vague. I would announce a new program to buy some of the distressed assets that were weighing down banks, while acknowledging that it wasn’t ready. I would promise “a comprehensive plan to address the housing crisis,” with little further explanation. And I would signal that we would not allow any more Lehman-style failures, a crucial commitment designed to prevent an even more chaotic run, but that line was hedged and buried in my twenty-sixth paragraph. As the President had promised, this would be my moment in the sun.

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We needed to design a strategy to fix the broken financial system and a large fiscal stimulus package to arrest the economic free fall. We had to figure out a way to save the dying U.S. auto industry in order to prevent a regional depression in the industrial Midwest. We had to devise a plan to deal with the escalating housing crisis in order to protect millions of families at risk of foreclosure. At a time when the federal deficit was soaring past $1 trillion for the first time, we would also have to send Congress a budget laying out our tax and spending priorities, and demonstrating how we intended to limit the red ink once the economy recovered.

…

At my farewell dinner at the Fed, Jeff Lacker had quipped that my colleagues had considered giving me one of our Maiden Lane vehicles as a going-away present, since they probably wouldn’t exceed the Fed’s $25 gift limit. At the time, those assets were distressed enough to make the joke funny. The markets had welcomed TARP, but they no longer believed that TARP was big enough to fill the system’s capital hole. The President had pledged to use at least $50 billion to address the housing crisis, so we now had about $300 billion left to repair the financial system. Fortunately, we wouldn’t need TARP money to recapitalize Fannie and Freddie, because the separate authority Hank had gotten to put capital into them was essentially unlimited; otherwise, they were hemorrhaging so badly they could have drained most of the cash we had left.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

From London to Sydney, residential property prices in the leading cities danced to the same monetary jig.3 As an executive at Savills, a property consultant, commented: ‘What happened was that, for the first time, the cost of money in most of the cities was similar – you might say quantitative easing [has] levelled the global playing field.’4 Real estate brokers referred to the favoured destinations of the world’s super-rich as ‘golden concrete’.5 In the United Kingdom, the country’s ‘housing crisis’ was generally ascribed to a lack of housebuilding. But the Bank of England’s decision to maintain interest rates at their lowest level in its three-hundred-year history had a more significant impact on affordability. While UK house prices were extremely expensive relative to household incomes, relative to mortgage costs they had never been cheaper.

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Homeownership was fast becoming a preserve of the professional classes.100 The British government offered a subsidy to first-time buyers in 2013, but this subsidy pushed up house prices even further.101 Politicians promised to build more homes, but the number of new houses needed to make housing affordable again was inconceivably large. Economists at the University of Reading came up with an alternative, summarized in a Bloomberg headline: ‘The Only Solution to Britain’s Housing Crisis May be a Crash’.102 Britain’s housing affordability crisis had damaging economic consequences. A dynamic economy requires that workers move freely between jobs. But as house prices climbed, there was a steep drop in the number of Britons moving home to start a new job.103 Young homeowners who took out large mortgages to buy a house had less money to spend on other things.

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The average first-time buyer in 2015 showed an income of £50,000 or more, putting him or her in the top 30 per cent of households, according to Savills. 101. Kate Allen and Jim Pickard, ‘Help to Buy Has Pushed Up House Prices, Says Study’, Financial Times, 20 September 2015. Also, Kate Allen, ‘QE Feeding Europe House Price Bubble, Says Study’, Financial Times, 20 July 2015. 102. Jill Ward, ‘The Only Solution to Britain’s Housing Crisis May be a Crash’, Bloomberg, 10 April 2017. 103. John Ashmore, ‘How Britain’s Housing Market Has Created a Mobility Crisis’, CapX, 6 June 2019. Between 2000 and 2018, the number of people aged 25 to 34 moving home to start a new job fell by 40 per cent. This decline roughly coincides with the low interest-rate regime.

Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation With Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2009

In the same year, Fannie set itself the goal of doubling its profits in five years, and its employees were rewarded with stock options when that goal was achieved. In 1999, Steven Holmes noted in the New York Times that, by pushing through such projects, the administration could cause a repeat of the housing crisis of the 1980s: In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980s.24 But there was nothing tentative about the actions of Fannie Mae.

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See also discrimination against minorities multiple purchases, 7, 9 second mortgages, 6-7 See also housing policy Hoover, Herbert, 101-5, 109 New Deal policies and policies of, 106 Hortlund, Per, 143 Housing and Urban Development (HUD), lending expansion under Cisneros, 29-36 housing bubble, 5-10, 17-18, 113 riding the bubble, 55-58, 134-35 warning signs of impending trouble, 40-43, 70-75 housing crisis of 1980s, 33 housing policy Cisneros and, 23-25 Community Reinvestment Act and, 26-28 expanded homeownership, 23-28 exposure to risk, 24-25, 29-30, 40-43 geographic variations, 7-9 government homeownership projects, 25-28 lending community and, 25-28 monitoring of loans made, 34 ownership society and, 24, 36-40 stretching HUD rules and requirements, 29-36 subprime mortgages and, 24, 29-36 warning signs of impending trouble, 40-43 housing prices, 8, 9-10 HUD.

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2012

And it was pretty clear to almost anyone who thought about it- including, it turns o ut, Robert Sh iller- that something was going badly wrong in US housing m arkets after 200 1 or so. But he saw it as exceptional rather than system ic.6 Shiller could well claim, of course, that all of the above other exam ­ ples were merely regional events. B u t then so, from t h e standpoint of the people of Brazil or China, was the housing crisis of 2007-09. The epi­ center was the US southwest and Florida ( with some spillover in G eorgia), along with a few other hot-spots (the grumbling foreclosure crises that began in the late 1 9 90s in poor areas in older cities like Balt imore and C leveland were too local and "unimportant" be cause those affected were African-A mericans and m inorities).

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See also Eastern Europe, 140 Santiago China, xiv, 1 1 - 1 5 passim, 1 9 , 44, 46, 57-65, 1 24, 1 33; bill i onaires, 1 5 ; Ecologistes, Lx Egypt, 1 64. See also Cairo 7he Eigh teenth Bruma ire of Louis consumerism, 3 9 , 6 1 ; exception Napoleon (Marx) , 37 to global ant iwar protests, 1 1 6; El Alto, Bolivia, 79, 1 1 6, 1 1 7, 1 3 1 , urbanization, xv, 1 1 - 1 2, 1 9; US housing crisis and, 3 1 ; World El Alto, Rebel City ( Lazar) , 144 -50 Bank and, 29. See also Beijing; Chongqing; Guangdong; Shanghai; Shenzen Chongqing, 64, 1 36 Christiania, Copenhagen, 78 City of God, 1 00 Class Struggles in France ( Marx) , 37 1 4 1 - 5 1 passim passim Elyachar, Jul ia, 20- 2 1 Engels, Friedrich, 4, 1 6- 1 8 passim, 5 3 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 1 60 Escobar, Arturo, 142 European Central Bank, 24 Cleveland, 1 3, 3 1 , 56, 83 European Union, 29 Clinton, Bill, 45, 53, 54, 56 Euskadi Ta Askatasuna ( ETA) , 1 00 Cochabamba, Bolivia, 82-83, 1 1 6, 142, Excluded Workers Congress, 1 3 1 -32, 143, 149 1 37, 1 5 1 Cold War, 9, 1 24 Columbia University, 23-24 Commonwealth ( Hardt and Negri), 1 52 The Comm unis t Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 53 Copenhagen, 78 Fallujah, Iraq, 1 1 7 Fannie Mae, 39, 4 1 , 45, 47, 49, 5 1 Federal Emergency Management Agency ( FEMA), 1 60 Federal Home Mortgage Corporation.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Published 2 Jan 2003

I decide there must be something I am doing wrong, some cue I am missing. Budgie's owners had been confident that Apartment Search would find me a place. When I call another friend of a friend, a professor at a college in St. Paul who has briefed me on the Twin Cities' industrial history, he concedes to being aware of an affordable-housing “crisis” but has no idea what I should do. Those rental agents who are kind enough to talk to me all recommend the same thing: find a motel that rents by the week and stay there until something opens up.[24] So, through multiple calls, I arrive at a list of eleven motels in the Twin Cities area, all of them of the non-brand-name variety, offering weekly rates.

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But rents were also skyrocketing in the touristically challenged city of Minneapolis, where the last bits of near-affordable housing lie deep in the city, while job growth has occurred on the city's periphery, next to distinctly unaffordable suburbs. Insofar as the poor have to work near the dwellings of the rich—as in the case of so many service and retail jobs—they are stuck with lengthy commutes or dauntingly expensive housing. If there seems to be general complacency about the low-income housing crisis, this is partly because it is in no way reflected in the official poverty rate, which has remained for the past several years at a soothingly low 13 percent or so. The reason for the disconnect between the actual housing nightmare of the poor and “poverty,” as officially defined, is simple: the official poverty level is still calculated by the archaic method of taking the bare-bones cost of food for a family of a given size and multiplying this number by three.

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else
by James Meek
Published 18 Aug 2014

Thatcher and her successors have done all they can to sell off the nation’s bricks and mortar, only to be forced to rent it back, at inflated prices, from the people they sold it to. Before Right to Buy, the government spent a pound on building homes for every pound it spent on rent subsidies. Now, for every pound it spends on housing benefit, it puts five pence towards building. The response of the current government to the housing crisis is to try to make it worse. It is taking steps to increase house prices, without taking steps to increase supply. The coalition’s two most explicit interventions in the housing market have been to restrict supply and raise prices: the first when it cut, by two-thirds, the grant given to housing associations to build new homes, and the second with its mocking parody of Right to Buy, ‘Help to Buy’, offering already well-off people cheap loans to overbid for overpriced houses they couldn’t otherwise afford.

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There is a substantive obstacle in the way of that descent back into squalor: there is no neat way to separate the shortage of social housing from the shortage of housing in general. The government is pulling back in the face of a market that is failing across the board. Matt Griffith, author of an incisive paper for the think tank IPPR about the housing crisis, We Must Fix It, points out that the interconnecting problems afflicting the private housebuilding industry do not reflect a deeper economic malaise; they are the deeper economic malaise. Britain’s established housebuilders, Griffith reckons, no longer have housebuilding as their primary function.

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment
by Guy Spier
Published 8 Sep 2014

For example, analysts like Henry Blodget at Merrill Lynch were wildly bullish about Internet stocks, dressing up pigs with lipstick. Years later, the same thing happened at credit-rating agencies where analysts issued blindly positive ratings for the CMOs and CDOs that would ultimately lead to the housing crisis. As for me, my 18 gut-wrenching months at D. H. Blair had destroyed my clean copybook and brought my career to an absolute low. The résumé and reputation I had built for myself at Oxford and Harvard had been reduced to dust. And reputation in business—especially the investing world—is everything.

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See also tech bubble due diligence, 14, 16 Duff & Phelps Credit Rating, 49 duffers (chess term), 129 education, perils of elite, 21–30 efficient-markets hypothesis, 27–8 Eigen, David, 53 Einhorn, David, 56, 88, 90, 109 Einstein, Albert, 62, 111 Entrepreneurs’ Organization, 177, 185, 194 envy, 50–2, 109–10, 112, 189 Enzo Biochem, 10 EVCI Career Holdings Corp., 149, 157–60 Fabozzi, Frank, 18–19 Fairfax Financial Holdings, 35, 140 Fannie Mac, 53–5 Farmer Mac, 53–7 fee structures, hedge fund, 46–7, 67, 73–4, 79–80 Feldman, Andrew, 23 financial crisis of 2008–2009, 21, 57, 101 and addiction to Bloomberg, 118 and Aquamarine Fund, 86–99, 192 and behavioral finance, 107–9 and finding balance, 121–2 and inner scorecard, 80 and redemption policies, 47 Fooled by Randomness (Taleb), 136 Ford, Henry, 45 Fortescue Metals Group, 97 Fosha, Diana, 17 Freddie Mac, 53–5, 90 Gabelli, Mario, 73 Gage, Phineas, 102 Gates, Bill, 61, 78–9, 83, 124, 176 Gawande, Atul, 151–4 GEICO, 38, 164 Girard, Joe, 61 GLIDE Foundation, 69–70, 75–6, 175 Goldman Sachs, 7–8, 30–1 Gotham Partners, 54 Graham, Benjamin, 1, 18–19, 30, 36–7, 50, 79, 106, 146 greed, 3, 8, 16, 50, 112, 189, 193 Green, William, 85, 195 Greenblatt, Joel, 53, 106 Greene, Robert, 171 Guerin, Rick, 82, 93 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 5 Harvard Business School (HBS), 5–7, 9, 21–2, 28–9, 42, 49, 128, 130, 184 Hawkins, David, 66 Hemingway, Ernest, 17 heroes, modeling habits of, 39–40, 46, 67, 71, 96, 113, 115–16, 176–7 Hill, Napoleon, 35 Hindi, Orly, 180 Hohn, Chris, 49–50, 51, 144 Hölldobler, Bert, 104 housing crisis, 17, 90. See also financial crisis of 2008–2009 How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling (Bettger), 6 How to Win Friends and Influence People (Carnegie), 35 Hughes, Stephen, 167–9 Influence: Science and Practice (Cialdini), 148 Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Cialdini), 60 inner growth and meaning, 187–94 Intelligent Investor, The (Graham), 1, 19, 30, 79 investing checklist for, 151–70 as a game, 123–32 guideline for checking stock prices, 135–7 guideline for researching, 140 guideline for responding to sales pitches, 137–9 guideline for talking to management, 139–40 guidelines for buying and selling, 145–8 guidelines for discussing, 144–5, 148–50 rules and tools for, 133–50 use of the phrase “value investing,” 187 See also value investing IPOs (initial public offerings), 9–10, 129, 138–9 J.

Dead Companies Walking
by Scott Fearon
Published 10 Nov 2014

Chapman has never been shy about criticizing the managers of businesses he invests in, but he was particularly pointed with the brass at BMHC. He took to publicly calling out Rob as “San Francisco’s own $6 Million Man” and urged the company to reduce “its bloated cost structure.”* Even as the housing crisis became a clear supercycle event, BMHC—again, a low-margin commodity and service provider with its roots in Boise, Idaho—kept its tony corporate headquarters on the San Francisco waterfront. That fact alone, even more than the firm’s increasingly gruesome finances, convinced me to short its stock.

…

There was no reason Rob and his fellow executives couldn’t conduct their business in a low-cost industrial park or even some modest mobile offices tucked into the corner of one of the dozens of lumber supply yards the company owned. That would have not only saved crucial overhead expenses during the housing crisis, it would have shown the world—and their own employees—that they were going to do everything it took to weather the downturn, even if it meant living and working (gasp!) outside of San Francisco. Eventually, in early 2009, BMHC did move its headquarters back to its original hometown of Boise, Idaho.

The Behavioral Investor
by Daniel Crosby
Published 15 Feb 2018

Of rules and their exceptions Thus, the student of market psychology finds himself at an awkward crossroads. He understands that market timing is typically ineffectual, but is also aware of times in history when broad market levels have become obviously and grossly disconnected from any measure of fundamental value. From the Roaring 20s and the Nifty Fifty to the Tech Bubble and the Housing Crisis, periods of mania have been relatively frequent, easy to spot with typical valuation metrics and have had dramatic wealth-destroying effects. If the rule is “don’t time the market,” is it possible that there are ever exceptions to the rule? I believe that there are and that consistent with our behavioral emphasis on contrarianism, they are infrequent, painful to implement and will run directly contrary to what feels right.

…

The 1973 oil crisis resulted in rumors that toilet paper would be in short supply. These rumors led to subsequent runs on the grocery story where fearful citizens stocked up. This led to, you guessed it, an actual shortage of toilet paper that was wholly a consequence of perception. More consequentially, this was evident in the housing crisis of the late 2000s. As housing prices began their precipitous decline, more and more homeowners found themselves underwater, meaning that the market value of the home was less than the mortgage. This provides ample reason for the homeowner to walk away from the home, declare bankruptcy and be free of the whole affair.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

A joint effort coordinated by the local Labour council and property developer Lendlease, its intention was to respond to the twin problems of the housing crisis and central government reducing local budgets as the result of austerity. In this respect it mirrors outsourcing. There the solution to unemployment is jobs whose wages increase poverty, while the HDV wanted to build homes that ordinary people could not afford. In a London borough where the average home was already fifteen times the median wage, the HDV wasn’t a solution to the housing crisis – it entrenched it. This feedback loop is no accident. Neoliberalism reduces the capacity of public bodies to spend money while simultaneously intensifying social problems like homelessness and poverty.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together
by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin
Published 21 Jun 2023

, Financial Times. 37 Hammond, G., 2022, ‘Canary Wharf proposes £500mn lab project to reinvent financial hub’, Financial Times. 38 Cintu, A., 2021, ‘Record apartment conversions make 2021 most successful year in adaptive reuse’, RentCafe (rentcafe.com). 39 Feldman, E., 2022, ‘Converting office buildings to apartments could help city housing crisis’, Spectrum News. 40 Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion. 41 Reagor, C., 2017, ‘Downtown Phoenix’s rebirth has been decades in the making. Here’s how they did it’, The Arizona Republic (azcentral.com). 42 Kelly, H., Kramer, A. and Warren, A., 2020, Emerging Trends in Real Estate: United States and Canada 2020, PWC and Urban Land Institute. 43 Harmon, J. and Zim, E., 2021, ‘The rise and fall of the American mall’, Business Insider. 44 Authors’ calculations based on Zillow data. 45 Paulas, R., 2017, ‘The death of the suburban office park and the rise of the suburban poor’, Pacific Standard Magazine. 46 DeVoe, J., 2021, ‘Leaders say Arlington has the ecosystem to be the next Austin or Miami’, ARL Now. 47 Authors’ calculations based on Zillow data.

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Farouk, M., 2020, ‘Cautious hopes for slum dwellers relocated in Egypt housing project’, Reuters. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2021, ‘The labor market for recent college graduates’ (newyorkfed.org). Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, 2019, ‘The US auto labor market since NAFTA’ (stlouisfed.org). Feldman, E., 2022 ‘Converting office buildings to apartments could help city housing crisis’, Spectrum News. Ferenczi, A., 2021, ‘A city without cars is already here, and it’s idyllic’, Vice (vice.com). Ferguson, N., 2017, The Square and the Tower (Penguin). Fessenden, M., 2015, ‘Making a sandwich from scratch took this man six months’, Smithsonian Magazine. Fischer, C., 1982, To Dwell Among Friends (University of Chicago Press)

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley
Published 11 Mar 2024

The item of clothing may then continue its journey to a huge dump in Kenya, where impoverished children pick through the waste to find a few items of resalable quality.4 You rush out into the brisk, cold air, which is mercifully slightly warmer than the air in your house. Much as they have utterly failed to deal with the housing crisis that forces you to pay two-thirds of your income in rent, your government has failed to insulate people from rising energy costs too.5 You guiltily jump into your car, knowing that your decision to drive yourself to work is part of a problem that’s causing global temperatures to rise at an unprecedented rate.

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Madoff Investment Securities LLC, 120–21 Bevins, Vincent, 191 Bezos, Jeff, 75–77, 80–81, 132 Biden, Joe, 69, 70–71, 136, 140–42 Big Three asset managers, 133, 135, 137 biopolitics (Foucault), 105 BlackRock, 69, 132–37, 257 Blackstone Financial Management, 44, 133 “black swan” events, 50, 114 Blackwater, 104 Bodie, Matthew, 254 Boeing, 3–10, 86, 87, 96, 225 agreements with Southwest Airlines, 5, 10, 16 Boeing 737 MAX, 3–9, 17, 218–19 Boeing 787 Dreamliner, 4–5, 8 capitalism and, 16–17 corporate welfare and, 7–8, 29 MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), 4, 5–7 merger with McDonnell Douglas, 4, 8–9 shareholder distributions, 6 Bolsonaro, Jair, 251 BP, 64 Braithwaite, Michael, 163–64 Braun, Benjamin, 129–30 Braverman, Harry, 99–100 Brazil Amazon environmental protections, 251 Fordlândia in, 22–23, 186 Porto Alegre model for participatory budgeting (PB), 232–33, 247 Bregman, Rutger, 224 Bretton Woods, 51 British Business Bank (BBB), 156–57 Brook House (UK), 102 Brown, Matthew, 237–38, 247 Brown, Wendy, 33, 34, 143, 167 Buffett, Warren, 95 Builders Labourers Federation (BLF, Australia), 227–29 Bukharin, Nikolai, 182 bureaucratization, 34–35, 147 Burke, Edmund, 103 Bush, George W., 140 C Calhoun, David, 9 Cameron, David, 54, 154–56, 162 campaign finance reform, 259 Canada COVID-19 aid to corporations, 46, 136 Ethyl Corp. lawsuit and, 197 resistance to the labor movement, 78 Toronto Community Housing Corporation (THTC) participatory budgeting, 232–33 Canada Infrastructure Bank, 136 Capita, 164 Capital (Marx), vii capitalism, 11–17 alliances among capitalists in, 13–14 centralization of power in, xvi–xvii, 92, 136–37 central vs. corporate planning and, x–xiv, xvi, xix–xx, 14–16 class divisions in, x, xix, 11–14, 38–39, 82–84, 108, 151, 158–60, 216–18, 252, 259, 268 democracy and, xiv–xv, 147, see also democratic planning dialectic/creative tension between markets and planning, xvi–xvii, 37, 53, 123, 126 distinction between capital and labor, 30–39 feudalism vs., 12–13, 266, 269–71 foundations of, 264–66, 268–71 free markets and competition and, ix, 11–14, 15–17, 30, 36–39, 97–98, 137, 221, 268–70 fusion of political and economic power in, xviii, 10, 13–15, 33, 80, 82–84, 95–96, 104–8, 183–85, 190, 264–65 fusion of public and private power in, 142–43, 159–60 human capital and, 33, 148, 166–67 as hybrid system of competitive pressure and centralized control, ix, 16, 37, 47, 123, 269 imperialism as highest stage of, 183 international finance system as time lords of, 109, 113–14 investor-capitalists, 118, 148 Keynes and, see Keynes, John Maynard Marx and, see Marx, Karl means of production in, 12–13, 247, 264 “mini-capitalists” and, 33, 118, 122–23 nature of capital and, 11, 12–13 need for business firms in, 81–85 negative externalities, 88–89 new industrial capitalism (Galbraith), 37 pursuit of profit in, xiii–xiv, 25, 29 rewards for competitiveness, 225–26 as rule by capital vs. free markets, 10–11, 36–39, 137 socialism vs., 221 socialized capitalism (Galbraith), 97–98 social relationships in, 11, 13, 143, 157–59, 164, 170, 172, 265–66 stakeholder capitalism, 35–36, 135–36, 148 state vs. markets and, 220–22 surveillance capitalism, 27, 54–58, 94, 98–100, 155 see also disaster capitalism CARES Act (2020), 9–10 Cayman Islands, as tax haven, 42, 132 central banks, 124–32 bank bailouts in the United Kingdom and, 31–32 BlackRock and, 136 democratizing, 258 emergence of central banking, 124–25 legitimacy questions, 129–32 loanable funds model and, 114–18 quantitative easing (QE) and, 127–28, 129, 136 swap lines among, 209–10 US dollar and, 178, 209–10 see also specific central banks Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, US), 175, 189, 241 centralized planning by Amazon, 75–81 in capitalist economies, 14–16, 24, 66–71, 98, 143, 266 collective action problem and, 47–48, 67, 70, 159–61, 166–67, 248–49, 253 corporatism/corporate planning vs., x–xiv, 14–16, 27, 30, 84 democratic, see democratic planning empires and, see empire planning financial crisis of 2008 and, 49–50 at Ford Motor Company, 19–24 Galbraith on, 97–98 Gramsci on, 24 Hayek on, x–xii international finance system and, 113–14 neoliberal revolution vs., 24–26 resisting, 71–72 by states, see state planning by Walmart, 88, 264, 265 Chamayou, Grégoire, 27, 30 Chan, Jackie, 168 Chang, Ha-Joon, 146, 180, 182 Chao, Elaine, 42–43 ChemChina, 90, 91, 124 Chemring Group, 46 Chevron, 64, 194–96, 205 Chicago School, 150–51, 199 Chile democratic socialism in, 241–46 National Telecommunications Enterprise, 245 Project Cybersyn, 245–46, 247, 265, 266 State Development Corporation (CORFO), 244–45 violence of the neoliberal state in, 34 Chiluba, Frederick, 206 China Belt and Road Initiative, 171–72, 182–83 COVID-19 surveillance and, 57–58 developmentalism and, 137, 170–72 Evergrande Group implosion, 167–69, 171 state planning in, 167–72 China CITIC Bank International, 124 Chiquita (formerly United Fruit Company, UFC), 186–89 Christophers, Brett, 136 Chrysler, 29 Citigroup, 120, 124 Civil War, 144 climate breakdown, viii, 66–71 Amazon and, 79 decarbonization efforts, 67, 69–71, 78, 135, 140–41, 250–51, 256, 263 economic power of capital and, 15 Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, 251 fossil-fuel sector and, 66, 69, 139–43 Global North and, 263 Global South and, 263 Green New Deal proposal, 69, 248 need for cooperation and, 66–71, 216, 247–52 Climate Leviathan (Wainwright and Mann), 70 Coase, Ronald, 81, 83–85 Coca-Cola, 81 Cold War, ix, xx collective action problems, 47–48, 66–71, 159–61, 166–67, 248–49, 253, see also democratic planning Collins Aerospace, 219 Colombia, surveillance of Teleperformance workers, 99 Communist Manifesto (Marx), 152 Communist Party of China, 171 of Guatemala, 188 of Indonesia, 191 community wealth building (CWB), 237–38 comparative advantage (Ricardo), 179–81 computer technology ARPANET, 244 coop app platforms, 154–55, 254–55 data protection and privacy, 27, 54–58, 94, 99, 155 in democratizing the future, 264–66 dot-com bubble (1997–2001), 110–11, 120, 133 intellectual property rights and, 262 Project Cybersyn (Chile) and, 245–46, 247, 265, 266 surveillance capitalism and, 27, 54–58, 94, 98–100, 155 Walmart centralized planning and, 88, 264, 265 Connolly, James, 59, 61 conspiracy theories, xvi, 38, 43–44, 53 Cooley, Mike, 216–20 Coons, Chris, 141 COP26 (UN Climate Change Conference, 2021), 70–71 Coral Island, The (Ballantyne), 222–24 Corbyn, Jeremy, 250 Cornered (Lynn), 21 corporations central vs. corporate planning, x–xiv corporate crime and, 106–7, 119–24, 156–57, 220–21 corporate sovereignty, xiv, 22–23, 25, 80, 103–8, 143 corporatism and, x–xiv, 14–16, 27, 30, 84 COVID-19 pandemic programs, 9–10, 41–49, 59–60, 141–42, 155–56 democratic planning and, see democratic planning expanding collective ownership of, 253–55, 257 fusion of political and economic power of, xviii, 10, 13–15, 33, 80, 82–84, 95–96, 104–8, 183–85, 190, 264–65 lobbying by, 105–6, 140, 141–42, 151, 159, 259 managerialism and, 34–35, 84, 100, 108, 216 profit maximization by, xiii–xiv, 25, 29 see also taxes and taxation COVID-19 pandemic airline industry and, 9 BlackRock and, 136 call center workers and, 98–99 CARES Act (2020) and, 9–10 corporate beneficiaries of, 9–10, 41–49, 59–60, 141–42, 155–56 cost-of-living crisis, 48, 58, 63–66, 129 Evergrande (China) implosion and, 167–69, 171 fossil-fuel industry and, 64, 141–42 frauds and scams in, 156–57 housing crisis and, 43, 44–45 inflation and, 63–66 McKinsey & Company and, 53–58, 155 mortality measures during, 105 shareholder distributions/share buybacks during, 45–47, 59–60, 64 shipping companies and, 62–63, 64 state economic programs in, 41–48 supply chain financing and, 153–54 surveillance programs, 57–58, 98–99 UK responses to, 45–46, 53–61, 155–57, 162–63 US responses to, 41–45 WeWork business model and, 112 worker loss of income and poverty, 60, 63, 98–99 zoonotic disease and, 68 creative destruction (Schumpeter), 86, 95, 96 Credit Suisse, 52, 123–24, 153–54 crony capitalism, 34 Crothers, Bill, 155–56 Crown Commercial Service (CCS, UK), 155–56 Crown Prosecution Service (CPS, UK), 102 Cunningham, Ceri, 239–40 Curaçao, as tax haven, 45 D Dalton, David, 155 Danone, 46 Dark Waters (2019 film), 91 data protection and privacy, 27, 54–58, 94, 99, 155 Davis, Mike, 68 Dawn of Everything, The (Wengrow and Graeber), 224–25 Dayen, David, 89 Debt (Graeber), 125 Debt Collective (US), 249–50 Decree 900 (Guatemala), 188 de Guzman, Leody, 177 Delinquent Genius (Cooley), 217 democracy capitalism and, xiv–xv, 147 democratizing the state, 257–61 planning and, see democratic planning as synonymous with socialism (Meiksins Wood), xviii “unfreedom” and, xiv–xv Democratic Party (US) fossil-fuel industry and, 140–41, 142 in Mississippi, 236 democratic planning, 215–66 Argentina, Ciudad Futura, 234–35, 255 Australia, green bans, 227–29 Brazil, participatory budgeting, 232–33, 247 in Chile, 241–46 for the future, 264–66 human nature and, 222–26 Iceland, Better Reykjavik program, 235–36, 258–59 India, Kerala people’s planning, 233–34 international finance system and, 255–57 international institutions and, 261–64 Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson program, 236–37, 247, 251–52, 255 participatory budgeting (PB), 232–33, 235–36, 258–59 people-powered planning, 226–40, 247–52 Spain, Marinaleda workers’ collective, 229–30 state-level, 241–46, 257–61 UK, Blaenau Ffestiniog program (Wales), 238–40 UK, Greater London Enterprise Board, 216–17, 219–20 UK, Lucas Plan/Lucas Aerospace Corporation, xix, 215–22, 226, 229, 231, 247, 248, 266 UK, People’s Plan for the Royal Docks (London), 230–31 UK, Preston community wealth building (CWB) program, 237–38, 247, 255 for work and the corporation, 252–55 democratic socialism, 216–17, 241–48, 265 Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), 250 dependency theory, 184–86, 199, 205 deregulation, xv–xvi, 7, 31, 32, 51, 170, 206 Deutsche Bank, 49 developmentalism, 137, 170–72, 205–8 disaster capitalism, 41–71 climate breakdown and, 66–71 collective action problems and, 47–48, 67, 70, 159–61, 248–49, 253 corporate welfare programs and, 31–32 COVID-19 pandemic and, see COVID-19 pandemic financial crisis of 1987 and, 126–27 financial crisis of 1997 and, 51, 200 financial crisis of 2008 and, see financial crisis of 2008 (subprime bubble) nature of, 38 shock doctrine (N.

…

K., 37, 97–98 Gallagher, Kevin, 262 General Electric, 4 General Motors, 27, 29 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, The (Keynes), xi Germany Berlin Wall removal, 200–201 campaign finance by state and, 259 competition policy and, 150 COVID-19 aid to corporations in, 45, 46–47 Ford Motor as supplier to, 23–24 Green Party, 229 labor movement and, 78, 248 Nazi Party/Third Reich, 19, 23–24, 93, 122, 183–84, 226 social market economy (Röpke) and, 203 Vattenfall lawsuit and, 197 Weimar Republic, 121–22 World War II and, 158, 181 GFG Alliance, 153, 156–57 Ghana independence from Britain (1957), 177 Non-Aligned Movement and, 190–91 structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and, 200 gig economy, 92–93, 253, 254 Gindin, Sam, 31, 198, 210 Global Climate Coalition, 139 Global Intangible Low-Tax Income (GILTI), 42 Global North climate breakdown and, 263 exploitation of the Global South by, 190–91, 261, 262 Global South catching up to, 207–8 Global South as challenge to, 182–83, 246 Global South critique of neocolonialism and, 177, 208, 210–11 international debt crisis, 198–202, 262 market power and wage suppression, 93 production by the Global South in, 185 Washington Consensus policies, 200–201, 210 Global South catching up to Global North, 207–8 as challenge to Global North, 182–83, 246 climate breakdown and, 70–71, 263 critique of neocolonialism of the Global North, 177, 208, 210–11 exploitation by the Global North, 190–91, 261, 262 international debt crisis, 198–202, 262 market power and wage suppression by Global North, 93 Non-Aligned Movement and, 190–92, 193 production in the Global North and, 185 solidarity among members of, 184–86, 192 violence of the neoliberal state in, 34 Golding, William, 223–24, 226 Goldman Sachs, 48–49, 53, 54, 60, 123–24, 132–33, 225 Goodrich Corporation, 218 Google (Alphabet), 94, 95, 133 Gould, Matthew, 155 Graeber, David, 35, 125, 224–25, 265–66 Gramsci, Antonio, 20–22, 24, 157–58 Great Depression, 147 Greater London Council (GLC, UK), 219–20, 231 Greater London Enterprise Board (UK), 216–17, 219–20 Great Reversal, The (Philippon), 87–88 Greene, Marjorie Taylor, 43–44 Green New Deal proposal, 69, 248 Green Party (US), 251 Greenpeace, 140 Greensill, Lex, 152–59 Greensill Capital, 153–59 Greenspan, Alan, 127–29 Green Team Landscaping Co-op (Mississippi), 237 Grundrisse (Marx), 264 Guam, US colonialism and, 173, 174 Guatemala, United Fruit Company (UFC, now Chiquita) and, 186–90, 193 Guerra, Antonio, 195 Guevara, Che, 234 Gupta, Rajat, 54 Gupta, Sanjeev, 153, 156 H Haley, Nikki, 8 Halliburton, 178, 193 Hancock, Matt, 154–56 Hancox, Dan, 230 Harding, Dido, 54, 155 Hassan, Maggie, 141 Hawaii, US colonialism and, 173 Hayden, Grant, 254 Hayek, Friedrich A., xvii–xx, 34–36, 89, 100–101, 108, 146–47, 167, 202, 217 critique of centralized planning, x–xii Highway Code, 148–52, 165, 204 Keynes vs., xvi, 268 neoliberalism and, x–xii, xv–xvi The Road to Serfdom, vii, xi, 34, 204 Hearn, Denise, 89 Helleiner, Eric, 51 Higgins, Michael D., 217 Highway Code (Hayek), 148–52, 161, 204 Hilferding, Rudolf, 121–23 Hitler, Adolf, 19, 23 Hobbes, Thomas, 144, 222, 226 homophobic attacks, 103 Hoover, Herbert, 22 housing crisis, viii Cooperation Jackson (Mississippi) affordable housing, 236–37, 247, 251–52, 255 corporate landlords and, 44–45 COVID-19 pandemic and, 43, 44–45 financial crisis of 2008 and, 52 How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Rodney), 185 H&R Block, 106 HSBC, 124 Huffington, Arianna, 38 Humankind (Bregman), 224 I Iceland, Better Reykjavik participatory budgeting program, 235–36, 258–59 ideological state apparatus (ISA), 164–65 Ifans, Rhys, 239 immigrants labor movements and, 263 UK immigrant policies, 163–64, 263 India Bhopal, gas tragedy (2001), 90 East India Company (EIC), 103–4, 183 Kerala, People’s Planning, 233–34 indigenous peoples Australian green bans and, 228 climate breakdown and, 251 critique of European society, 224–25 in Guatemala, 189–90 land/property seizures from, 186–90, 228, 251 Indonesia Jakarta Method and, 190–92 Non-Aligned Movement and, 190–91, 193 industrial system (Galbraith), 97–98 inflation cost-of-living crisis, 48, 58, 63–66, 129 Ever Given crisis (2021) and, 62–63, 64 oil price spikes and, 62, 63 sellers’ inflation, 64–65 Volcker shock and, 198, 205 wage-price spiral argument and, 63–65 InfluenceMap, 140 interest rates inflation and, 65–66, 198, 205 international finance system and, 115 Volcker shock and, 198, 205 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 67–68 international finance system, 109–37 Big Three institutional investors, 133, 135, 137 BlackRock, 69, 132–37, 257 capital flight threat and, 93, 96, 204–5, 208, 246, 262 central banks and, see central banks centralization of global capitalism and, 136–37 confidence in, 116–18 democratic planning and, 255–57 developmentalism and, 137, 170–72, 205–8 dynamics of debt and, 114–18, 168–69, 262 economic nationalism vs., 204–5 financial crisis of 2008 and, see financial crisis of 2008 (subprime bubble) financialization in, 121–24, 199 fractional reserve banking, 114–18 fraud and scandals in, 119–24, 220–21 international debt crisis, 198–202, 262 International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, 53, 114, 176, 198–200, 206–8, 262 manias, panics, and crashes, 125–26 mergers and acquisitions, 133 planning power in, 113–14 private law and, 130–32 regulation of, 32, 113, 116, 130, 148, 150 stakeholder capitalism and, 135–36 structural adjustment programs (SAPs), 198–202 taxes and, see taxes and taxation time lords of capitalism and, 109, 113–14 US dollar and, 178, 209–10 Washington Consensus policies, 200–201, 210 WeWork/SoftBank relationship, 109–13, 117 World Bank in, 176–77, 198–99, 206–8 International Labour Organization (ILO, UK), 60 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 53, 114, 176, 199–200, 206–8, 262 International Trade Union Confederation, 75 Intuit, 106 investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), 194–98 Iraq, 105, 178, 192–93 Israel COVID-19 response, 57 Suez crisis (1956), 61–62 Italy, labor movement and, 78 J Jakarta Method, The (Bevins), 190–92 Jameson, Frederic, xix, 16 Japan developmentalism and steel industry, 172 housing boom, 127 quantitative easing by the Bank of Japan, 127–28 in World War II, 175–76, 190, 191 Jassy, Andrew, 78 Jiayin, Xu, 167–69 Johnson, Boris, 70–71 Johnson, Desmond, 164 Johnson, Lyndon B., 27, 176 Johnson, Trevor, 164 Jones Act (1916, US), 174–75 JPMorgan, 52, 120–21, 123–24 JPMorgan Chase, 119 K Kaleki, Michael, 97 Kao, Martin, 44 Kaplan, Lewis, 195 Kautsky, Karl, 121–23 Keen, Steve, 114–15 Kelly, Mark, 141 Kelly, Petra, 229 Kelly’s Bush (Australia), 227–28 Kennedy, John F., 27, 181 Keynes, John Maynard, xi, xvii, xx, 126, 149, 217, 268, 269 ambivalence toward freedom and autonomy of the masses, xvi centralization of power in capitalism, xvii Hayek vs., xvi, 268 privatized Keynesianism, 117–18 regulated markets and, xvi Keystone XL pipeline, 251 Kicking Away the Ladder (Chang), 146 King, Arthur, 228 Klein, Michael, 124 Klein, Naomi, 38, 193, 198 Kozul-Wright, Richard, 262 KPMG, 193 Kushner, Jared, 33 Kyoto Protocol, 139 L Labor and Monopoly Capital (Braverman), 99–100 labor movements at Amazon, 75, 77–79 in Australia, 227–29 “banana republics” and, 187 conflict with capital, 37, 148, 151, 160 democratic planning and, 247–48, 252–53 electoral systems and, 260–61 employer-employee relationship and, 83–85 at Ford Motor Company, 19–22, 26–29, 31, 75 four-day workweek and, 248, 253 immigrant workers and, 263 Lucas Aerospace Corporation/Lucas Plan and, 216–17 neoliberal resistance to, 15, 31, 33–34, 62, 64–65, 77–78, 148, 160, 216–17, 218, 220, 221, 252–53 in Spain, 78, 229–30 Tripartite Committee, 27–28, 30, 160 UK resistance to, 15, 31, 33–34, 62, 64–65, 77–78, 160, 216–17, 218, 220, 221 at United Fruit Company (UFC, now Chiquita) and, 187 US resistance to, 31, 62 Volcker shock and, 198, 205 wage-price spiral argument and, 63–65 wage suppression, 60, 63, 92–93 worker ownership and, 255 Land Rover, 28 Lansdale, Edward, 175 Lash, Scott, 37 Lazydays Holdings, 42 Lee, Susie, 42 legal issues competition law, 87, 150, 151 corporate crime, 106–7, 119–24, 156–57, 220–21 corporation as legal construct, 105–7 international court system, 178, 194–98, 203–4, 210 investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), 194–98 private law, 130–32 see also taxes and taxation Le Guin, Ursula K., 267 Lehman Brothers, 38, 48 Lenin, Vladimir, 59, 61, 122, 183 Lewis, John, 237 liberalism “blind” justice in, 149 comparative advantage and, 180–81 incomplete liberal revolutions and, 258 links with imperialism, 179–80 Lion Air Flight 610 (2018), 3–4, 7 Liveris, Andrew, 124 Locke, John, 145–47, 165 London School of Economics, 114 Lord of the Flies, The (Golding), 223–24 Lucas Aerospace Corporation/Lucas Plan, xix, 215–22, 226, 229, 231, 247, 248, 266 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 251 Lumumba, Chokwe, 236, 247 Lumumba, Chokwe Antar, 236 Luxembourg, as tax haven, 79 Lynn, Barry, 21 M Ma, Jack, 171 Madoff, Bernie, 120–21 managerialism, 34–35, 84, 100, 108, 216 Manchin, Joe, 141 Mann, Geoff, 70 Marcos, Ferdinand, 175–76 Marcos, Imelda, 176 Marcos, Mariano, 175–76 market power access to financing and, 96 of Amazon, 75–77, 79–81, 88, 132–34 COVID-19 pandemic and, 59–60, 65 creative destruction (Schumpeter) and, 86, 95, 96 of Ford Motor Company, 28 free markets vs., 13 monopoly and, see monopoly nature of, 16, 76–80 oligopoly and, 94, 95 over suppliers, 95 political power and, 95–96, 104–8 price markups and, 65, 76, 87, 92 Marshall Plan, 263 Marx, Karl, 52–53, 68, 82, 84, 85, 92, 94, 98, 121–25, 182, 264–65 Capital, vii centralization of power in capitalism, xvii–xviii Communist Manifesto, 152 Grundrisse, 264 means of production in capitalism, 12–13, 247, 264 Mateen, Omar, 103 MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), 4, 5–7 McConnell, Mitch, 43 McDonald’s, 81 McDonnell Douglas, 4, 8–9 McKinsey & Company, 53–58, 155 McNamara, Robert, 27, 176 Meagher, Michelle, 88, 107 Meidner Plan (Sweden), 255 Meiksins Wood, Ellen, xviii Mein Kampf (Hitler), 19 mergers and acquisitions in the aerospace industry, 4, 8–9, 218–19 of agrochemical companies, 90–91, 123–24 of Amazon, 80 big tech and, 95 COVID-19 pandemic and, 59–60 of financial institutions, 133 of fossil fuel companies, 194–96 Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, 133 Mesopotamia, 14 Meta/Facebook, vii, 94, 106 Metalclad Corp., 197 Mexico, Metalclad Corp. lawsuit and, 197 Microsoft, 95 middle class, emergence in capitalism, 98 Miliband, Ed, 158 Miliband, Ralph, 158, 159, 247, 260 military-industrial complex (US), 9–10, 23, 25, 191–93, 217–20, 244 Minsky, Hyman, 113, 114 MIO Partners, 54–55 Mirowski, Philip, 36 Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson/Jackson-Kush Plan, 236–37, 247, 251–52, 255 money laundering, 120–21, 156–57 monopoly Amazon and, 75–77, 132–34 limiting investment in, 96–97 market concentration and, 91–92, 95 measuring monopoly power, 87–88 monopoly capitalism, 99–100 prices and, 92, 94–95 problems of monopoly power, 88–89 temporary monopoly power (Schumpeter), 85–88, 96 monopsony, 93, 97 Monsanto, 90, 91, 106, 123–24 Moon, Cary, 79 Morgan Stanley, 123–24, 153 Mottley, Mia, 70–71 Mubenga, Jimmy, 101–2 Muilenburg, Dennis, 7 Mulally, Alan, 29–30 Mundey, Jack, 227–29 Mussolini, Benito, 20, 187 N Nalundasan, Julio, 175 Napoleon Bonaparte, 187 Nasser, Gamal, 61 National Association of Realtors, 106 National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), 78 Navatek LLC, 44 neoliberalism bureaucratization and, 34–35, 147 challenge of capitalist state and, 165–66 Chicago school of, 150–51, 199 consumer freedom of choice and, xiv, xv–xvi, 166–67 corporate welfare programs and, 7–8, 25, 29–33, 140–42, see also taxes and taxation crisis of governability and, 30–31 deregulation and, xv–xvi, 7, 31, 32, 51, 170, 206 distinction between capital and labor, 30–39 “double truths” of (Hayek), 36, 152 efficient markets as lie at heart of, 36–39, 146–47, 268 “encasing” democracy around the world, 203 Hayek and, see Hayek, Friedrich A.

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover
by Katrina Vanden Heuvel and William Greider
Published 9 Jan 2009

That’s nearly twice the rate among white borrowers. Among low-income black borrowers, 62 percent of refinance loans were subprime, more than twice the rate among low-income whites. “It actually started in communities like Atlanta,” says Nikitra Bailey, a Center for Responsible Lending researcher who has studied the Southeastern U.S. housing crisis. “A lot of our older African-Americans were house rich but cash poor. So lenders came up with these scams to siphon the wealth away.” It’s a loss black America can scarcely afford, because black wealth has long been enormously dependent on home equity. In 1967, the year before the Mitchells bought their house, homes accounted for 67 percent of black wealth, compared with 40 percent of white wealth.

…

They will reach fruition when politicians and other leaders swallow their bruised egos and rethink their supine posture, arm in arm with Wall Street. That looks improbable at the moment. But voters can help them change their minds. The Suicide Solution B A R B A R A E H R E N R E I C H July 28, 2008 Afew days beforeCongress passed its housing bill,Car-lene Balderrama of Taunton, Massachusetts, found her own solution to the housing crisis. Just a little over two hours in advance of the time her mortgage company, PHH Corporation—may its name live in infamy—was to auction off her home, Balderrama killed herself with her husband’s rifle. This is not the kind of response to hard times that James Grant had in mind when he wrote his July 19 Wall Street Journal essay titled “Why No Outrage?”

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley
Published 9 Sep 2019

In the context of stagnating wages, the gap between income and expenditure would be covered by personal borrowing. 1988 was the first year ever that consumers’ expenditure exceeded their incomes.30 The Lawson boom — the economic boom named after the Chancellor who presided over it — saw tax cuts, a reduction in interest rates (once the union movement had been dealt with, of course), and an across-the-board increase in household borrowing and spending. Growth increased in the short-term, before collapsing in an equally large bust when interest rates had to be hiked again to keep the UK in the Exchange Rate Mechanism. In a mini precursor to 2008, a housing crisis ensued. But it wasn’t long before stability was restored, and debt began to climb once again — and it didn’t stop climbing for nearly two decades. The genius of basing demand on private debt was that it allowed people to buy more, propelling economic growth, whilst also directing a greater portion of peoples’ income towards interest payments and fees that went to financiers.31 Under this system, individuals would use the tools provided to them by financial markets to weather the storms created by changes in the business cycle, making a tidy profit for the finance sector in the process.32 In this way, “privatised Keynesianism” replaced the Keynesian model of demand management that governed the post-war consensus.33 Had this model relied only on unsecured lending, like credit cards or student loans, it wouldn’t have lasted very long.

…

But at the beginning of 2007, refinancing became more difficult, and many consumers found themselves stuck with high interest payments that they couldn’t afford. House prices levelled off in 2006 and then began to fall. Defaults escalated, and banks began to worry. Had the trouble ended at US mortgages, we may have been left with a US, and perhaps a UK, housing crisis. But by 2007, mortgages were no longer just mortgages. The debt that had been created by the banks in the boom between the 1980s and 2007 had been transformed into the plumbing of the entire global financial system. Every day, millions of dollars’ worth of mortgages were packaged up into securities, traded on financial markets, insured, bet against, and repackaged into a seemingly endless train of financial intermediation.

The New Class Conflict
by Joel Kotkin
Published 31 Aug 2014

Michael Boyajian, “The Death of the American Sunbelt,” Room Eight, July 19, 2010, http://www.r8ny.com/blog/judgeboyajian/the_death_of_the_american_sunbelt.html; Matthew O’Brien, “Why Is the American Dream Dead in the South?” Atlantic, January 26, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/why-is-the-american-dream-dead-in-the-south/283313. 67. Jed Kolko, “Metros Clobbered by the Housing Crisis Are Growing Again,” CityLab, March 14, 2013, http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/03/metros-clobbered-housing-crisis-are-growing-again/4991; Joel Kotkin, “Forget What the Pundits Tell You, Coastal Cities Are Old News—It’s the Sunbelt That’s Booming,” Daily Beast, March 1, 2014, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/01/forget-what-the-pundits-tell-you-coastal-cities-are-old-news-it-s-the-sunbelt-that-s-booming.html. 68.

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats
by Maya Goodfellow
Published 5 Nov 2019

The super-rich do exacerbate and help sustain the severe housing crisis; they treat housing like financial assets and help incentivise companies to build luxury, cash-cow apartments which only the very few can afford to live in. But focusing on specific nationalities like this ‘others’ inequality; rich Britons who play this same property investment game disappear, making it seem like it’s primarily outside influence that is the cause of unaffordable house prices. But these people buying and selling homes like they’re a commodity aren’t the only reason for the housing crisis. Factors such as land values and how planning permission is designed – determined largely by policy decisions – have played a huge part in the lack of affordable homes in the UK.

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell
Published 23 May 2023

The value of land has increased fivefold since 1995. Nevertheless, many among them feel the cost of housing and would like to see council tax and stamp duty replaced with a proportional property tax.40 Over half of the UK’s wealth is now locked up in land, dwarfing the amounts vested in savings. Britain’s broken housing market and housing crisis is in fact a land crisis, as Guy Shrubsole demonstrates in Who Owns England?: Politicians can talk all they like about building more homes, or slashing planning regulations to free up developers. But fail to tackle sky-high land prices, and all you’ll end up with is a bunch more unaffordable houses.

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(ed.), Grey, R., Kenny, T., Macfarlane, L., PowellSmith, A., Shrubsole, G. and Stratford, B. (2019) Land for the many: Changing the way our fundamental asset is used, owned and governed. London: The Labour Party. Moore, P. (2016) How Britain voted at the EU referendum. YouGov. 27 June. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articlesreports/2016/06/27/how-britain-voted Mulheirn, I. (2019) Tackling the UK housing crisis: Is supply the answer? London: UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence. https://housingevidence.ac.uk/wp-content/ uploads/2019/08/20190820b-CaCHE-Housing-SupplyFINAL.pdf Murphy, R. (2016) The joy of tax: How a fair tax system can create a better society. London: Corgi. 222 References Murphy, R. (2020) The role of tax after the pandemic.

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There
by Ted Books
Published 20 Feb 2013

This move back into city centers also coincided with the Great Recession. Those big houses and multiple cars, it turns out, were beyond many of our means. And it’s no coincidence, Turner says, that Airbnb — a company founded around shared housing — was born in 2008, just as the United States was entering a recession built on a housing crisis. For many Airbnb hosts, the spare rooms they rented through the service helped them keep their homes. City living, for all its allure, is expensive, but the sharing economy makes it possible for more people, whether they’re sharing a car because they can’t afford to own one, or a bike because they’ve got nowhere to store it.

The Liberal Moment
by Nick Clegg and Demos (organization : London, England)
Published 12 Nov 2009

House building levels at one point fell to the lowest level since the Second World War. There are almost one million fewer social homes than in 1991 and the waiting list has rocketed to 1.8m families. Labour has let down low income families – the very people who hoped Labour would protect them. Both the housing bubble and the social housing crisis developed because of Labour’s reluctance to disperse economic and political power. Social housing is disappearing because of the nationally-imposed Right to Buy and Whitehall restrictions on councils’ ability to invest in building new homes to replace those sold off. Both were introduced by the Conservatives but Labour did almost nothing to reverse the trends, even imposing extra constraints on councils in relation to the Decent Homes investment.

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream
by R. Christopher Whalen
Published 7 Dec 2010

And many Americans through the mid-1990s through 2007 saw the value of their homes rise dramatically, in some cases more than 100 percent over that period, leading to many people thinking of homes as speculative investment vehicles instead of a place to live. But the most striking fact coming out of the housing crisis for this author is that despite the 25 to 35 percent drop in value for many homes in major metropolitan areas, the cost of replacing many existing homes is above the current market value—grim testament to the reality of the underlying rate of inflation in the United States. The Greenspan Legacy Contemporary observers writing accounts of the collapse of the subprime debt bubble blame Greenspan and the members of the Federal Open Market Committee for the crisis.

…

But as the growth potential of the U.S. economy wanes and the baby boomers reach retirement age, all the while refusing to rein in their insatiable desire for consumption, the ability of the American economy to fulfill the dreams of workers around the world is in doubt. How we deal with the uniquely American problem of a global fiat currency will define the destiny of America and the world in the next century and beyond. One of the issues raised by the subprime housing crisis of 2007–2009 that is not often discussed in the media or economic circles is how the increasingly hollow U.S. economy will look without the positive effect of a constantly buoyant housing market. Josh Rosner believes that the positive influence of the baby boom in the decades following WWII is now becoming a serious drag on future U.S. economic growth.

…

Stevenson, Adlai Stewart, John Fat Years and the Lean Stewart, William Silver Knight (pamphlet) Stillman, James Stock investment New Era theory perspective, change Stock markets human nature, impact purchases (financing), short-term loans (usage) Stocks, decline Strong, Benjamin Bankers Trust Company exit Delano/House meeting Morgan control replacement Strong, William Subprime debt bubble, blame Subprime Debt Crisis (2008) Subprime debt crisis, Fed/Treasury assistance Subprime financial crisis, perspective (Raynes) Subprime housing crisis (2007-2009), issues Suez Canal, closing (1956) Sugar Equalization Board Summers, Larry Swanberg, W.A. Sylla, Richard Systemic risk, moral dilemma Szymczak, M.S. Taft, William Howard government debt Taleb, Nassim Tammany Hall Roosevelt, impact Tansil, Charles Callan America Goes to War Tariffs competitiveness, FDR promise FDR maintenance imposition increase protection, increase reduction FDR endorsement Hoover opposition Republican party position Tariffs for revenue only Taxes FDR increase reduction, passage Tennessee Iron & Coal Company U.S.

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 14 Feb 2017

Condo associations and residents in many cities, meanwhile, have protested the parade of transient visitors Airbnb has suddenly created in their buildings and the changes they have brought to their neighborhoods. Among other things, these opponents say that Airbnb is teeming with professional real estate operators who have hoarded housing units to turn them into full-time use on Airbnb. They claim this has kept housing off the market and worsened an affordable-housing crisis in many markets. In a handful of cities, including New York and San Francisco, they are legislating to curb the company’s growth. And the bigger Airbnb gets, the louder and tougher the fight. Over the years, Airbnb has also dealt with all the unintended consequences of putting strangers together, including ransackings, attacks, and lapses in responsibility on the part of its hosts that have led to tragic accidents of the worst possible kind.

…

It creates safety issues both by providing access to residential buildings to strangers and by failing to comply with traditional hotel-safety regulations. Perhaps most critically, they said the proliferation of units dedicated solely to renting out on Airbnb—so-called illegal hotels—removes housing from a market that is already in a serious affordable-housing crisis, driving prices up further for everyone. A much bigger blow came in the fall of 2013, when New York State attorney general Eric Schneiderman served Airbnb with a subpoena, saying he was going after illegal hotels and seeking records of transactions for some fifteen thousand Airbnb hosts in New York City.

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age
by Manuel Castells
Published 19 Aug 2012

There was widespread denunciation of the unemployment of millions of young people who had no prospects of finding a decent job. On April 7, 2011, thousands of youth had demonstrated in Madrid following the call of “Youth Without a Future,” an Internet-based campaign to defend their rights to education, work and housing. There had also been a protest against the housing crisis in general and against the shortage of affordable housing for young people in particular. One important contingent of the 15-M movement came from the youth involved in the “V as Vivienda (Housing)” campaign in the months preceding the movement. There were particularly virulent protests against mortgage foreclosures and evictions of elderly and families in need, who had been trapped by the banks in subprime loans that they would have to continue to pay for the rest of their lives, even after having lost their homes.

…

There were multiple proposals of various natures, voted on in the General Assemblies, but little effort to translate them into a policy campaign going beyond combating the effects of mortgage foreclosures or financial abuses on borrowers and consumers. The list of most frequently mentioned demands debated in various occupations hints at the extraordinary diversity of the movement’s targets: controlling financial speculation, particularly high frequency trading; auditing the Federal Reserve; addressing the housing crisis; regulating overdraft fees; controlling currency manipulation; opposing the outsourcing of jobs; defending collective bargaining and union rights; reducing income inequality; reforming tax law; reforming political campaign finance; reversing the Supreme Court’s decision allowing unlimited campaign contributions from corporations; banning bailouts of companies; controlling the military-industrial complex; improving the care of veterans; limiting terms for elected politicians; defending freedom on the Internet; assuring privacy on the Internet and in the media; combating economic exploitation; reforming the prison system; reforming health care; combating racism, sexism, and xenophobia; improving student loans; opposing the Keystone pipeline and other environmentally predatory projects; enacting policies against global warming; fining and controlling BP and similar oil spillers; enforcing animal rights; supporting alternative energy sources; critiquing personal leadership and vertical authority, beginning with a new democratic culture in the camps; and watching out for co-optation in the political system (as happened with the Tea Party).

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 3 Mar 2020

Leicester’s stock of 38,000 council dwellings had fallen to 21,000 through the enforced sales; now there were 6,000 people on the city’s waiting list for a council tenancy. The only homes the council could afford to build were for private sale. Sir Peter Soulsby, the city’s Labour leader, said, ‘At the very least right to buy ought to be suspended in cities like Leicester until we have dealt with the housing crisis.’ Councils showed enterprise by creating arm’s-length companies that were able to borrow outside the usual restrictions. Eventually, the meagre numbers – only 1,900 new council dwellings completed in 2015–16 – proved unacceptable even to ministers. Their next move wasn’t so much a U-turn as a grudging acceptance that councils were irreplaceable as builders; sotto voce, ministers told councils they could borrow more, and the pace of construction quickened.

…

One example: it acquired 250 acres of a 605-acre site at Fairham in Nottinghamshire to develop as new homes and employment space, in collaboration with Rushcliffe council and private companies. The council’s target of 13,000 new dwellings by 2028 will contribute towards the 300,000 a year target as England’s minimum. A coalition of housing groups put a figure on what it would take to end the housing crisis: £14.6 billion a year for ten years to build 1.45 million dwellings for social rent or shared ownership. That is well within reach, since governments can borrow capital cheaply against property assets that stay on its books. Glories of the Garden Some signals are green/amber. ‘Declinism’ is a British tradition, and Ipsos’s Bobby Duffy and other surveyors of opinion deplore a tendency to overdo the gloom.

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors
by Edward Niedermeyer
Published 14 Sep 2019

The Verge, February 8, 2018. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16990730/tesla-earnings-2017-elon-musk 184straining the local road infrastructure and labor and housing markets: Benjamin Spillman. “Musk plunges Tesla into Nevada’s housing crisis.” Reno Gazette Journal, October 12, 2018. https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2018/10/12/elon-musk-tesla-gigafactory-nevada-housing-crisis/1619609002/ 184were already pointing the way to the trouble ahead: Jeff Cobb. “Model 3 ‘Bottleneck’ Blamed on Chaos and Incompetence at Tesla Gigafactory.” HybridCars.com, October 31, 2017. https://www.hybridcars.com/model-3-bottleneck-blamed-on-chaos-and-incompetence-at-tesla-gigafactory/ 186one of its trademark extravaganza events at the Fremont factory: Model 3 Owners Club.

Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America)
by Louis Hyman
Published 3 Jan 2011

More credit, and not higher wages, would be enough to solve the problems of America’s cities. Toward that end, federal policy fashioned the financial innovation that made possible America’s debt explosion—the asset-backed security—that expanded well beyond its original purpose. Solving the urban crisis would require solving the housing crisis. But to fix the housing crisis, radical financial innovation would have to occur to maintain the capital flows into mortgages. As the urban riots became the urban crisis, however, mortgage markets had a crisis of their own. American mortgage markets had abruptly frozen—the so-called Credit Crunch of 1966—as investors rapidly withdrew their deposits from banks and put their money in the securities markets.

…

By 1970, withdrawals at savings and loan institutions exceeded deposits nearly every month.43 The president of the Mortgage Bankers of America, Robert Pease, declared at their annual convention that, “except for FNMA, there is almost no money available for residential housing. We are in a real honest-to-goodness housing crisis!”44 On average in 1971, $50 million worth of mortgages flowed from the capital markets through mortgage-backed securities into American housing each month. SECURING DEBT 233 In both the cities and suburbs, mortgage-backed securities provided new sources of mortgage funds. While direct mortgage assignment collapsed, mortgage-backed securities provided the financing to dramatically increase the new housing programs in America’s cities.

Who Stole the American Dream?
by Hedrick Smith
Published 10 Sep 2012

—ELISEO GUARDADO, subprime borrower The banks are playing to brokers who specialize in driving people into loans that people don’t understand…. They take a product that was exotic and move it to the category of a weapon—seriously. These loans go from being an exotic product to a hand grenade…. —KATHRYN KELLER, mortgage broker WHEN YOU THINK OF THE HOUSING CRISIS and millions of Americans being foreclosed out of their homes, you don’t imagine a bright, successful thirty-year-old like Bre Heller. When I met her, Heller was still reeling from the forced sale of her home in Orlando, Florida, stuck with a mountain of debt and furious at her bank. She didn’t seem like a typical victim.

…

The terms of JPMorgan Chase’s buyout barred lawsuits against either WaMu or JPMorgan Chase. The same happened to several pension funds for police and teachers in Detroit, Ontario, and Pompano Beach, Florida, which had invested in WaMu and were stuck with millions of shares of worthless WaMu common stock and bonds. Fraud but Almost No Prosecution What is striking about the housing crisis is that unlike the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, where hundreds of bank officials and board members went to jail on felony charges, only relatively low-level officers have been criminally prosecuted in the housing bust. Only belatedly have a few high-level government officials even acknowledged massive deception.

…

Clinton spelled out the benefits nationwide for average Americans if $1 trillion spent on Iraq went instead to domestic programs. “That is enough,” Clinton declared, “to provide health care for all 47 million uninsured Americans and quality pre-kindergarten for every American child, solve the housing crisis once and for all, make college affordable for every American student, and provide tax relief to tens of millions of middle-class families.” Increasingly, members of Congress have been pressing Obama to apply this economic logic to Afghanistan. Tea Party Republicans in the House have joined liberal Democrats in calling for defense cuts and faster withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy
by Daniel Gross
Published 7 May 2012

Indeed there are signs that progress is already being made in tackling some of the most thorny problems America faces—without explosive, fundamental change. Take housing. Falling house prices, excess supply, and the mortgage mess have been a millstone around the economy’s neck since 2007. The crisis has destroyed household wealth, ravaged banks’ balance sheets, and sapped consumers of their desire and ability to consume, borrow, and invest. The housing crisis turned out to be like Hanukkah: we were told it was going to last for a year, but it will probably last a good eight years. Residential investment morphed from a force that supercharged growth between 2001 and 2006 to one that sandbagged it. In its reports the Commerce Department points out how much each sector contributed to or detracted from growth.

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Index Abdullah, King of Saudi Arabia, 125 advertising, 7, 50, 136, 143, 201, 202 exports and, 129–30 Aegis Communications, 172 agriculture, 20, 99–101, 206, 227 exports and, 100–101, 104, 122, 154, 160 in North Dakota, 149, 153–58, 162 AIA, 35 AIG, 32–33, 35–36, 133 Airbnb, 194–95 Ally Financial, 40, 42 Altman, Daniel, 141 Amazon.com, 22, 203 American Association of Publishers, 193 American Bankers Association, 12–13 American Petroleum Institute, 104 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, 30 American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 208 Anheuser-Busch, 95, 158 AOL, 183–84, 195 A123 Systems, 211 Apple, 140–41, 143, 195, 198–201 Areddy, James T., 101 Argentina, 85, 176, 203 arms, exports of, 108–9 Armstrong, Tim, 183 Arvizu, Dan, 210 Asia, 13, 35, 87, 144, 203, 226, 228 employment and, 164, 168 exports and, 103, 105, 120, 123 inports and, 131, 138, 140, 146 North Dakota and, 155, 161 and reshoring and insourcing, 169–70, 173, 176–78 Associated Press, 174, 190, 206 Association of International Educators (NAFSA), 119–20 athletes, 126–27 ATM machines, 124, 174–76 Auletta, Ken, 183 Australia, 14, 48, 74, 103, 203 exports and, 98, 106, 122 autos, automakers, 2, 7, 14–15, 21, 34, 104, 186 bailout of, 33, 40–43, 46, 133, 136 efficiency economy and, 60–61, 69, 75, 77–79, 102, 173, 222–24, 227 efficient consumers and, 182, 190–93, 195–96 electric, 41, 79, 97, 210–11, 222 FDI and, 82, 87, 97 hybrid, 78–80, 211 inports and, 133–37, 227 Japan and, 14, 26, 41, 79, 87, 134–35, 173 and reshoring and insourcing, 167–68, 173–74 restructuring and, 46, 51–52, 78, 136, 173–74 supersizing and, 210–11 Bach Composite, 86 bailouts, 6, 20, 23, 46, 51–52, 133, 136–37 of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, 32, 35, 42–43 TARP and, 36–38, 40–42 timely policy decisions and, 28, 31–43 Bailyn, Bernard, 18 Bain Capital, 50–51 Baker, Akbar Al, 108 Bakken Shale, 151 Banco do Brasil, 95 Bank of America, 37–38, 48 Bank of East Asia, 92 Bank of Hawaii, 124 bankruptcies, 1, 82, 111, 166, 218 of CIT Group, 47–48 efficiency economy and, 78, 80 restructuring and, 44–48, 51, 53, 55, 58, 78, 136 timely policy decisions and, 40–41 banks, bankers, banking, 1–4, 16, 21, 25–26, 65, 81, 208, 217, 219 bailouts and, 6, 20, 32–34, 38–40, 42–43 of China, 20, 82, 92–94 economic decline and, 12, 17 efficient consumers and, 184, 190 exports and, 112, 124, 129 failure of, 1, 39–40, 46, 92 FDI and, 83, 85, 92–95 in history, 13–14, 36 of Japan, 29–30, 37, 47 North Dakota and, 156–58 regulation of, 19, 25 restructuring and, 45–47, 51, 53–55, 58 strengthening recovery and, 216, 220 TARP and, 36–38 timely policy decisions and, 32–34, 36–40, 43 Barboza, David, 141 Batali, Mario, 123 Bear Stearns, 32–33, 53 Beck, Jill, 155–56, 162 beer, beer business, 144, 194, 206 FDI and, 95–96 North Dakota and, 158–59 and reshoring and insourcing, 177–78 Bennett, Jeff, 87 Berger, John, 153 Bernanke, Ben, 32–33 Bernstein, Peter, 206 Berry Petroleum, 80 Better Place, A, 211 BigBelly Solar, 75, 107, 195, 204 efficiency economy and, 64–68, 72 Big Roads, The (Swift), 207 Bison Gear & Engineering, 67 Blinder, Alan, 31, 164 Blonder Home Accents, 111 Bloomberg, 33, 109 BMW, 79, 87, 97 Boehner, John, 5, 222 Boeing, 51, 108, 227 Book of Masters, 137 Bopp, Aric, 88–89 Boskin, Michael, 5 Boston, Mass., 72, 144, 192, 212, 224 BigBelly Solar and, 66–67 restructuring and, 49–51 Boston Community Capital, 225 Boston Consulting Group (BCG), 117, 166–68, 179 Boston Properties, 51 bottled water, 184–85 Bowen, Wally, 209–10 Bowles-Simpson Commission, 221–22 BP Amoco, 153 brands, 46, 159, 183, 206, 215 exports and, 111, 117, 119 FDI and, 87, 93, 96 inports and, 132, 135, 138–41, 143–44, 227 supersizing and, 199, 202 Braskem, 95 Brattle Group, 210 Brazil, 19, 100–101, 175 exports and, 101, 103–4, 109, 122 FDI and, 82, 85, 94–95 inports and, 131, 144–46 BRIC nations, 19–20, 23, 151 Broadway Partners, 49–50 Buffalo Commons theory, 150 Buicks, Buick, 78, 134–36, 227 Bull, 171 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 166, 187, 191 Burger King, 95 Burr, Aaron, 218 Bush, George W., 5, 16, 26, 30, 33, 222 business cycles, 17–18, 82, 231 Business Roundtable, 146–47 Cai Yong, 134 California, 79–80, 149, 161, 211–12 FDI and, 84, 92, 96–97 tourism in, 122–23 Campagna, Michael A., 178 Canada, 4, 48, 74, 202 exports and, 100, 122 FDI and, 92, 95 capitalism, 3, 14, 25, 45 Capital One, 58 Capital Purchase Program (CPP), 36–38 carbon, 170, 186 efficiency economy and, 61, 65, 75 taxes on, 61, 75, 103–4, 217 Card Hub, 55, 58 Cargill Malt, 158–59 Caro, Robert, 206 casinos, 85, 152 Cavendish Farms, 159–60 Census Bureau, 53 Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 222 Center Rock Inc., 108 Central Park, 85, 94, 212 Chandan, Sam, 94 Chandler, Alfred, 206 Chegg.com, 193, 195, 204 Cheniere Energy Partners, 106 Chesapeake Bay Candle, 177 Chevrolets, Chevrolet, 41, 77, 135–36, 199 Chicago, Ill., 8, 67, 90, 193, 212 China, 6–9, 14, 18–21, 25–26, 82, 164–78, 187, 217 comparisons between U.S. and, 7–8, 25, 166–67, 202, 208 economy of, 2, 7–8, 18–20, 25, 141, 148, 165, 178, 222 efficiency economy and, 62, 67–69, 71, 227 employment and, 164–68, 170 FDI and, 85–87, 92–94, 97, 164 incomes in, 20, 164–67 inports and, 134–36, 138–44, 146, 164, 227 and reshoring and insourcing, 169–78, 222 trade and, 94, 98, 100–104, 106–9, 112–14, 116, 118–20, 122–28, 164 China Eastern, 124 China UnionPay, 124 Christie, Chris, 211 Chrysler: bailout of, 40–42 bankruptcy of, 40–41, 46, 51, 136 Fiat’s acquisition of, 40, 78, 87 and reshoring and insourcing, 173–74 Chung, Winston, 97 CIT Group, 47–49 Citi, Citibank, Citigroup, 37, 53, 84–85, 172 Citic Press, 128 Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 206–7 Civil War, 18, 82 Civil Works Administration, 206 Cleveland Clinic, 126, 145 Clinton, Bill, 26, 31, 70, 217–18, 228 Clooney, George, 129, 227 CNBC, 4, 108 CNG Now, 105 CNOOC, 86 coal, 102–5, 162, 165, 202 Coca-Cola, 83–84, 143, 202, 227 inports and, 133, 137–38, 146 coffee, 139–40, 181 Coleman, 171 collateralized debt obligations, 36 Collinses, 111–14, 116 Colombia, 26, 131, 148 FDI and, 85, 88–91 Commerce Department, U.S., 1, 54, 99–100, 104, 120, 122, 125, 219 Commercial Paper Funding Facility, 34 Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, 96 competition, 3, 19, 21, 23, 80, 83, 106–7, 167, 194, 204, 228 efficiency economy and, 62, 68, 77 efficient consumers and, 193, 196 inports and, 131–32, 137, 141 North Dakota and, 148, 161 and reshoring and insourcing, 169, 179 Congress, U.S., 14, 19, 23–24, 125, 146 deficits and, 221–22 economic decline and, 3, 10 health care reform and, 5–6 U.S. credit rating and, 1–2 Congressional Budget Office, 31 Connecticut, 50, 86, 105, 140, 146, 151, 161–62, 212 efficient consumers and, 187–88 Conservation and Recreation Department, Mass., 66 construction, 174 efficient consumers and, 190–91 housing crisis and, 219–20 infrastructure and, 205–6, 209, 211, 213 North Dakota and, 152–53, 155–56 Consumer Price Index, 187 consumers, consumerism, consumption, 2, 25, 28, 81, 101, 111, 216, 219 coal and, 102–3 economic pessimism and, 22–23 efficiency economy and, 64–65, 68, 73–75, 78, 223–24 exports and, 98–99, 104–5, 107, 110, 119, 128, 130–31, 147, 154, 164 FDI and, 83, 89–90, 92–93 indebtedness and, 9–10, 53–57 inports and, 131–32, 136–37, 141, 143, 147, 227 North Dakota and, 151, 153–54 and reshoring and insourcing, 169, 172, 175, 177 restructuring and, 44–45, 53–59 supersizing and, 202, 204, 209 see also efficient consumers Cooper, Bill, 105 Cooper, Stephen, 44 CoreLogic, 190 corporations, 1, 9–10, 60, 139–43, 163–67, 169–85, 192–206, 225 comparisons between consumers and, 181, 185, 189, 195 and costs of labor, 164–67 economic optimism and, 23–24 economic pessimism and, 22–23 efficiency economy and, 63–68, 71, 75–76, 80–81, 158, 172, 223 efficient consumers and, 181–85, 192–96 exports and, 98, 103, 108–10, 112–14, 116–17, 131, 177 FDI and, 82–96 global, 22, 24, 71, 95 inports and, 132, 135–37, 139–42, 144, 146–47, 202–3, 227 job growth and, 218–19 North Dakota and, 152–53, 155, 157–60 recoveries and, 17–18, 21, 215 and reshoring and insourcing, 167, 169–79 restructuring and, 44–45, 47–49, 52–53, 57–58, 81, 166 supersizing and, 199–206, 209–10 taxes on, 146–47, 163 timely policy decisions and, 28, 30, 34 U.S. economic importance and, 227–28 Costner, Kevin, 129–30 Coty, 71 Coulomb Technologies, 211 Council of Economic Advisers, 31 Cowan, Lynn, 203 Creation Technologies, 67 credit, 32–36, 94, 194 booms in, 21, 29, 56, 62 crisis in, 2, 4, 23, 26, 48, 53 exports and, 112–13 restructuring and, 49, 51, 53–56, 58 timely policy decisions and, 29, 32–33, 35–36, 42–43 credit cards, 34, 183–85 restructuring and, 54–56 credit ratings, 1–2, 11, 52 Credit Suisse, 137, 223 Davis, Fred, 90–91 debt, 1, 19–20, 23–24, 60, 185 CIT Group and, 48–49 consumers and, 9–10, 53–57 crises and, 6, 29, 216 efficiency economy and, 62–63, 72, 78 efficient consumers and, 181, 189, 193, 196 Erie Canal and, 205–6 FDI and, 82, 94 national, 2, 5, 11, 217 North Dakota and, 155–56 restructuring and, 45–59, 78 strengthening recovery and, 215–16 timely policy decisions and, 32–34, 36, 39, 42 see also loans, lending, lenders debt ceiling extensions, 2, 217 Dedrick, Jason, 140 Defense Department, U.S., 109 deficits: budget, 2, 6, 10, 64–65, 217, 221–22 efficiency economy and, 64–65 trade, 102, 107, 168, 221–22 Delphi, 46 demand, 18, 31, 45, 57, 101, 132, 178, 221 efficiency economy and, 60, 62, 72–74, 223 exports and, 99, 104, 107–10, 116, 119 North Dakota and, 153–54, 159 supersizing and, 206, 208 Deming, W.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

As other buyers are pushed down the housing chain, inflation at the top of the market ripples down. This has contributed to the escalation of house prices and rents, making housing unaffordable for most wage-earners. Between 2010 and 2015, London house prices leapt by about 50 per cent. And while the housing crisis in London is most acute, prices have also risen steeply in the rest of the country. The previous trend towards more people owning their homes has gone into steep reverse. More are living in overcrowded or inadequate accommodation; more young adults are living with parents, unable to set up a household of their own; and homelessness is increasing, including among families with children.

…

In Britain and elsewhere, low interest rates and tax breaks have propelled property prices to levels that have put home ownership out of reach for many and, coupled with the abolition or erosion of rent controls, generated an increasingly expensive private rental market. Landlordism has become a feature of global rentier capitalism. It has not been resurrected by chance or by free markets. The UK’s present housing crisis has its origins in Thatcher’s decision in the 1980s to give council tenants the ‘right to buy’ their homes at a substantial discount, a subsidy scheme that decimated the stock of social housing. Nearly 2 million tenants have since taken advantage of the scheme. Financial liberalisation also meant mortgages became easier to obtain.

Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe
by Gillian Tett
Published 11 May 2009

After all, Dimon was a hands-on manager with strong knowledge of the market, who had no qualms about disturbing his employees’ holidays if he considered a matter urgent. And by the autumn of 2006, Dimon thought the housing sector was becoming just that. In the spring of 2006, national house prices had started to slide. “A housing crisis approaches,” a column in Barron’s magazine boldly declared by August, pointing out that the median price of new homes had dropped almost 3 percent in the previous eight months, while sales of new homes had fallen 10 percent, leaving new home inventories at record levels. “The national median price of housing will probably fall by close to 30 percent in the next three years [based on] simple reversion to the mean,” it added, meaning that the fast-rising home prices of the past few years were the result of a bubble.

…

“In the world I operate in”: Interview with Blythe Masters, February 2007, on womenworking2000.com. No author cited. http://www.womenworking2000.com/feature/index.php?id=94. Ten: Tremors In October 2006, Bill King, the man: Tully, Shawn, “Jamie Dimon’s Swat Team,” Fortune (September 15, 2008). Supplemented with author interviews. “A housing crisis approaches”: Witter Lon, “The No-Money-Down Disaster,” Barron’s (August 21, 2006). “Builders that built speculative homes”: Editorial comment, “Pop! Goes the U.S. Real Estate Bubble,” Toronto Star (September 6, 2006). “When even Toll Brothers, the high-end builder”: Shilling, A. Gary, “Implosion: When Even Toll Brothers, the High-end Builder, Suffers Cancelations, You Know the Real Estate Boom Is Over,” Forbes (June 19, 2006).

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
by William Davies
Published 26 Feb 2019

Kennedy International Airport, New York, x, xiii, 41 Johns Hopkins University, 176 Jones, Alexander, 131 Kant, Immanuel, 128, 130 Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, Ira, 188 Kennedy Jr., Robert, 23 Kepler, Johannes, 35 Keynes, John Maynard, 165 King Jr., Martin Luther, 21, 224 knowledge economy, 84, 85, 88, 151–2, 217 known knowns, 132, 138 Koch, Charles and David, 154, 164, 174 Korean War (1950–53), 178 Kraepelin, Emil, 139 Kurzweil, Ray, 183–4 Labour Party, 5, 6, 65, 80, 81, 221 Lagarde, Christine, 64 Le Bon, Gustave, 8–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25, 38 Le Pen, Marine, 27, 79, 87, 92, 101–2 Leadbeater, Charles, 84 Leeds, West Yorkshire, 85 Leicester, Leicestershire, 85 Leviathan (Hobbes), 34, 39, 45 liberal elites, 20, 58, 88, 89, 161 libertarianism, 15, 151, 154, 158, 164, 173, 196, 209, 226 Liberty Fund, 158 Libya, 143 lie-detection technology, 136 life expectancy, 62, 68–71, 72, 92, 100–101, 115, 224 Lindemann, Frederick Alexander, 1st Viscount Cherwell, 138 Lloyds Bank, 29 London, England bills of mortality, 68–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 EU referendum (2016), 85 Great Fire (1666), 67 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 and gross domestic product (GDP), 77, 78 housing crisis, 84 insurance sector, 59 knowledge economy, 84 life expectancy, 100 newspapers, early, 48 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 plagues, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 London School of Economics (LSE), 160 loss aversion, 145 Louis XIV, King of France, 73, 127 Louisiana, United States, 151, 221 Ludwig von Mises Institute, 154 MacLean, Nancy, 158 Macron, Emmanuel, 33 mainstream media, 197 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 Manchester, England, 85 Mann, Geoff, 214 maps, 182 March For Our Lives (2018), 21 March for Science (2017), 23–5, 27, 28, 210, 211 marketing, 14, 139–41, 143, 148, 169 Mars, 175, 226 Marxism, 163 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 179 Mayer, Jane, 158 McCarthy, Joseph, 137 McGill Pain Questionnaire, 104 McKibben, William “Bill,” 213 Megaface, 188–9 memes, 15, 194 Menger, Carl, 154 mental illness, 103, 107–17, 139 mercenaries, 126 Mercer, Robert, 174, 175 Mexico, 145 Million-Man March (1995), 4 mind-reading technology, 136 see also telepathy Mirowski, Philip, 158 von Mises, Ludwig, 154–63, 166, 172, 173 Missing Migrants Project, 225 mobilization, 5, 7, 126–31 and Corbyn, 81 and elections, 81, 124 and experts, 27–8 and Internet, 15 and Le Bon’s crowd psychology, 11, 12, 16, 20 and loss, 145 and Napoleonic Wars, xv, 127–30, 141, 144 and Occupy movement, 5 and populism, 16, 22, 60 and violence, opposition to, 21 Moniteur Universel, Le, 142 monopoly on violence, 42 Mont Pelerin Society, 163, 164 moral emotion, 21 morphine, 105 multiculturalism, 84 Murs, Oliver “Olly,” ix Musk, Elon, 175, 176, 178, 183, 226 Nanchang, Jiangxi, 13 Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), 126–30 chappe system, 129, 182 and conscription, 87, 126–7, 129 and disruption, 170–71, 173, 174, 175, 226 and great leader ideal, 146–8 and intelligence, 134 and mobilization, xv, 126–30, 141, 144 and nationalism, 87, 128, 129, 144, 183, 211 and propaganda, 142 Russia, invasion of (1812), 128, 133 Spain, invasion of (1808), 128 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 23, 175 National Audit Office (NAO), 29–30 national citizenship, 71 National Defense Research Committee, 180 National Health Service (NHS), 30, 93 National Park Service, 4 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 national sovereignty, 34, 53 nationalism, 87, 141, 210–12 and conservatism, 144 and disempowerment, 118–19 and elites, 22–3, 60–61, 145 ethnic, 15 and health, 92, 211–12, 224 and imagined communities, 87 and inequality, 78 and loss, 145 and markets, 167 and promises, 221 and resentment, 145, 197, 198 and war, 7, 20–21, 118–19, 143–6, 210–11 nativism, 61 natural philosophy, 35–6 nature, 86 see also environment Nazi Germany (1933–45), 137, 138, 154 Netherlands, 48, 56, 129 Neurable, 176 neural networking, 216 Neuralink, 176 neurasthenia, 139 Neurath, Otto, 153–4, 157, 160 neurochemistry, 108, 111, 112 neuroimaging, 176–8, 181 Nevada, United States, 194 new atheism, 209 New Orleans, Louisiana, 151 New Right, 164 New York, United States and climate change, 205 and gross domestic product (GDP), 78 housing crisis, 84 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 knowledge economy, 84 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 New York Times, 3, 27, 85 newspapers, 48, 71 Newton, Isaac, 35 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 217 Nixon, Robert, 206 no-platforming, 22, 208 Nobel Prize, 158–9 non-combatants, 43, 143, 204 non-violence, 224 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 123, 145, 214 North Carolina, United States, 84 Northern Ireland, 43, 85 Northern League, 61 Northern Rock, 29 Norwich, Norfolk, 85 nostalgia, xiv, 143, 145, 210, 223 “Not in my name,” 27 nuclear weapons, 132, 135, 137, 180, 183, 192, 196, 204 nudge techniques, 13 Obama, Barack, 3, 24, 76, 77, 79, 158, 172 Obamacare, 172 objectivity, xiv, 13, 75, 136, 223 and crowd-based politics, 5, 7, 24–5 and death, 94 and Descartes, 37 and experts, trust in, 28, 32, 33, 51, 53, 64, 86, 89 and Hayek, 163, 164, 170 and markets, 169, 170 and photography, 8 and Scientific Revolution, 48, 49 and statistics, 72, 74, 75, 82, 88 and telepathic communication, 179 and war, 58, 125, 134, 135, 136, 146 Occupy movement, 5, 10, 24, 61 Oedipus complex, 109 Office for National Statistics, 63, 133 Ohio, United States, 116 oil crisis (1973), 166 “On Computable Numbers” (Turing), 181 On War (Clausewitz), 130 Open Society and Its Enemies, The (Popper), 171 opiates, 105, 116, 172–3 opinion polling, 65, 80–81, 191 Orbán, Viktor, 87, 146 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 72 Oxford, Oxfordshire, 85 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 Oxford University, 56, 151 OxyContin, 105, 116 pacifism, 8, 20, 44, 151 pain, 102–19, 172–3, 224 see also chronic pain painkillers, 104, 105, 116, 172–3 Palantir, 151, 152, 175, 190 parabiosis, 149 Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Paris Commune (1871), 8 Parkland attack (2018), 21 Patriot Act (2001), 137 Paul, Ronald, 154 PayPal, 149 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 34, 53 peer reviewing, 48, 139, 195, 208 penicillin, 94 Pentagon, 130, 132, 135, 136, 214, 216 pesticides, 205 Petty, William, 55–9, 67, 73, 85, 167 pharmacology, 142 Pielke Jr., Roger, 24, 25 Piketty, Thomas, 74 Pinker, Stephen, 207 plagues, 56, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 95 pleasure principle, 70, 109, 110, 224 pneumonia, 37, 67 Podemos, 5, 202 Poland, 20, 34, 60 Polanyi, Michael, 163 political anatomy, 57 Political Arithmetick (Petty), 58, 59 political correctness, 20, 27, 145 Popper, Karl, 163, 171 populism xvii, 211–12, 214, 220, 225–6 and central banks, 33 and crowd-based politics, 12 and democracy, 202 and elites/experts, 26, 33, 50, 152, 197, 210, 215 and empathy, 118 and health, 99, 101–2, 224–5 and immediate action, 216 in Kansas (1880s), 220 and markets, 167 and private companies, 174 and promises, 221 and resentment, 145 and statistics, 90 and unemployment, 88 and war, 148, 212 Porter, Michael, 84 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 111–14, 117, 209 post-truth, 167, 224 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 power vs. violence, 19, 219 predictive policing, 151 presidential election, US (2016), xiv and climate change, 214 and data, 190 and education, 85 and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 79, 145 and inequality, 76–7 and Internet, 190, 197, 199 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and Russia, 199 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 prisoners of war, 43 promises, 25, 31, 39–42, 45–7, 51, 52, 217–18, 221–2 Propaganda (Bernays), 14–15 propaganda, 8, 14–16, 83, 124–5, 141, 142, 143 property rights, 158, 167 Protestantism, 34, 35, 45, 215 Prussia (1525–1947), 8, 127–30, 133–4, 135, 142 psychiatry, 107, 139 psychoanalysis, 107, 139 Psychology of Crowds, The (Le Bon), 9–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25 psychosomatic, 103 public-spending cuts, 100–101 punishment, 90, 92–3, 94, 95, 108 Purdue, 105 Putin, Vladimir, 145, 183 al-Qaeda, 136 quality of life, 74, 104 quantitative easing, 31–2, 222 quants, 190 radical statistics, 74 RAND Corporation, 183 RBS, 29 Reagan, Ronald, 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 real-time knowledge, xvi, 112, 131, 134, 153, 154, 165–70 Reason Foundation, 158 Red Vienna, 154, 155 Rees-Mogg, Jacob, 33, 61 refugee crisis (2015–), 60, 225 relative deprivation, 88 representative democracy, 7, 12, 14–15, 25–8, 61, 202 Republican Party, 77, 79, 85, 154, 160, 163, 166, 172 research and development (R&D), 133 Research Triangle, North Carolina, 84 resentment, 5, 226 of elites/experts, 32, 52, 61, 86, 88–9, 161, 186, 201 and nationalism/populism, 5, 144–6, 148, 197, 198 and pain, 94 Ridley, Matt, 209 right to remain silent, 44 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 160, 166 Robinson, Tommy, ix Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 52 Royal Exchange, 67 Royal Society, 48–52, 56, 68, 86, 133, 137, 186, 208, 218 Rumsfeld, Donald, 132 Russian Empire (1721–1917), 128, 133 Russian Federation (1991–) and artificial intelligence, 183 Gerasimov Doctrine, 43, 123, 125, 126 and information war, 196 life expectancy, 100, 115 and national humiliation, 145 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 and social media, 15, 18, 199 troll farms, 199 Russian Revolution (1917), 155 Russian SFSR (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 155, 177, 180, 182–3 safe spaces, 22, 208 Sands, Robert “Bobby,” 43 Saxony, 90 scarlet fever, 67 Scarry, Elaine, 102–3 scenting, 135, 180 Schneier, Bruce, 185 Schumpeter, Joseph, 156–7, 162 Scientific Revolution, 48–52, 62, 66, 95, 204, 207, 218 scientist, coining of term, 133 SCL, 175 Scotland, 64, 85, 172 search engines, xvi Second World War, see World War II securitization of loans, 218 seismology, 135 self-employment, 82 self-esteem, 88–90, 175, 212 self-harm, 44, 114–15, 117, 146, 225 self-help, 107 self-interest, 26, 41, 44, 61, 114, 141, 146 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 sentiment analysis, xiii, 12–13, 140, 188 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 shell shock, 109–10 Shrecker, Ted, 226 Silicon Fen, Cambridgeshire, 84 Silicon Valley, California, xvi, 219 and data, 55, 151, 185–93, 199–201 and disruption, 149–51, 175, 226 and entrepreneurship, 149–51 and fascism, 203 and immortality, 149, 183–4, 224, 226 and monopolies, 174, 220 and singularity, 183–4 and telepathy, 176–8, 181, 185, 186, 221 and weaponization, 18, 219 singularity, 184 Siri, 187 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 slavery, 59, 224 smallpox, 67 smart cities, 190, 199 smartphone addiction, 112, 186–7 snowflakes, 22, 113 social indicators, 74 social justice warriors (SJWs), 131 social media and crowd psychology, 6 emotional artificial intelligence, 12–13, 140–41 and engagement, 7 filter bubbles, 66 and propaganda, 15, 18, 81, 124 and PTSD, 113 and sentiment analysis, 12 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 weaponization of, 18, 19, 22, 194–5 socialism, 8, 20, 154–6, 158, 160 calculation debate, 154–6, 158, 160 Socialism (Mises), 160 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 South Africa, 103 sovereignty, 34, 53 Soviet Russia (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 177, 180, 182–3 Spain, 5, 34, 84, 128, 202 speed of knowledge, xvi, 112, 124, 131, 134, 136, 153, 154, 165–70 Spicer, Sean, 3, 5 spy planes, 136, 152 Stalin, Joseph, 138 Stanford University, 179 statactivism, 74 statistics, 62–91, 161, 186 status, 88–90 Stoermer, Eugene, 206 strong man leaders, 16 suicide, 100, 101, 115 suicide bombing, 44, 146 superbugs, 205 surveillance, 185–93, 219 Sweden, 34 Switzerland, 164 Sydenham, Thomas, 96 Syriza, 5 tacit knowledge, 162 talking cure, 107 taxation, 158 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 technocracy, 53–8, 59, 60, 61, 78, 87, 89, 90, 211 teenage girls, 113, 114 telepathy, 39, 176–9, 181, 185, 186 terrorism, 17–18, 151, 185 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 emergency powers, 42 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 suicide bombing, 44, 146 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Thames Valley, England, 85 Thatcher, Margaret, 154, 160, 163, 166 Thiel, Peter, 26, 149–51, 153, 156, 174, 190 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 34, 45, 53, 126 Tokyo, Japan, x torture, 92–3 total wars, 129, 142–3 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 34, 53 trends, xvi, 168 trigger warnings, 22, 113 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 Trump, Donald, xiv and Bannon, 21, 60–61 and climate change, 207 and education, 85 election campaign (2016), see under presidential election, US and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 145 inauguration (2017), 3–5, 6, 9, 10 and inequality, 76–7 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and March for Science (2017), 23, 24, 210 and media, 27 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and Paris climate accord, 207 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 Tsipras, Alexis, 5 Turing, Alan, 181, 183 Twitter and Corbyn’s rallies, 6 and JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x and Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x and Russia, 18 and sentiment analysis, 188 and trends, xvi and trolls, 194, 195 Uber, 49, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192 UK Independence Party, 65, 92, 202 underemployment, 82 unemployment, 61, 62, 72, 78, 81–3, 87, 88, 203 United Kingdom austerity, 100 Bank of England, 32, 33, 64 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 Brexit (2016–), see under Brexit Cameron government (2010–16), 33, 73, 100 Center for Policy Studies, 164 Civil Service, 33 climate-gate (2009), 195 Corbyn’s rallies, 5, 6 Dunkirk evacuation (1940), 119 education, 85 financial crisis (2007–9), 29–32, 100 first past the post, 13 general election (2015), 80, 81 general election (2017), 6, 65, 80, 81, 221 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 gross domestic product (GDP), 77, 79 immigration, 63, 65 Irish hunger strike (1981), 43 life expectancy, 100 National Audit Office (NAO), 29 National Health Service (NHS), 30, 93 Office for National Statistics, 63, 133 and opiates, 105 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 and pain, 102, 105 Palantir, 151 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 quantitative easing, 31–2 Royal Society, 138 Scottish independence referendum (2014), 64 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 Thatcher government (1979–90), 154, 160, 163, 166 and torture, 92 Treasury, 61, 64 unemployment, 83 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 World War II (1939–45), 114, 119, 138, 143, 180 see also England United Nations, 72, 222 United States Bayh–Dole Act (1980), 152 Black Lives Matter, 10, 225 BP oil spill (2010), 89 Bush Jr. administration (2001–9), 77, 136 Bush Sr administration (1989–93), 77 Bureau of Labor, 74 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3, 136, 151, 199 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 Civil War (1861–5), 105, 142 and climate change, 207, 214 Clinton administration (1993–2001), 77 Cold War, see Cold War Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 176, 178 Defense Intelligence Agency, 177 drug abuse, 43, 100, 105, 115–16, 131, 172–3 education, 85 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 137 Federal Reserve, 33 Fifth Amendment (1789), 44 financial crisis (2007–9), 31–2, 82, 158 first past the post, 13 Government Accountability Office, 29 gross domestic product (GDP), 75–7, 82 health, 92, 99–100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 115–16, 158, 172–3 Heritage Foundation, 164, 214 Iraq War (2003–11), 74, 132 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Kansas populists (1880s), 220 libertarianism, 15, 151, 154, 158, 164, 173 life expectancy, 100, 101 March For Our Lives (2018), 21 March for Science (2017), 23–5, 27, 28, 210 McCarthyism (1947–56), 137 Million-Man March (1995), 4 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 23, 175 National Defense Research Committee, 180 National Park Service, 4 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 Obama administration (2009–17), 3, 24, 76, 77, 79, 158 Occupy Wall Street (2011), 5, 10, 61 and opiates, 105, 172–3 and pain, 103, 105, 107, 172–3 Palantir, 151, 152, 175, 190 Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Parkland attack (2018), 21 Patriot Act (2001), 137 Pentagon, 130, 132, 135, 136, 214, 216 presidential election (2016), see under presidential election, US psychiatry, 107, 111 quantitative easing, 31–2 Reagan administration (1981–9), 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” speech (2002), 132 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 and torture, 93 Trump administration (2017–), see under Trump, Donald unemployment, 83 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 World War I (1914–18), 137 World War II (1939–45), 137, 180 universal basic income, 221 universities, 151–2, 164, 169–70 University of Cambridge, 84, 151 University of Chicago, 160 University of East Anglia, 195 University of Oxford, 56, 151 University of Vienna, 160 University of Washington, 188 unknown knowns, 132, 133, 136, 138, 141, 192, 212 unknown unknowns, 132, 133, 138 “Use of Knowledge in Society, The” (Hayek), 161 V2 flying bomb, 137 vaccines, 23, 95 de Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban, 73 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 Vesalius, Andreas, 96 Vienna, Austria, 153–5, 159 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 violence vs. power, 19, 219 viral marketing, 12 virtual reality, 183 virtue signaling, 194 voice recognition, 187 Vote Leave, 50, 93 Wainright, Joel, 214 Wales, 77, 90 Wall Street, New York, 33, 190 War College, Berlin, 128 “War Economy” (Neurath), 153–4 war on drugs, 43, 131 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Watts, Jay, 115 weaponization, 18–20, 22, 26, 75, 118, 123, 194, 219, 223 weapons of mass destruction, 132 wearable technology, 173 weather control, 204 “What Is An Emotion?”

…

Kennedy International Airport, New York, x, xiii, 41 Johns Hopkins University, 176 Jones, Alexander, 131 Kant, Immanuel, 128, 130 Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, Ira, 188 Kennedy Jr., Robert, 23 Kepler, Johannes, 35 Keynes, John Maynard, 165 King Jr., Martin Luther, 21, 224 knowledge economy, 84, 85, 88, 151–2, 217 known knowns, 132, 138 Koch, Charles and David, 154, 164, 174 Korean War (1950–53), 178 Kraepelin, Emil, 139 Kurzweil, Ray, 183–4 Labour Party, 5, 6, 65, 80, 81, 221 Lagarde, Christine, 64 Le Bon, Gustave, 8–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25, 38 Le Pen, Marine, 27, 79, 87, 92, 101–2 Leadbeater, Charles, 84 Leeds, West Yorkshire, 85 Leicester, Leicestershire, 85 Leviathan (Hobbes), 34, 39, 45 liberal elites, 20, 58, 88, 89, 161 libertarianism, 15, 151, 154, 158, 164, 173, 196, 209, 226 Liberty Fund, 158 Libya, 143 lie-detection technology, 136 life expectancy, 62, 68–71, 72, 92, 100–101, 115, 224 Lindemann, Frederick Alexander, 1st Viscount Cherwell, 138 Lloyds Bank, 29 London, England bills of mortality, 68–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 EU referendum (2016), 85 Great Fire (1666), 67 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 and gross domestic product (GDP), 77, 78 housing crisis, 84 insurance sector, 59 knowledge economy, 84 life expectancy, 100 newspapers, early, 48 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 plagues, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 London School of Economics (LSE), 160 loss aversion, 145 Louis XIV, King of France, 73, 127 Louisiana, United States, 151, 221 Ludwig von Mises Institute, 154 MacLean, Nancy, 158 Macron, Emmanuel, 33 mainstream media, 197 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 Manchester, England, 85 Mann, Geoff, 214 maps, 182 March For Our Lives (2018), 21 March for Science (2017), 23–5, 27, 28, 210, 211 marketing, 14, 139–41, 143, 148, 169 Mars, 175, 226 Marxism, 163 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 179 Mayer, Jane, 158 McCarthy, Joseph, 137 McGill Pain Questionnaire, 104 McKibben, William “Bill,” 213 Megaface, 188–9 memes, 15, 194 Menger, Carl, 154 mental illness, 103, 107–17, 139 mercenaries, 126 Mercer, Robert, 174, 175 Mexico, 145 Million-Man March (1995), 4 mind-reading technology, 136 see also telepathy Mirowski, Philip, 158 von Mises, Ludwig, 154–63, 166, 172, 173 Missing Migrants Project, 225 mobilization, 5, 7, 126–31 and Corbyn, 81 and elections, 81, 124 and experts, 27–8 and Internet, 15 and Le Bon’s crowd psychology, 11, 12, 16, 20 and loss, 145 and Napoleonic Wars, xv, 127–30, 141, 144 and Occupy movement, 5 and populism, 16, 22, 60 and violence, opposition to, 21 Moniteur Universel, Le, 142 monopoly on violence, 42 Mont Pelerin Society, 163, 164 moral emotion, 21 morphine, 105 multiculturalism, 84 Murs, Oliver “Olly,” ix Musk, Elon, 175, 176, 178, 183, 226 Nanchang, Jiangxi, 13 Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), 126–30 chappe system, 129, 182 and conscription, 87, 126–7, 129 and disruption, 170–71, 173, 174, 175, 226 and great leader ideal, 146–8 and intelligence, 134 and mobilization, xv, 126–30, 141, 144 and nationalism, 87, 128, 129, 144, 183, 211 and propaganda, 142 Russia, invasion of (1812), 128, 133 Spain, invasion of (1808), 128 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 23, 175 National Audit Office (NAO), 29–30 national citizenship, 71 National Defense Research Committee, 180 National Health Service (NHS), 30, 93 National Park Service, 4 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 national sovereignty, 34, 53 nationalism, 87, 141, 210–12 and conservatism, 144 and disempowerment, 118–19 and elites, 22–3, 60–61, 145 ethnic, 15 and health, 92, 211–12, 224 and imagined communities, 87 and inequality, 78 and loss, 145 and markets, 167 and promises, 221 and resentment, 145, 197, 198 and war, 7, 20–21, 118–19, 143–6, 210–11 nativism, 61 natural philosophy, 35–6 nature, 86 see also environment Nazi Germany (1933–45), 137, 138, 154 Netherlands, 48, 56, 129 Neurable, 176 neural networking, 216 Neuralink, 176 neurasthenia, 139 Neurath, Otto, 153–4, 157, 160 neurochemistry, 108, 111, 112 neuroimaging, 176–8, 181 Nevada, United States, 194 new atheism, 209 New Orleans, Louisiana, 151 New Right, 164 New York, United States and climate change, 205 and gross domestic product (GDP), 78 housing crisis, 84 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 knowledge economy, 84 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 New York Times, 3, 27, 85 newspapers, 48, 71 Newton, Isaac, 35 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 217 Nixon, Robert, 206 no-platforming, 22, 208 Nobel Prize, 158–9 non-combatants, 43, 143, 204 non-violence, 224 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 123, 145, 214 North Carolina, United States, 84 Northern Ireland, 43, 85 Northern League, 61 Northern Rock, 29 Norwich, Norfolk, 85 nostalgia, xiv, 143, 145, 210, 223 “Not in my name,” 27 nuclear weapons, 132, 135, 137, 180, 183, 192, 196, 204 nudge techniques, 13 Obama, Barack, 3, 24, 76, 77, 79, 158, 172 Obamacare, 172 objectivity, xiv, 13, 75, 136, 223 and crowd-based politics, 5, 7, 24–5 and death, 94 and Descartes, 37 and experts, trust in, 28, 32, 33, 51, 53, 64, 86, 89 and Hayek, 163, 164, 170 and markets, 169, 170 and photography, 8 and Scientific Revolution, 48, 49 and statistics, 72, 74, 75, 82, 88 and telepathic communication, 179 and war, 58, 125, 134, 135, 136, 146 Occupy movement, 5, 10, 24, 61 Oedipus complex, 109 Office for National Statistics, 63, 133 Ohio, United States, 116 oil crisis (1973), 166 “On Computable Numbers” (Turing), 181 On War (Clausewitz), 130 Open Society and Its Enemies, The (Popper), 171 opiates, 105, 116, 172–3 opinion polling, 65, 80–81, 191 Orbán, Viktor, 87, 146 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 72 Oxford, Oxfordshire, 85 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 Oxford University, 56, 151 OxyContin, 105, 116 pacifism, 8, 20, 44, 151 pain, 102–19, 172–3, 224 see also chronic pain painkillers, 104, 105, 116, 172–3 Palantir, 151, 152, 175, 190 parabiosis, 149 Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Paris Commune (1871), 8 Parkland attack (2018), 21 Patriot Act (2001), 137 Paul, Ronald, 154 PayPal, 149 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 34, 53 peer reviewing, 48, 139, 195, 208 penicillin, 94 Pentagon, 130, 132, 135, 136, 214, 216 pesticides, 205 Petty, William, 55–9, 67, 73, 85, 167 pharmacology, 142 Pielke Jr., Roger, 24, 25 Piketty, Thomas, 74 Pinker, Stephen, 207 plagues, 56, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 95 pleasure principle, 70, 109, 110, 224 pneumonia, 37, 67 Podemos, 5, 202 Poland, 20, 34, 60 Polanyi, Michael, 163 political anatomy, 57 Political Arithmetick (Petty), 58, 59 political correctness, 20, 27, 145 Popper, Karl, 163, 171 populism xvii, 211–12, 214, 220, 225–6 and central banks, 33 and crowd-based politics, 12 and democracy, 202 and elites/experts, 26, 33, 50, 152, 197, 210, 215 and empathy, 118 and health, 99, 101–2, 224–5 and immediate action, 216 in Kansas (1880s), 220 and markets, 167 and private companies, 174 and promises, 221 and resentment, 145 and statistics, 90 and unemployment, 88 and war, 148, 212 Porter, Michael, 84 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 111–14, 117, 209 post-truth, 167, 224 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 power vs. violence, 19, 219 predictive policing, 151 presidential election, US (2016), xiv and climate change, 214 and data, 190 and education, 85 and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 79, 145 and inequality, 76–7 and Internet, 190, 197, 199 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and Russia, 199 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 prisoners of war, 43 promises, 25, 31, 39–42, 45–7, 51, 52, 217–18, 221–2 Propaganda (Bernays), 14–15 propaganda, 8, 14–16, 83, 124–5, 141, 142, 143 property rights, 158, 167 Protestantism, 34, 35, 45, 215 Prussia (1525–1947), 8, 127–30, 133–4, 135, 142 psychiatry, 107, 139 psychoanalysis, 107, 139 Psychology of Crowds, The (Le Bon), 9–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25 psychosomatic, 103 public-spending cuts, 100–101 punishment, 90, 92–3, 94, 95, 108 Purdue, 105 Putin, Vladimir, 145, 183 al-Qaeda, 136 quality of life, 74, 104 quantitative easing, 31–2, 222 quants, 190 radical statistics, 74 RAND Corporation, 183 RBS, 29 Reagan, Ronald, 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 real-time knowledge, xvi, 112, 131, 134, 153, 154, 165–70 Reason Foundation, 158 Red Vienna, 154, 155 Rees-Mogg, Jacob, 33, 61 refugee crisis (2015–), 60, 225 relative deprivation, 88 representative democracy, 7, 12, 14–15, 25–8, 61, 202 Republican Party, 77, 79, 85, 154, 160, 163, 166, 172 research and development (R&D), 133 Research Triangle, North Carolina, 84 resentment, 5, 226 of elites/experts, 32, 52, 61, 86, 88–9, 161, 186, 201 and nationalism/populism, 5, 144–6, 148, 197, 198 and pain, 94 Ridley, Matt, 209 right to remain silent, 44 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 160, 166 Robinson, Tommy, ix Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 52 Royal Exchange, 67 Royal Society, 48–52, 56, 68, 86, 133, 137, 186, 208, 218 Rumsfeld, Donald, 132 Russian Empire (1721–1917), 128, 133 Russian Federation (1991–) and artificial intelligence, 183 Gerasimov Doctrine, 43, 123, 125, 126 and information war, 196 life expectancy, 100, 115 and national humiliation, 145 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 and social media, 15, 18, 199 troll farms, 199 Russian Revolution (1917), 155 Russian SFSR (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 155, 177, 180, 182–3 safe spaces, 22, 208 Sands, Robert “Bobby,” 43 Saxony, 90 scarlet fever, 67 Scarry, Elaine, 102–3 scenting, 135, 180 Schneier, Bruce, 185 Schumpeter, Joseph, 156–7, 162 Scientific Revolution, 48–52, 62, 66, 95, 204, 207, 218 scientist, coining of term, 133 SCL, 175 Scotland, 64, 85, 172 search engines, xvi Second World War, see World War II securitization of loans, 218 seismology, 135 self-employment, 82 self-esteem, 88–90, 175, 212 self-harm, 44, 114–15, 117, 146, 225 self-help, 107 self-interest, 26, 41, 44, 61, 114, 141, 146 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 sentiment analysis, xiii, 12–13, 140, 188 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 shell shock, 109–10 Shrecker, Ted, 226 Silicon Fen, Cambridgeshire, 84 Silicon Valley, California, xvi, 219 and data, 55, 151, 185–93, 199–201 and disruption, 149–51, 175, 226 and entrepreneurship, 149–51 and fascism, 203 and immortality, 149, 183–4, 224, 226 and monopolies, 174, 220 and singularity, 183–4 and telepathy, 176–8, 181, 185, 186, 221 and weaponization, 18, 219 singularity, 184 Siri, 187 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 slavery, 59, 224 smallpox, 67 smart cities, 190, 199 smartphone addiction, 112, 186–7 snowflakes, 22, 113 social indicators, 74 social justice warriors (SJWs), 131 social media and crowd psychology, 6 emotional artificial intelligence, 12–13, 140–41 and engagement, 7 filter bubbles, 66 and propaganda, 15, 18, 81, 124 and PTSD, 113 and sentiment analysis, 12 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 weaponization of, 18, 19, 22, 194–5 socialism, 8, 20, 154–6, 158, 160 calculation debate, 154–6, 158, 160 Socialism (Mises), 160 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 South Africa, 103 sovereignty, 34, 53 Soviet Russia (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 177, 180, 182–3 Spain, 5, 34, 84, 128, 202 speed of knowledge, xvi, 112, 124, 131, 134, 136, 153, 154, 165–70 Spicer, Sean, 3, 5 spy planes, 136, 152 Stalin, Joseph, 138 Stanford University, 179 statactivism, 74 statistics, 62–91, 161, 186 status, 88–90 Stoermer, Eugene, 206 strong man leaders, 16 suicide, 100, 101, 115 suicide bombing, 44, 146 superbugs, 205 surveillance, 185–93, 219 Sweden, 34 Switzerland, 164 Sydenham, Thomas, 96 Syriza, 5 tacit knowledge, 162 talking cure, 107 taxation, 158 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 technocracy, 53–8, 59, 60, 61, 78, 87, 89, 90, 211 teenage girls, 113, 114 telepathy, 39, 176–9, 181, 185, 186 terrorism, 17–18, 151, 185 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 emergency powers, 42 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 suicide bombing, 44, 146 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Thames Valley, England, 85 Thatcher, Margaret, 154, 160, 163, 166 Thiel, Peter, 26, 149–51, 153, 156, 174, 190 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 34, 45, 53, 126 Tokyo, Japan, x torture, 92–3 total wars, 129, 142–3 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 34, 53 trends, xvi, 168 trigger warnings, 22, 113 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 Trump, Donald, xiv and Bannon, 21, 60–61 and climate change, 207 and education, 85 election campaign (2016), see under presidential election, US and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 145 inauguration (2017), 3–5, 6, 9, 10 and inequality, 76–7 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and March for Science (2017), 23, 24, 210 and media, 27 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and Paris climate accord, 207 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 Tsipras, Alexis, 5 Turing, Alan, 181, 183 Twitter and Corbyn’s rallies, 6 and JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x and Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x and Russia, 18 and sentiment analysis, 188 and trends, xvi and trolls, 194, 195 Uber, 49, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192 UK Independence Party, 65, 92, 202 underemployment, 82 unemployment, 61, 62, 72, 78, 81–3, 87, 88, 203 United Kingdom austerity, 100 Bank of England, 32, 33, 64 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 Brexit (2016–), see under Brexit Cameron government (2010–16), 33, 73, 100 Center for Policy Studies, 164 Civil Service, 33 climate-gate (2009), 195 Corbyn’s rallies, 5, 6 Dunkirk evacuation (1940), 119 education, 85 financial crisis (2007–9), 29–32, 100 first past the post, 13 general election (2015), 80, 81 general election (2017), 6, 65, 80, 81, 221 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 gross domestic product (GDP), 77, 79 immigration, 63, 65 Irish hunger strike (1981), 43 life expectancy, 100 National Audit Office (NAO), 29 National Health Service (NHS), 30, 93 Office for National Statistics, 63, 133 and opiates, 105 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 and pain, 102, 105 Palantir, 151 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 quantitative easing, 31–2 Royal Society, 138 Scottish independence referendum (2014), 64 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 Thatcher government (1979–90), 154, 160, 163, 166 and torture, 92 Treasury, 61, 64 unemployment, 83 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 World War II (1939–45), 114, 119, 138, 143, 180 see also England United Nations, 72, 222 United States Bayh–Dole Act (1980), 152 Black Lives Matter, 10, 225 BP oil spill (2010), 89 Bush Jr. administration (2001–9), 77, 136 Bush Sr administration (1989–93), 77 Bureau of Labor, 74 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3, 136, 151, 199 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 Civil War (1861–5), 105, 142 and climate change, 207, 214 Clinton administration (1993–2001), 77 Cold War, see Cold War Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 176, 178 Defense Intelligence Agency, 177 drug abuse, 43, 100, 105, 115–16, 131, 172–3 education, 85 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 137 Federal Reserve, 33 Fifth Amendment (1789), 44 financial crisis (2007–9), 31–2, 82, 158 first past the post, 13 Government Accountability Office, 29 gross domestic product (GDP), 75–7, 82 health, 92, 99–100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 115–16, 158, 172–3 Heritage Foundation, 164, 214 Iraq War (2003–11), 74, 132 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Kansas populists (1880s), 220 libertarianism, 15, 151, 154, 158, 164, 173 life expectancy, 100, 101 March For Our Lives (2018), 21 March for Science (2017), 23–5, 27, 28, 210 McCarthyism (1947–56), 137 Million-Man March (1995), 4 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 23, 175 National Defense Research Committee, 180 National Park Service, 4 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 Obama administration (2009–17), 3, 24, 76, 77, 79, 158 Occupy Wall Street (2011), 5, 10, 61 and opiates, 105, 172–3 and pain, 103, 105, 107, 172–3 Palantir, 151, 152, 175, 190 Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Parkland attack (2018), 21 Patriot Act (2001), 137 Pentagon, 130, 132, 135, 136, 214, 216 presidential election (2016), see under presidential election, US psychiatry, 107, 111 quantitative easing, 31–2 Reagan administration (1981–9), 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” speech (2002), 132 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 and torture, 93 Trump administration (2017–), see under Trump, Donald unemployment, 83 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 World War I (1914–18), 137 World War II (1939–45), 137, 180 universal basic income, 221 universities, 151–2, 164, 169–70 University of Cambridge, 84, 151 University of Chicago, 160 University of East Anglia, 195 University of Oxford, 56, 151 University of Vienna, 160 University of Washington, 188 unknown knowns, 132, 133, 136, 138, 141, 192, 212 unknown unknowns, 132, 133, 138 “Use of Knowledge in Society, The” (Hayek), 161 V2 flying bomb, 137 vaccines, 23, 95 de Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban, 73 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 Vesalius, Andreas, 96 Vienna, Austria, 153–5, 159 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 violence vs. power, 19, 219 viral marketing, 12 virtual reality, 183 virtue signaling, 194 voice recognition, 187 Vote Leave, 50, 93 Wainright, Joel, 214 Wales, 77, 90 Wall Street, New York, 33, 190 War College, Berlin, 128 “War Economy” (Neurath), 153–4 war on drugs, 43, 131 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Watts, Jay, 115 weaponization, 18–20, 22, 26, 75, 118, 123, 194, 219, 223 weapons of mass destruction, 132 wearable technology, 173 weather control, 204 “What Is An Emotion?”

A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner
by Chris Atkins
Published 6 Feb 2020

I feel as if I’ve been cut free from a sunken wreck and am starting the long swim back to the surface. 9 Courtrooms and Cheeseburgers In which Gary and I both get stuck in Wandsworth. We refuse to ride the bang-up, and wage admin warfare with the authorities. Things I learn: 1) The Offender Management Unit can’t count 2) How to conceive in prison 3) A novel way to solve the housing crisis We score a partial victory for Gary, but my prospects take a turn for the worse. 11 January I’m shortly due back in court for my confiscation hearing. I am desperate to know what’s going on, but can’t raise my lawyer on the phone. Danielle lets me nip out of the inductions to call, and I eventually speak to my lawyer’s assistant, who clearly learnt her bedside manner from Dr Harold Shipman.

…

I’d change the locks quick-smart and then put the address on Gumtree.’ He would only accept offers from foreigners, and insist they pay the first three months’ rent upfront in cash. He would hand over the keys, ditch his phone and then leave them to it. It’s a very twenty-first-century crime, and Carney is adamant that he was simply helping to solve London’s housing crisis. 20 January It’s finally time for my confiscation hearing at Southwark. I’m woken at 6 a.m. by an officer tapping on the door. I assume that it’s a Listener call-out, and stumble out of bed asking who the contact is. The screw tells me that I’m due in court, and I get ready in the dark to avoid waking Gary.

Why We Get the Wrong Politicians
by Isabel Hardman
Published 14 Jun 2018

Unless the council’s environmental health department decided that the flat was uninhabitable, she wasn’t even near the start of getting a transfer to a bigger property. To qualify for a priority move, she would have to be severely disabled, with a mobility problem. The young woman obviously felt relieved that Buck had listened and promised to do what she could. But she still left looking utterly hopeless. For another couple with a housing crisis, something needed to be done immediately. The woman was due to give birth the following day and they had been evicted without warning by their private landlord. Buck was again very firm, explaining that as the pair had moved to Westminster North from another part of the country, the local council had no duty to house them.

…

But the fight was so bruising for those in government, especially Eric Pickles, who was then Communities Secretary, and Theresa May, who observed it from a distance in the Home Office before entering Number 10 herself in 2016, that they privately vowed never again to have a serious stand-off with an organisation that represented so many people likely to vote Conservative. Consequently, ministers have dodged seriously considering reforms that could help build more homes and solve Britain’s housing crisis, such as reviewing the protections for the Green Belt. Another green and pleasant policy scuppered by a different sort of lobbying group was a 2011 plan to part-privatise the Forestry Commission, which manages more than 150,000 hectares of Britain’s forests. Ministers insisted that protection for the forests would remain in place, but the plans to raise around £250 million from the sale caused a row that spread quicker than a forest fire.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

He was occasionally accompanied by colleagues, but the entire arrangement was kept secret from the rest of the CA teams—and perhaps Palantir itself. I can’t speculate about why, but the Palantir staff received Cambridge Analytica database logins and emails with fairly obvious pseudonyms like “Dr. Freddie Mac” (after the mortgage company that was bailed out by the federal government in the 2008 housing crisis). I do know that after Palantir data scientists started building their own Facebook harvesting apps and scrapers, Nix asked them to stay after hours to keep working on applications that could replicate the Facebook data Kogan was getting—without the need for Kogan. It was no longer simply Facebook apps that were being used.

…

Like many of their fellow Canadians, they took pleasure in smugly shaking their heads at their backward neighbors. Canadians have a hard time understanding populism because, unlike America or Britain, it has never had any Rupert Murdoch–owned media. There is no Fox News or The Sun in Canada. Because of its more risk-conscious banking system, the country did not experience a housing crisis or financial crash. And unlike the rest of the OECD, Canada is the outlier where patriotism and support for immigration actually correlate positively with each other. So I would find myself repeating the same conversation over and over to baffled Canadians who simply could not understand how Brexit or Trump were even possible.

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
by Martin Gurri
Published 13 Nov 2018

Manuel Castells, a sympathetic observer, perused the online records of the Occupy sites’ general assemblies, and compiled a roster of changes the participants expected to work on the world. It made exhausting reading. …controlling financial speculation, particularly high frequency trading; auditing the Federal Reserve; addressing the housing crisis; regulating overdraft fees; controlling currency manipulation; opposing the outsourcing of jobs; defending collective bargaining and union rights; reducing income inequality; reforming tax law; reforming political campaign finance; reversing the Supreme Court’s decision allowing unlimited campaign contributions from corporations; banning bailouts of companies; controlling the military-industrial complex; improving the care of veterans; limiting terms for elected politicians; defending freedom on the Internet; assuring privacy on the Internet and in the media; combating economic exploitation; reforming the prison system; reforming health care; combating racism, sexism, and xenophobia; improving student loans; opposing the Keystone pipeline and other environmentally predatory projects; enacting policies against global warming; fining and controlling BP and similar oil spillers; enforcing animal rights; supporting alternative energy sources; critiquing personal leadership and vertical authority, beginning with a new democratic culture in the camps; and watching out for cooptation in the political system…[72] The action words used for these improvements of the status quo connoted negation and elimination: “reform,” “control,” “reverse,” “limit,” “combat,” “fine,” “critique.”

…

Ormerod’s endless list of parliamentary claims of competence can find a mirror image in the equally endless expectations of government culled by Manuel Castells from Occupier statements: …controlling financial speculation, particularly high frequency trading; auditing the Federal Reserve; addressing the housing crisis; regulating overdraft fees; controlling currency manipulation; opposing the outsourcing of jobs; defending collective bargaining and union rights; reducing income inequality; reforming tax law; reforming political campaign finance; reversing the Supreme Court’s decision allowing unlimited campaign contributions from corporations; banning bailouts of companies; controlling the military-industrial complex; improving the care of veterans; limiting terms for elected politicians; defending freedom on the Internet…[185] The public has judged government on government’s own terms, but added bad intentions.

How Long Will Israel Survive Threat Wthn
by Gregg Carlstrom
Published 14 Oct 2017

Half a century after the occupation, there remains a vast disparity between east and west on virtually every indicator. Among East Jerusalem residents, 75 per cent live below the poverty line, and one-third of children do not complete a full twelve years of school. Building permits in the east are expensive and difficult to obtain, and the resultant housing crisis has pushed population density to nearly twice the level of the west. Basic services are scarce, from health care to sewage to post offices. Shuafat refugee camp, which borders the “ordinary” Shuafat neighborhood but is separated by a high concrete wall and a checkpoint, had no running water for three months before Abu Khdair’s murder.

…

Lapid had become a problematic member of the coalition, sparring with Netanyahu over the budget and a plan to exempt first-time homebuyers from tax. The latter was Lapid’s flagship economic initiative. It was widely panned by Israeli economists, who said it would do nothing to alleviate the country’s housing crisis, which is caused mainly by a shortage of new apartments. Netanyahu opposed it, partly because he feared a political victory would boost Lapid’s standing. Rumors had also swirled for weeks that Lapid and Herzog were trying to cobble together an alternative coalition, marrying the center-left and ultra-Orthodox parties.

Inheritance
by Leo Hollis

* * * I had not started out writing with this story in mind. I had begun with a completely different question: who owns London today? Researching the housing crisis, I soon came to recognise how often the question of land is overlooked. When we think about the modern city we look at the buildings and the infrastructural flows of the urban environment: stones, bricks, stairs, windows and kerbs. It is often assumed that when we consider the current housing crisis the debate is concerned only with the supply and distribution of houses. We should build more; open more space; construct taller; increase density.

The Centrist Manifesto
by Charles Wheelan
Published 18 Apr 2013

That is how we achieve smaller, smarter government. Restore fiscal sanity. We cannot continue to borrow massively from the rest of the world. Our mounting debt is unfair to future generations, leaves the nation dangerously beholden to foreign creditors, and puts the financial system at risk. As we should have learned from our own housing crisis and the Greek debt crisis, when markets lose confidence, the plunge is fast and devastating. When will investors lose confidence in American debt? I have no idea—but we will be caught by surprise when it happens. There is never a memo announcing that a financial crisis will begin in six weeks.

Vancouver Like a Local
by Jacqueline Salomé

As might be expected of such a glitzy statement piece, the light fixture comes with some drama. Made from 600 faux crystals, and coming with a hefty $4.8 million price tag (footed by a local luxury real estate developer), the work has been criticized as a display of opulence in a city facing a housing crisis. It’s one of Vancouver’s most controversial art installations. » Don’t leave without seeing the lights in action: this mammoth chandelier glitters, twirls, and dances daily at 12pm, 4pm, and 9pm. g Public Art g Contents Google Map 217.5 ARC X 13 Map 3; 1204 Beach Avenue, West End; ///reported.owes.rush “Sunset at the metal ribs, see you there,” is a message frequently sent by Vancouverites linking up with friends.

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 28 Jan 2020

DECENT HOUSING The post-crisis recession had huge consequences on housing for many Europeans. High unemployment and cuts in salaries and state support meant many could not afford to pay their rent or mortgage. Between 2008 and 2013, more than four million Europeans were estimated to have faced evictions.13 The recession brought to a head a housing crisis that had been festering for years. Europe has become increasingly urbanized, and the availability and affordability of housing, especially for those with limited income, have become major problems in most large cities. In many urban areas, the price of residential housing has risen sharply since the 1980s.

…

See also public sector doctrines relating to (see economic doctrines) employment programs, 229, 274–80 globalization role of, 305 lending, 183–84 public banks, 116–18, 184–86; 183–184 role in research and development, 23, 100, 312 societal role of, 8 government bonds, 171–72, 182 Greece Austerity Doctrine and, 17 bond interest rates, 80 as crisis country, 35, 36 debt restructuring and, 57–58 depressed investment and, 108 ECB pressure on, 77 economic adjustment and, 55–56 Gini coefficient for, 47 health care in, 242 investment ratio of, 104 privatization in, 21–22 Troika policies and, 37 Troika structural reforms and, 70 unemployment levels of, 31 wage reduction in, 39–40 Growth Pact, Stability and. See Stability and Growth Pact Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP), 64 headline inflation, 82 health care, 241–43 home mortgages affordability of, 231, 233–35 public option for, 183–84, 233–34 rising costs of, 230 housing crisis. See also home mortgages affordable housing, 235–37 land use and property taxes, 231–33 overview of, 229–31 Human Development Index, 126 Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner for, 247 Human Rights, Universal Declaration of (1948), 237 HypoVereinsbank, 164 IMF (International Monetary Fund), 36 incentives CEO and executive, 137–38 corporate governance and, 127 for excessive patenting, 146 proposals for reforming, 140 providing, for innovations, 147 worker-owned businesses and, 142 income, raising minimum wages, 265–68 restoring workers’ bargaining power, 262–65 universal basic income, 251–54 India, 131, 252, 253, 275 industrial policies, 273–74 inequality austerity related to, 49–50 corporation power leading to, 128 data supporting patterns of, 6, 7 globalization mismanagement and, 303–4 large corporations and, 19–20 macroeconomic framework creating, 46–47 market power contributing to, 129 as socioeconomic characteristic, 2 unemployment and, 31, 49–50, 275 inequality, growing (post-mid 1970s) contributing factors, 219–21 data supporting patterns of, 6, 7 decline in labor shares, 216, 217 economic background, 215–16 equitable society, achieving, 223–24 globalization, 219, 220–21, 221–23 income inequalities, 217–18, 218 rising poverty, 218–19, 219 welfare state and, 216–17 inflation Austerity Doctrine related to, 17 fears about, 44, 51–52, 58 -fighting mandate of ECB, 72–73, 75–76 low, or deflation proposals, 82–84 Price Stability Doctrine and, 18–19 informal workers, 247–48 information technology sector, 129 inheritance taxes, 188, 190–91 Initiative for Policy Dialogue, xv innovation -based economy, 128, 149 intellectual property rights and, 143–45, 147 in market economies, 135–36 insurance.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

At the time, we wondered what he had to look so pleased about. Now we know. Relieved (albeit briefly) of the burden of office and with time on his soft hands, he could now really make a killing as the most gallingly ubiquitous man on British television. But when I saw a trailer for Channel 5’s Our Housing Crisis – Who’s to Blame? presented by one Michael Portillo, my mixed feelings became a heady cocktail of annoyance and awe with perhaps a dash of admiration at his chutzpah. Of the many reasons, some sartorial, that I am loath to warm to Mr Portillo in the way softer hearts have, foremost is that I remember him for what he once was, one of the most viciously relishing of the young Thatcherites, the man who opined in 1993 that we should forensically examine health, education and social security (in other words, the heart of the welfare state) ‘from which the public sector could withdraw altogether’.

…

As this is a Christian notion, it is possibly enormously and embarrassingly unfashionable. But make no mistake, we need to get back to it. Not just in the sphere of housing, but across the span of our national life. To stay with social housing for now, the conclusions Danny Dorling put in his lecture to the LSE seem cogent and powerful to me. The answer to our housing crisis is in a massive programme of social housing building, the removal of all the financial incentives of Right to Buy, the removal of attractive financial incentives to become a private landlord, proper rent regulation, short-hold tenancies to be made illegal, and furthermore the compulsory purchase of buildings left unoccupied for more than a reasonable time.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

A normative corollary to this definition is also necessary: Progress is only real when we minimize the gap between what we can reasonably achieve and what we’ve actually achieved. As will be seen in Chapter Three the world is less poor than a century ago, and yet our capability to eradicate poverty has never been greater. Western problems such as the housing crisis are indicative of this growing gap between what governments could capably do to promote the well-being of their citizens, and what they purposely tie their own hands to avoid resolving. We may not know with exact certainty what we can reasonably achieve — this is a hypothetical after all — but we can definitely sense when we’re not doing enough.

…

According to one McKinsey study, for example, real healthcare costs in the US have risen 818% between 1960 and 2018.18 An older population suffering from more expensive chronic diseases is one reason, but there seems to be a dearth of explanations for this rise that don’t involve accepting the dysfunctionality of the US healthcare system, where the costs of delivering a baby add up to an average of $10,808 in 201519 compared to $30 in 1943 (just 1.5% of average annual household income then compared to 20% today).20 To this must be added the aforementioned rise in university fees, given that a higher education degree is now a necessity for holding most skilled jobs (increasingly, a post-grad degree too). And then there’s the housing crisis in major Western cities, which is where most of the good jobs for university graduates tend to be unless you want to be one of the nearly half of graduates who work in jobs that require no university skills.21 According to quarterly data by Nationwide (a UK building society), an average family in Britain buying an average dwelling will have had to pay 5.2 times their annual household earnings at the beginning of 2019, around twice that of 1983 when the series began.

Big Debt Crises
by Ray Dalio
Published 9 Sep 2018

Notably, the tax reduction was funneled to taxpayers within days—a virtually instantaneous stimulus. The infrastructure spending, on the other hand, would take years to ramp up as projects needed to be scoped and planned for, so it mattered less in the short term. On February 18, the administration announced a plan worth up to $275 billion to address the housing crisis. With the goal of helping “as many as nine million American homeowners refinance their mortgages or avert foreclosure,” the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan offered $75 billion in direct spending to keep at-risk homeowners in their homes. It also provided incentives to lenders to alter the terms of their loans to troubled borrowers to make them more affordable.

…

–New York Times December 3, 2007 Mortgage Relief Impact May Be Limited “The Bush administration’s effort to help at least some people in danger of defaulting on their subprime mortgages could affect only a small share of those who took out such loans during the final two years of the housing bubble, industry analysts said today.” –New York Times December 5, 2007 Wall Street Firms Subpoenaed in Subprime Inquiry -New York Times December 11, 2007 Mortgage Crisis Forces the Closing of a Fund “Losses on investments weakened by the deepening housing crisis have forced Bank of America to close a multibillion-dollar high-yield fund, the largest of its kind, after wealthy investors withdrew billions of dollars in assets.” –New York Times December 11, 2007 Fed Cuts Rate a Quarter Point; Stocks Dive -New York Times December 12, 2007 Fed Leads Drive to Strengthen Bank System “A day after the Federal Reserve disappointed investors with a modest cut in interest rates, central banks in North America and Europe announced on Wednesday the most aggressive infusion of capital into the banking system since the terrorist attacks of September 2001.“ –New York Times December 13, 2007 3 Big Banks See No Relief as Write-Offs Mount Up –Bloomberg December 14, 2007 Investors Shrug Off Global Cash Injection -New York Times December 19, 2007 E.C.B.

…

–New York Times February 10, 2009 Secretary Geithner Introduces Financial Stability Plan –Treasury Press Release February 10, 2009 Stocks Slide as New Bailout Disappoints -New York Times February 10, 2009 There wasn’t much of a surprise… “The key takeaway for the members and staff present at the briefing seems to have been that the Treasury’s plan was at its infancy and far from where members of Congress expected it to be.” –BDO February 13, 2009 Stimulus Plan Approved by Congress -New York Times February 17, 2009 Signing Stimulus, Obama Doesn’t Rule Out More -New York Times February 18, 2009 $275 Billion Plan Seeks to Address Housing Crisis “President Obama announced a plan on Wednesday to help as many as nine million American homeowners refinance their mortgages or avert foreclosure.” –New York Times February 20, 2009 Markets Close Lower as Fears Over Banks Persist -New York Times February 20, 2009 The Eve of Nationalization?

The Transformation Of Ireland 1900-2000
by Diarmaid Ferriter
Published 15 Jul 2009

In 1900 Sir Charles Cameron, the city’s Medical Officer, drew attention to the malnourishment of mothers and to the fact that infant mortality among the labouring classes was five times higher than those of the upper classes, and he recommended the clearing of certain slum areas. While Dublin Corporation had acquired powers in the late nineteenth century to regulate private housing in the context of sanitation, they had only tinkered at the margins of the housing crisis, as had the small Dublin Artisans Dwelling Company and the Iveagh Trust. In 1911, 22.9 per cent of Dublin’s population lived in one-room tenements with the only large centres of population getting near that figure being Finsbury in London (14.8) and Glasgow (13.2).57 In contrast, it has been suggested Ireland’s rural labourers were: among the best housed of their class in Western Europe … as late as 1921 it was reported that 48,000 cottages had been provided in rural Ireland since 1883, with a total expenditure of £8.5 million, whereas under the urban housing acts only £5 million had been spent and just 10,000 houses built.58 In 1903 the Mansion House Conference on housing had suggested the provision of new housing on the outskirts of the city, and Dublin Corporation was faced with the problem of a small rateable base because of the subsequent drift to the suburbs.

…

In 1911, 22.9 per cent of Dublin’s population lived in one-room tenements with the only large centres of population getting near that figure being Finsbury in London (14.8) and Glasgow (13.2).57 In contrast, it has been suggested Ireland’s rural labourers were: among the best housed of their class in Western Europe … as late as 1921 it was reported that 48,000 cottages had been provided in rural Ireland since 1883, with a total expenditure of £8.5 million, whereas under the urban housing acts only £5 million had been spent and just 10,000 houses built.58 In 1903 the Mansion House Conference on housing had suggested the provision of new housing on the outskirts of the city, and Dublin Corporation was faced with the problem of a small rateable base because of the subsequent drift to the suburbs. Reform of Dublin’s urban problems was hampered by the complexity of the relationship between the ownership of land and property and municipal politics, and the low rateable value of much of the property in the city.59 Undoubtedly, some members of the Corporation did well out of the housing crisis, though it has been argued that the role of the slum owners within nationalist politics has been exaggerated, given the links between the Irish Parliamentary Party and the Town Tenants League.60 The early years of the century saw the beginning of many debates about moving the population out to the suburbs and there were policy debates about the nature and location of housing.

…

Corcoran listed a catalogue of failure: no diminution in the problem of purely precarious employment, or in the abuse of strong drink; and he suggested the school attendance of Ireland in city and country ‘is a national scandal … here and in many other ways, there is room enough for trained social workers; a thousand could find ample scope for well-directed energy in Dublin alone’.136 The lack of appetite for confronting the housing crisis in the city was also noted, highlighting the divide between the rural and urban housing experiences. Labourers Acts had ensured that rural labourers made progress in the housing league during these years – indeed, it is not an exaggeration to term it a social revolution, in the sense that it was the first large-scale public-housing scheme in the country, with up to a quarter of a million housed under the Labourers Acts up to 1921.

City on the Verge
by Mark Pendergrast
Published 5 May 2017

In late 1945, the Ku Klux Klan surged into the spotlight (or firelight) yet again with a rally atop Stone Mountain, featuring a three-hundred-foot-wide cross lit by fuel oil, visible from sixty miles away, “to let the niggers know the war is over and that the Klan is back,” as one attendee said. Dozens of Atlanta policemen joined. In White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, historian Kevin Kruse documents Atlanta’s postwar battle over housing. “The end of World War II brought a severe housing crisis to Atlanta, as thousands of veterans returned home to discover the city had not only failed to build new homes during their absence but actually started to destroy old ones.” In 1946, as more African Americans began to move west of Ashby Street (now renamed Joseph E. Lowery Boulevard), a neo-Nazi group, the Columbians, posted signs reading, “Zoned as a White Community,” featuring their lightning insignia.

…

“Instead of promoting redistribution toward equality, such a system perpetuates inequality.” Members of the black middle and upper classes have thrived, but the hapless and often hopeless poor, of any racial or ethnic group, have not. Although the BeltLine project alone cannot solve Atlanta’s affordable housing crisis, it does have a mandate to provide 5,600 affordable units along the loop over the twenty-five-year time span of the tax allocation district (TAD), and after ten years, it had funded only a tenth of those, largely because of the impact of the Great Recession. During my research, I took part in a sparsely attended meeting of the Atlanta BeltLine Affordable Housing Advisory Board (BAHAB), charged with advising BeltLine organizations on affordable housing issues.

The Crisis of Crowding: Quant Copycats, Ugly Models, and the New Crash Normal
by Ludwig B. Chincarini
Published 29 Jul 2012

Funds in the business of providing leveraged liquidity were in the thick of the storm. JWMP was no exception. The troubling signs began early in 2008. January and February are typically good for fixed-income relative-value funds, because banks window-dress their balance sheets near the fiscal year’s end in November and December.2 The housing crisis made 2008 an exception. JWMP started the year with its worst-ever monthly return: −4.14% in January 2008. February was even worse, at −5.25%. By the end of February, JWMP began to unwind some of its risk. The Bear and the Gorilla Attack Then came the institutional bank run on Bear Stearns in March 2008.

…

In the case of a defaulted home loan, if the loan was originally for $600,000 and the borrower defaulted with 0% down, then the bank presumably should value the loan at the home’s value, which in a declining real estate market might be much less than $600,000. These writeoffs will lower the bank’s capital ratio and if large enough, will wipe out their equity making the bank insolvent (that is, assets are worth less than liabilities). Simple Answer to Puzzles Some people have proposed that to solve the banking and housing crisis, the U.S. government should simply have all banks renegotiate every mortgage to the current value of housing and have the government reimburse them. How much might this cost? Take a home owner who took out a home loan of $600,000 at 6% interest rates and the monthly mortgage payment was $3,597.40.

…

“Consumer Confusion in the Mortgage Market: Evidence of Less than a Perfectly Transparent and Competitive Market.” American Economic Review, May 2010. Wuffli, Peter. “Salomon Global Banking Conference.” UBS Presentation by CFO, October 28, 1998. Young, Ashley N. “The Real Estate Agent’s Role in the Housing Crisis: A Proposal for Ethical Reform.” Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Summer 2011. Zingales, Luigi. “Overall Impact of TARP on Financial Stability.” Oral Testimony before the Congressional Oversight Panel, March 4, 2011. Zuckerman, G., J. Hagerty, and D. Gauthier-Villars. “Impact of Mortgage Crisis Spreads; Dow Tumbles 2.8% as Fallout Intensifies; Moves by Central Banks.”

How I Invest My Money: Finance Experts Reveal How They Save, Spend, and Invest
by Brian Portnoy and Joshua Brown
Published 17 Nov 2020

As an entrepreneur and business owner, I represent an equity investment with higher risk. In 2008, I chose a business model that wasn’t commonly adopted—providing financial advice on a fee-for-service basis for middle income clients who didn’t believe they could afford the service. To add more risk to the equation, I founded the firm during the start of the housing crisis, and we moved frequently, which resulted in constantly rebuilding my clientele. Now, trends have changed in my favor. I merged my fee-only financial planning practice with a like-minded female entrepreneur of color. Our firm, 2050 Wealth Partners, is a 100% virtually-based fee-only financial planning firm, operated from our home offices in New York and Maryland.

Paint Your Town Red
by Matthew Brown
Published 14 Jun 2021

Intergenerational transfer of housing and landed wealth has emerged as a main driver of continuing inequality. The Conservative government’s 2020 proposal to grant blanket planning permission over wide swathes of England to private landowners and developers is likely to further exacerbate these problems. The housing crisis has been building for years as rentier capital replaces industrial capital, and cannot be quickly or easily remedied. Indeed, it has become something of a zero-sum game: if prices come down to increase affordability, then existing homeowners — many of whom have drawn down equity on their houses in the expectation of repaying it later when the house is sold, or have used it as an investment vehicle in place of a pension — will lose out.

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy
by Mehrsa Baradaran
Published 5 Oct 2015

He argued in 2000 at the Cato institute that “study after study has shown that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are failing to do even as much as banks and S&Ls in providing financing for affordable housing, including minority and low income housing.” Mike Konczal, “No, Marco Rubio, Government Did Not Cause the Housing Crisis,” Washington Post: Wonkblog, February 13, 2003, accessed March 17, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/13/no-marco-rubio-government-did-not-cause-the-housing-crisis/. 76. Elizabeth Laderman and Carolina Reid, “CRA Lending during the Subprime Meltdown,” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, February 2009, 115, accessed March 17, 2015, www.frbsf.org/community-development/files/cra_lending_during_subprime_meltdown.pdf. 77.

The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War
by A. J. Baime
Published 2 Jun 2014

She found the place filthy—garments on clotheslines freezing even in April, little kids roaming free and covered in ringworm. Cold medicines and aspirin were as rare and valuable as blocks of gold. “If there were any better place to go we’d certainly pull out,” she wrote in her diary, “but I don’t think you can find anything much different within driving distance of the plant.” Edsel realized that the housing crisis could throw a wrench into the bomber production process. If workers could not find an adequate place to live, or if they could not get to work, the bombers wouldn’t roll. He reached out to his contacts in Washington, pleading for help. His pleadings quickly reached the White House. The President imagined a government-financed “Bomber City” alongside Willow Run, an entire city freshly built with government money.

…

See also Bugas, John; FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) Hopkins, Harry exhaustion, [>]–[>] on FDR’s belief in role of bombings to victory, [>] with FDR when learning of Pearl Harbor attack, [>] reports on delays in heavy bomber production, [>] Hotchkiss school, William Ford at, [>]–[>] housing crisis, Willow Run, [>]–[>], [>], [>] Hudson Motor Car Company, frames for the B-26 “Widowmaker” Marauder, [>] Hudson’s Department Store, [>] Hull, Cordell, [>], [>], [>]–[>] hydraulic brakes, [>]–[>] Ickes, Harold “Old Curmudgeon,” [>]–[>], [>] incendiary bombs, [>] The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, [>] iron ore, mining of, in Michigan, [>] Italy, declaration of war on the US, [>] Iwanowa, Elsa, [>] Jackson (Mississippi) Daily News, on Detroit Race Riot of 1943, [>] Japan air attack on Pearl Harbor, [>] initial Allied victories against, [>] successes following US entry into war, [>] surrender to Allies, [>] US actions to thwart growing militarism of, [>]–[>] US declaration of war on, [>] war with, FDR’s early recognition of likelihood of, [>] JB-2 Loon, [>] Jeep (Willys-Overland) and hiring of Sorensen as chief executive, [>] production of at the Rouge plant, [>] Jeffries, Edward, [>]–[>], [>] Jeschonnek, Hans, [>] Jews.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It
by Owen Jones
Published 3 Sep 2014

There was little sense of this in the media portrayal: it was as though his triumph was somehow illegitimate because it depended on the votes of trade-union members. Quite how intolerable the Establishment regarded any deviation from the political consensus was illustrated by the reaction to three commitments Ed Miliband made in September 2013 that went against the political grain. Responding to a housing crisis that had left 5 million people on waiting lists and house-building at a record low, Miliband pledged action against construction firms that hoarded land while waiting for it to increase in value. Next, in a reversal of New Labour and the Conservatives’ commitment to ever-lower corporation tax, he promised a tax hike on big companies, which would go to fund tax breaks for struggling small businesses.

…

While these non-government organizations could previously spend up to £989,000 a year before a general election, it was now to be slashed to £390,000, and would include everything from staff costs to public meetings. But the definition of ‘non-party campaigning’ was so vague that it covered pretty much any issue, ranging from calling for more resources for treating cancer to dealing with the affordable-housing crisis. Charity trustees, known to be fearful of anything with legal implications – they are, after all, saddled with strict legal obligations they have to abide by19 – would move to stop campaigns that scrutinize power. The Trades Union Congress suggested this could make organizing their 2014 annual congress or holding a demonstration in election year a criminal offence.

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk
Published 15 Feb 2018

In short, the exorbitant cost of housing is now one of the most important reasons for the stagnation of living standards across North America and Western Europe. If defeating populism hinges in part on making citizens more optimistic about the future, a radical reorientation of housing policy is urgently needed.38 One important way to address the housing crisis is, quite simply, to increase the stock of available homes. The process of obtaining permits should be made much easier, and disputes about them resolved much more quickly.39 Towns and villages should have less power to veto developments in their jurisdiction.40 States should do more to help in the construction of new apartments, whether directly through the addition of new units of public housing or indirectly through financial assistance to local municipalities.41 Finally, the introduction of land value taxes—which levy the same charge on a patch of land irrespective of whether its owner lets it lie barren or decides to erect a building on it—would provide a strong incentive to build new homes.42 A different tax system could also improve the distribution of housing.

…

See Olivia Rudgard, “One in Ten British Adults Now a Second-Home Owner,” Telegraph, August 18, 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/18/one-ten-british-adults-now-second-home-owner/. 38. David Adler, “Why Housing Matters,” unpublished manuscript. 39. In the United Kingdom, where the housing crisis is especially acute, there have recently been some moves toward speeding up the planning process. See “Fast Track Applications to Speed Up Planning Process and Boost Housebuilding,” Gov.uk, February 18, 2016, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/fast-track-applications-to-speed-up-planning-process-and-boost-housebuilding; and Patrick Wintour and Rowena Mason, “Osborne’s Proposals to Relax Planning System a ‘Retreat from Localism,’” Guardian, July 10, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/10/osbornes-proposals-relax-planning-system-retreat-localism. 40.

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 11 Oct 2021

William Tucker, “The Source of America’s Housing Problem: Look in Your Own Back Yard,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis 127 (February 6, 1990), www.cato.org. 49. Ibid. 50. Bernard J. Frieden, The Environmental Protection Hustle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979), 178. 51. Jennifer Hernandez, “California’s Environmental Quality Act Lawsuits and California’s Housing Crisis,” Hastings Environmental Law Journal 24, no. 1 (2018): 21–71, www.hklaw.com. 52. “Cost of Living Index by State 2021,” World Population Review, accessed March 21, 2021, www.worldpopulationreview.com. 53. Douglas Schwartz, “California Dems Excited About Biden and Harris, Quinnipiac University Poll Finds; 43% of Voters Say They Can’t Afford to Live Here,” Quinnipiac University, February 6, 2019, www.poll.qu.edu. 54.

…

California County Population Estimates and Components of Change by Year–July 1, 2010–2020,” California Department of Finance, December 2020, www.dof.ca.gov. 59. David Zahniser and Liam Dillon, “L.A. City Council Opposes State Bill That Would Lift Local Zoning Rules,” Los Angeles Times, April 16, 2019, www.latimes.com. 60. Michael Hiltzik, “Column: California’s Housing Crisis Reaches from the Homeless to the Middle Class—but It’s Still Almost Impossible to Fix,” Los Angeles Times, March 29, 2018, www.latimes.com. 61. Laura Foote, interview by the author, January 15, 2021. 62. YIMBY leader (name withheld), interview by the author, April 1, 2020. 63. Ibid. 64.

The Lie of the Land
by Amanda Craig
Published 14 Jun 2017

It’s almost a year since it happened, and the police have got no further with what the papers called the Headless Corpse Mystery, but there are ever so many things I’d be wondering if I were investigating it, she thinks. Knowing how to use a maul to chop off the head must mean it was someone used to woodcutting, for instance. Of course the house had to be re-let. There are too many properties locked up and falling to pieces, and even if the housing crisis is less deep here, they should still be lived in. Tore is a good landlord, unlike old Sir Jerry; he grew up poor himself, and even if he’s rich now, he knows the importance of a home. Without people in them to see when the roof leaks or there’s a flood, a house can go to rot and ruin in months.

…

‘Marta’s living all on her own up in a vast six-bedroomed house in Hampstead worth millions while we’re slumming it here.’ ‘It’s her home. You can’t ask her to sell up just so we can have a better life.’ ‘That’s the problem with the property market in this country,’ Quentin says. ‘If it weren’t for old ladies rattling round enormous houses, there’d be no housing crisis.’ ‘We like Oma, don’t we, Xan?’ ‘Yes,’ says Xan, yawning, and glaring at his stepfather. I must send my UCAS form off, he thinks, hazily, but that life of study and lectures is increasingly remote to him. Whenever he starts to think of his future Katya’s image interrupts it. ‘You like this?

This Land: The Struggle for the Left
by Owen Jones
Published 23 Sep 2020

Corbyn was the long-standing MP for Islington North, in a multicultural borough long associated with ‘champagne socialism’, but in reality scarred with huge injustices: nearly half of Islington’s children grow up in poverty.14 Corbyn did his politics out of the spotlight. One of his researchers remembers taking a call from Corbyn one night: he had got talking to a homeless man in his constituency and, learning the man had no accommodation that night, was trying to find him somewhere to sleep. Britain’s housing crisis – particularly acute in inner London constituencies such as Corbyn’s – would remain one of his greatest passions; so, too, were his constituents. Advice surgeries would begin at 2 p.m. on Saturdays in Islington’s Old Fire Station; they would end whenever the last person left, sometimes around midnight.

…

Given that this older demographic is also the most socially conservative on issues ranging from immigration to LGBTQ rights to Muslims, it’s equally unsurprising that Labour has not won a majority of pensioners since 1997. At every election since, the Conservative lead in this demographic has increased. Yet it is younger people who suffered an unprecedented squeeze in living standards, a growing housing crisis, student debt, decimated public services, slash-and-burn cuts to social security, as well as an assault on deeply held progressive social values – and who were most attracted to the Corbynite flame. Corbynism won the support of younger people in unprecedented numbers; but it also repelled older people to an unparalleled degree.

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters
by Gregory Zuckerman
Published 5 Nov 2013

For McClendon, the Statoil agreement was reassurance that all was well with his company. “Everything except macro events” was “really going our way,” according to McClendon.1 But Chesapeake shares kept falling, setting off alarm bells at the banks that had lent McClendon hundreds of millions of dollars. During the first week of October, as an intensifying housing crisis seemed likely to lead to a U.S. recession and pressure energy prices, Chesapeake tumbled to just twenty-two dollars a share. The lenders decided they needed to act. Late in the afternoon of October 8, a Goldman Sachs executive in the firm’s private wealth group called McClendon, reaching him in his Oklahoma City office.

…

That year, as she turned thirty-four years old, she had seven employees reporting to her and she seemed on the fast track at work. Liz and her husband, Matthew, a truck driver, bought a home in a nearby town for $365,000 dollars. It featured fruit and magnolia trees and was across the street from the elementary school their two daughters attended. Then the housing crisis hit. As the local real estate market crumbled, Irish’s income evaporated. She made less than $40,000 in 2009. By the summer of 2010, she had earned less than $5,000 that entire year. Liz and her husband had neglected to build much of a nest egg and ran into trouble paying their bills. Soon they lost their home and faced thousands of dollars of additional bills.

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe
by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Alex Hyde-White
Published 24 Oct 2016

See ILO, World Employment Social Outlook—Trends 2016, available at http://www.ilo.org/global/research/global-reports/weso/2016/WCMS_443480/lang--en/index.htm. This situation, where there has been a deficiency of aggregate demand, has persisted for a long time. Indeed, one of the reasons that the Fed encouraged the reckless lending that led to the housing crisis was to make up for what would otherwise have been a weak aggregate demand within the United States. Ben Bernanke, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, referred to the situation as a “savings glut.” See “The Global Saving Glut and the U.S. Current Account Deficit,” Remarks by Governor Ben S.

…

Though central banks are only supposed to lend to solvent but illiquid institutions, necessarily, in doing so, they are putting their judgment against that of the market. 27 In the United States, almost all of the hundreds of billions of bailout dollars went to help the banks and their bondholders and shareholders. A negligible amount went to help homeowners, even though the crisis had begun as a housing crisis. The administration and the Fed believed in trickle-down economics: throw enough money at the banks, and the whole economy will benefit. It would have been far better for the economy had they tried a larger dose of trickle-up economics: help the homeowners, and everyone will benefit. 28 The Troika, in effect, threatened to bankrupt Ireland if the government tried to make bondholders bear some of the costs of bank restructuring.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America
by Charlotte Alter
Published 18 Feb 2020

Svante had spent time in a homeless shelter, he had watched his mom struggle to make rent, and he was a twenty-four-year-old with four roommates. So he had little patience for the NIMBYism (“Not In My Back Yard”) of homeowners who flooded community meetings to oppose building more affordable housing in their neighborhoods. NIMBYism, Svante thought, was the biggest reason for the affordable housing crisis in Ithaca and around the country. Otherwise progressive people—people who had Greenpeace stickers on their hybrid cars—would create “firestorms” to protect their property values, he said. Their demands sounded reasonable: they’d say things like “We don’t want to change the character of the neighborhood,” or “Quality of life is important to us,” or “It’s the traffic!”

…

to oppose building more: Jeff Stein, “Long-simmering Fight over Affordable Housing Plan Ends amid Mayor’s Emotional Plea,” Ithaca Voice, August 27, 2014, ithacavoice.com/2014/08/long-simmering-fight-affordable-housing-plan-ends-amid-ithaca-mayors-emotional-plea/. could have spent elsewhere: David Marchan, “Time for a New Vision,” Ithaca.com, March 13, 2019, ithaca.com/opinion/guest_opinions/time-for-a-new-vision/article_8dff857c-45ae-11e9-ba3b-57834ca9d289.html. $40 million affordable housing plan: Sarah Mervosh, “Minneapolis, Tackling Housing Crisis and Inequity, Votes to End Single-Family Zoning,” The New York Times, December 13, 2018, nytimes.com/2018/12/13/us/minneapolis-single-family-zoning.html held by people under forty: Andrew Dunn, “Millennials Are About to Control the City Council. How will They Change Charlotte?” CharlotteAgenda.com, November 30, 2017, charlotteagenda.com/110521/millennials-control-city-council-will-change-charlotte/.

Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration
by Kent E. Calder
Published 28 Apr 2019

Its shares dropped precipitously, by 42 percent, to $4.22, in a single day.48 Two Asian firms—the Korean Development Bank and an unnamed Chinese bank—together with London’s Barclays courted Lehman Brothers as potential suitors. They terminated discussions, however, on sensing the magnitude of its troubles, including exposure to the US housing crisis.49 Lehman 64 chapter 3 looked to Bank of America as a potential buyer, but on September 15 BOA agreed to purchase Merrill Lynch instead, for $50 billion. Lehman Brothers, without a white knight, collapsed into bankruptcy with $613 billion in debts, precipitating the largest US corporate bankruptcy ever.

…

See David Ellis, “Lehman Suffers Nearly $4 Billion Loss,” CNN Money, September 10, 2008, http://​money​.cnn​.com/​2008/​09/​10/​ news/​companies/​lehman. 49. The KDB deal fell apart because KDB and Lehman could not agree on specific terms and market conditions. The deal could have potentially exposed KDB to fallout from the US housing crisis. And KDB reportedly wanted to pay only one-third of Lehman’s asking price. See Tina Wang, “For Lehman, a Deal with KDB Appears Dead,” Forbes, September 10, 2008, http://​www​.forbes​.com/​2008/​09/​10/​lehman​-korean​-bank​-markets​ -equity​-cx​_tw​_0910markets3​.html. 50. On the chronology of the Lehman crisis, see “Timeline: Key Events in Financial Crisis,” USA Today, September 8, 2013, http://​www​.usatoday​.com/​story/​money/​ business/​2013/​09/​08/​chronology​-2008​-financial​-crisis​-lehman/​2779515/; and “The Fall of Lehman Brothers,” Market Watch, http://​projects​.marketwatch​.com/​fall​-of​-lehman​ -brothers​-timeline/​#0. 51.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion
by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Published 19 Jul 2021

Neumann surprised his team when, days before the meeting, he invited his father, Doron, to fly from Israel and insisted he join him for the meeting in New Delhi. It wasn’t a terribly in depth-conversation. Modi, in addition to taking in Neumann’s pitch for WeWork’s expansion into India, asked Neumann for help solving his country’s housing crisis, Neumann recounted to others. Neumann pledged that WeWork would find ways to do so. Neumann would later tell his staff that WeWork would solve not only India’s housing crisis but the world’s. The next day, Neumann ascended the stage at the Vigyan Bhavan conference center. He wore a flowing white shirt and a high-collared navy-blue vest nicknamed the Modi vest because it was the prime minister’s attire of choice.

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm
Published 10 May 2010

By 2008 both institutions were sustaining massive losses that rapidly eroded their capital. Those losses came from two sources. For starters, the fee they received for guaranteeing the mortgages that they manufactured into mortgage-backed securities proved insufficient to cover their losses. In the worst housing crisis since the Great Depression, even safe “prime” borrowers started to default, at rates far in excess of what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had anticipated. The insurance premiums no longer covered the losses, which now surfaced on the two institutions’ balance sheets. Far more significant was the fact that their investment portfolios were bursting with subprime mortgages and subprime securities.

…

By comparison, doomed Lehman Brothers was levered at a relatively modest 31 to 1, and Bank of America was even lower, at 11 to 1. Many European banks had avidly joined in the frenzy of financing and securitizing mortgages and other kinds of loans. This left them holding toxic mortgage-backed securities and CDOs that eroded in value when the housing crisis hit the United States. As markets for these securities dried up, many European banks saw their potential losses rise to frightening levels. By the end of 2009, the European Central Bank raised estimates of write-downs to €550 billion, topping earlier estimates. Not all these assets came from the United States.

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
by Richard V. Reeves
Published 22 May 2017

Richard Reeves and Dimitrios Halikias, “How Land Use Regulations are Zoning Out Low-Income Families,” Social Mobility Memos (blog), August 16, 2016 (www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/08/16/zoning-as-opportunity-hoarding/). 47. Amanda Kolson Hurley, “Will U.S. Cities Design Their Way Out of the Affordable Housing Crisis,” Next City, January 18, 2016 (https://nextcity.org/features/view/cities-affordable-housing-design-solution-missing-middle). 48. Lee Anne Fennell, “Homes Rule,” review of The Homevoter Hypothesis: How Home Values Influence Local Government Taxation, School Finance, and Land-Use Policies, by William A.

Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading
by Peter Kovac
Published 10 Dec 2014

When Lewis tells us “the price volatility within each trading day in the U.S. stock market between 2010 and 2013 was nearly 40 percent higher than the volatility between 2004 and 2006,” it’s not clear what data source he is using. But it is clear that these are cherry-picked statistics: Why 2004 to 2006? Why not include 2003? And why compare to 2010, 2011, and 2012, with the European debt crisis threatening to blow apart Europe in a way that the U.S. housing crisis couldn’t?[57] The answer is that the data fits his argument best when you slice it this way. The period from 2004 to 2006 comprises the quietest years on record – there were absolutely zero days where the market dropped by 2% or more, and only two days in those three years where the market rose by 2%.

End the Fed
by Ron Paul
Published 5 Feb 2011

In many ways, some people refer to you as a price fixer, you know, because you fix interest rates. The market is powerful, and usually overwhelms and does come into play, but when the Fed fixes an interest rate at 1 percent, that is price-fixing. At the end of your testimony, you suggested that we should address this housing crisis, and we should have rules that would address deceptive lending practices. And I just think that is not the answer at all. The real deception is when we distort the value of money, when we create money out of thin air. We have no savings. Yet there’s so-called capital. There’s money available.

How to Be Right: In a World Gone Wrong
by James O'Brien
Published 2 Nov 2018

Pockets of resistance at the Guardian and elsewhere were preaching almost pointlessly to the choir, while the likes of Kelvin MacKenzie at the Sun and latterly Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail, inarguably the two most powerful and toxic propagandists of the last 30 years, were offering up generous portions of xenophobic fire and brimstone on a daily basis. It wasn’t just that immigration might be a factor in sundry perceived problems. Immigration was the problem. Take, for example, a few hardy perennials: immigrants undercut our wages, immigrants put a strain on public services and immigrants are responsible for the housing crisis. These are widely held and not particularly racist convictions, but even if you allow that they are partly true, which is not at all clear, immigration can never account for either the existence or the scale of the perceived problems. To be temporarily trite, substitute the three instances of the word ‘immigrants’ above for the word ‘people’ and you will see that exclusively blaming the former for the travails of the latter only helps to excuse the employers who aren’t paying decent wages, the politicians who are underfunding the public sector and the property developers who aren’t building houses.

Where We Are: The State of Britain Now
by Roger Scruton
Published 16 Nov 2017

They grew from a subconscious sense that to build is to intrude on nature, and that the intrusion must always be apologized for. As the cities expanded so too did the apology, an attitude that led at last to the ‘garden city’ movement of Sir Ebenezer Howard. That movement is alive today, one force in the great controversy over land use precipitated by our housing crisis. And it illustrates a singular fact about the British people, which is that they are unhappy if they are not living on the ground.22 However poor they are, British people will avoid high-rise apartment blocks and strive to live where they can open a door onto their piece of territory. The building societies and friendly societies came about in order to satisfy this need to settle in a place of one’s own, and ultimately to retire there, growing flowers in front of the house and vegetables behind.

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business
by Mikkel Svane and Carlye Adler
Published 13 Nov 2014

Alex had his own financial woes, due to taxes owed on estimated income that was never realized from his previous company, Araneum, which had folded and therefore never earned what he expected. Morten, caught up in the real estate bubble, also had monetary concerns. He had left a high-income job for one with no pay and at the same time was trying to pay a mortgage on an apartment that was under water thanks to the housing crisis. He talked with urgency about the importance of paying off this mortgage as fast as possible. It may have been self-imposed pressure, but to him it was very real and very pressing. We had initially agreed that we would forgo any sort of salary while we were building the product, but at a certain point Morten decided he couldn’t continue this way.

Firefighting
by Ben S. Bernanke , Timothy F. Geithner and Henry M. Paulson, Jr.
Published 16 Apr 2019

Congress was never enthusiastic about a dramatically more powerful housing strategy, and Tim and most of those in the Obama administration also believed that additional dollars spent on unemployment benefits, infrastructure projects, payroll tax cuts, and aid to states would have more economic bang for the buck—while raising fewer dilemmas about fairness—than a new wave of programs aimed narrowly at home owners. Solving the economic crisis was a necessary condition for solving the housing crisis, while the reverse was not necessarily true. In the end, a long and steady economic recovery might be the most successful housing program. Home prices stabilized after the Great Recession ended, gradually eliminating trillions of dollars of negative equity, lifting millions of underwater home owners above water.

Handbook of Modeling High-Frequency Data in Finance
by Frederi G. Viens , Maria C. Mariani and Ionut Florescu
Published 20 Dec 2011

Second, looking at several years for which we have an idea of what the results should look like we notice that our hypotheses were confirmed. Specifically, in 2001 and partially in 2002, we expect to see high parameter values due to the end of the dot-com bubble. Again in 2008, we expect to see high values due to the housing crisis and the subsequent market crash in September 2008. Surprisingly, the most reliable confirmation is in the Levy Flight parameter values, they are all much smaller than 2.0 ‘‘the normal behavior’’ parameter value. 137 6.4 Results and Discussions 3.2 3 2.8 2.6 2.4 2.2 2 1.8 1.6 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 −1 −1.2 −1.4 −1.6 −1.8 −2 −2.2 −2.4 −2.6 −2.8 −3 −1 −1.2 −1.4 −1.6 −1.8 −2 −2.2 −2.4 −2.6 −2.8 −3 −1 −1.2 −1.4 −1.6 −1.8 −2 −2.2 −2.4 −2.6 −2.8 −3 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 FIGURE 6.3 Hurst and DFA regression plots for a sample of three stocks.

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See also Value at risk (VaR) High parameter values, 136 High trading activity, 42 Hilbert space, 387 Hillebrand, Eric, xiii, 75 HL estimator, 263. See also VaRHL Hölder constants, 358 Hölder continuous real-valued function, 350 Hölder continuous real-valued function with exponent δ, 351 Hölder’s inequality, 391, 395 Hölder spaces, 349, 355, 367, 388–390, 411 Homotopy perturbation method, 379–380 Housing crisis, 136 Hu–Kercheval method, 164 Hull–White process, 400 Hurst analysis, 130–131, 132 results of, 141 Hurst exponent, 125, 126, 132 values of, 138 Hurst index, 221. See also Implied Hurst index Hurst index estimation, Whittle-based approach for, 225–226 Hurst parameter(s), 121–122, 125, 135, 220, 221 Hurst parameter analysis, 136 Hurst parameter estimates, 132 Hurst parameter estimators, 229 Hurst regression plots, 137 Hyperbolic distributions, 171 IBM DFA and Hurst methods applied to, 147 Lévy flight parameter for, 343 IBM time series, 257 i.i.d. data, 172.

Basic Economics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 1 Jan 2000

Smith, “Study Sees Record Industrial Space Vacancies,” Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2004, p. B6. {49} Joel F. Brenner and Herbert M. Franklin, Rent Control in North America and Four European Countries (Washington: The Potomac Institute, 1977), p. 4. {50} Ibid., p. 69. {51} Thomas Hazlett, “Rent Controls and the Housing Crisis,” Resolving the Housing Crisis: Government Policy, Decontrol and the Public Interest, edited by M. Bruce Johnson (San Francisco: Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research, 1982), pp. 282–283. {52} William Tucker, The Excluded Americans, p. 163. {53} Diana Geddes, “The Doors Have Closed on Furnished Accommodation,” The Times of London, January 24, 1975, p. 11

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{57} Joseph Berger, “For Some Landlords, Real Money in the Homeless,” New York Times, February 9, 2013, p. A15. {58} Laurie P. Cohen, “Home Free: Some Rich and Famous of New York City Bask in Shelter of Rent Law,” Wall Street Journal, March 21, 1994, p. A1. {59} Nicole Gelinas, “Is There a New York Housing Crisis?” City Journal, Summer 2006, pp. 62, 64. {60} Joseph Berger, “For Some Landlords, Real Money in the Homeless,” New York Times, February 9, 2013, p. A1. {61} Matt Smith, “Legends in Our Own Minds,” SF Weekly, January 30, 2002, p. 13. {62} William Tucker, “How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing,” Policy Analysis, number 274, May 21, 1997

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy
by Callum Cant
Published 11 Nov 2019

On the other hand, workers on bicycles tend to work more erratically and are often topping up insufficient primary sources of income – be that a student loan or another job. They also tend to be younger UK nationals. Some workers are under so much pressure that they drop out of renting entirely and enter ‘property guardian’ arrangements in an effort to sidestep the escalating housing crisis. These two groups, when they cooperate, can form a strong coalition, despite their significant cultural, racial, linguistic, political, and economic differences. Women workers, however, are often excluded due to the internal culture of the workforce. The workers’ organization that emerges and reemerges out of this technical and social class composition is characterized by a collective class antagonism on the issues of wages and conditions.

The New Snobbery
by David Skelton
Published 28 Jun 2021

Often vapid TED Talks are venerated, and counterculture imagery is used to obscure the fact that priority is given to policies that benefit the professional class, such as open borders and the abolition of tuition fees, rather than policies that would benefit the wider population, such as building dignity at work or tackling the housing crisis. Praiseworthy social progress, such as the legalisation of gay marriage, can’t obscure the fact that the politics of the pre-referendum period had been almost predominantly run in the interests of the professional middle class, and that working people have continued to fall further behind. Although politicians have courted the working class with appeals to ‘strivers’ or ‘alarm-clock Britain’, governments of all parties have consistently promoted finance over manufacturing and graduates over non-graduates.

How to Be Black
by Baratunde Thurston
Published 31 Jan 2012

The subsequent state-sponsored or -supported discrimination and terrorism—I’m thinking environmental racism, police brutality, lynchings, separate and unequal schooling, neighborhood redlining, et cetera—have also cast a long shadow over the current black experience in the United States. One in fifteen black male adults is behind bars (compared to one in a hundred U.S. adults overall);* black household wealth averages just one-twentieth that of whites,* having fallen precipitously after the housing crisis; black people in Texas have a habit of finding themselves under the wheels of trucks driven by racists; and then there’s BET. There is no shortage of issues for which a black person in America can justifiably get mad. The Angry Negro is the personification of that Black Rage. As The Angry Negro, you are committing yourself to a life of hate.

The Great Crash 1929
by John Kenneth Galbraith
Published 15 Dec 2009

The Greenspan Doctrine held that bubbles cannot be prevented, that the governments task is merely to clean up afterward. The Greenspan practice was to create one bubble after another, until finally one came along so vast that it destroyed the system on the way by. At its source, our crisis is a housing crisis, and not one of too little housing but of too much. It springs from a predatory attack on the safeguards that had for decades kept housing finance safe and stable. In the early 2000s the Bush administration sent clear signals that regulations on mortgages would not be enforced. The signals were not subtle: on one occasion the director of the Office of Thrift Supervision came to a press conference with copies of the Federal Register and a chain saw.

100 Baggers: Stocks That Return 100-To-1 and How to Find Them
by Christopher W Mayer
Published 21 May 2018

This is the clear Outsider among homebuilders. Murray Stahl at Horizon-Kinetics wrote about it late in 2013. He summed up its outstanding features: NVR is somewhat of an oddity within the homebuilding industry. It chose not to enter rapidly growing markets such as in California and Arizona, it remained solidly profitable throughout the housing crisis and currently has more cash than debt. This conservative management approach has led the company to also repurchase nearly half of its shares outstanding during the course of the last decade. If you ever want to own a homebuilder, you should start with this one. • Exxon Mobil (XOM). Thorndike cited a long, 35-year, track record.

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World
by Yancey Strickler
Published 29 Oct 2019

In the 1980s and 1990s numerous restrictions on banks were removed, including prohibitions on banks having branches in multiple states (this change was key to the bank branch takeover of New York City). In 1999 a bill was signed into law that removed long-standing restrictions on the size and operations of banks that had been in place since the Great Depression. The deregulatory changes contributed to multiple financial crises (including Enron and the 2008 housing crisis) within a decade of their passing. These changes were made possible by the political donations and influence of the Maximizing Class. Financial maximization was the underlying motive behind all of these changes. The rational choice was whichever option made the most money. That was what mattered.

Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change
by Ronald Cohen
Published 1 Jul 2020

This allocation targets investments that can deliver market-rate financial returns, which are generally higher than the average return yielded by PRI investments. Together, the grant program and the endowment can combine to help achieve the foundation’s philanthropic goals. How has Ford spent its $1 billion endowment allocation? Well, for example, $30 million has gone towards MRIs tackling the affordable housing crisis in the USA – including investing in a community-improvement development bond from Capital Impact Partners and funding housing developers, such as Jonathan Rose and Avanath, that create affordable and green housing.51 This approach makes so much sense, that Ford is now working towards doing the same but for financial services for the poor.52 As Darren Walker puts it, ‘If the last fifty years of philanthropy were defined by grant-making budgets, the next fifty must be about directing the other 95 per cent of our assets toward justice.’

The Passenger: Paris
by AA.VV.
Published 26 Jun 2021

It is also the department with the highest concentration of immigrants (two-thirds of the children born in 2015 had at least one parent born abroad), many of them from the former colonies of North and West Africa. This is what Ly explores in his film: police violence, institutional racism, a chronic housing crisis and a lack of prospects for the youth, who are drawn to crime and radical Islam. Football and hip-hop provide a way out, as was the case for Aya Nakamura, a Malian singer with French citizenship raised in the 93, whose hit ‘Djadja’ climbed the charts around the world in 2018. Rui, aged thirty-two: ‘I arrived in France in 1995, when I was seven and a half.

Frommer's Paris 2013
by Kate van Der Boogert
Published 24 Sep 2012

© Markel Redondo Tackling the housing crisis is another one of the key points on Delanoë’s agenda for the next couple of years. Housing prices in Paris have been increasing for years and demand greatly outweighs supply. The new social housing initiatives that the mayor is experimenting with incorporate many of his ideas about sustainable development, but they might drastically change Paris’s beloved skyline. Challenging a 1977 by-law that limits the height of buildings within Paris to 37m (121 ft.), he is convinced that tower blocks offer the best solution to the housing crisis. Several sites, including Porte de la Chapelle in the 18e and the Masséna-Bruneseau district of the 13e, have been chosen as potential locations for 50m (164 ft.) and 200m (656 ft.) towers.

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
by Fiona Hill
Published 4 Oct 2021

most women in Russia: Mary Buckley, “Women in the Soviet Union,” Feminist Review, no. 8 (1981): 80. drove people to drink: Oliver Bullough, The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (New York: Basic, 2013). council house tenants: Andy Beckett, “The right to buy: the housing crisis that Thatcher built,” Guardian, August 26, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/26/right-to-buy-margaret-thatcher-david-cameron-housing-crisis. allocated by the Communist Party: Nadezhda Kosareva and Raymond Struyk, “Housing Privatization in the Russian Federation,” Housing Policy Debate4, no. 1 (1993): 82, https://www.innovations.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/hpd_0401_kosareva.pdf.

Pity the Billionaire: The Unexpected Resurgence of the American Right
by Thomas Frank
Published 16 Aug 2011

Republican Party elections of 1994 and elections of 2008 and elections of 2010 and expectations of, in 2008 TARP and Tea Party and revival of Return of Depression Economics, The (Krugman) Rivera, David Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek) Romer, Christina Romney, Mitt Roosevelt, Franklin Beck and “forgotten man” and Obama and RFC and Ryan and Rothenberg, Stu Rubin, Robert Rules for Radical Conservatives (“Kahane”) “ruling class” Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot (Franken) Ryan, Paul same-sex marriage Samuelson, Robert Santelli, Rick Saving Freedom (DeMint) Schlesinger, Arthur Schwarzenegger, Arnold Schweikert, David Schweitzer, Mark Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Seldes, Gilbert Sex Pistols Shane, Scott Shlaes, Amity shock therapy Slouching Towards Gomorrah (Bork) “Small Business Bill of Rights” small business. See also entrepreneurship bailouts and Democrats failure to capture outrage of failure and as front for big business health reform and housing crisis and job creation and as ordinary Americans populist heroism and regulation and Small Business Week social classes. See also Country Class; “Ruling Class” class war and Depression and obfuscation of social insurance socialism socialist realism Social Security software industry Soros, George Soviet Union Spread This Wealth (Duke) “Star Spangled Banner” Steinbeck, John Stewart, Jon stimulus Strange Death of Republican America, The (Blumenthal) strikes Summers, Larry supply-side revolution Susman, Warren Swados, Harvey Sweden Taibbi, Matt TARP.

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return
by Mihir Desai
Published 22 May 2017

The real curiosity is that the lender would be better off if the owner did the extension, but lenders often hesitate to make the compromises required to make the owner have the right incentives. The shadow of that preexisting commitment prevents the owner from doing the things he needs to do. This idea of debt overhang, in part, is why the housing crisis was so scary—with nearly one in five owners underwater in 2009, we might have seen many more neighborhoods with highly levered homes just continue to deteriorate because of these crazy incentives. What’s the answer? Well, the lender should accept a loss on its loan so that the homeowner will return to a setting where it’s possible to pursue projects that are in the homeowner’s own best interests.

Me! Me! Me!
by Daniel Ruiz Tizon
Published 31 May 2016

Similarly, just this morning, I was in the café when a woman walked right past the au fresco seating dragging her trolley behind her in a straight line. You can't pull a shopping trolley in a straight line. Not in Lambeth. Not with the state of these pavements. I don’t understand how so many people fail to see that. These end of life shopping fears are made even bigger by the capital’s worsening housing crisis. Today’s private rentals market is full of studios that have now dispensed with providing the hallway they at least used to offer until the late noughties. If you want to be sure of getting that hallway, you’re really looking at paying more than a £1000 a month now. This means many private renters like me now have to make do without a space that once served as a valuable buffer zone between the entrance to your flat and the rest of your overpriced home.

The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street
by Robert Scheer
Published 14 Apr 2010

Key to its effectiveness was the seemingly simple wall it erected between the commercial banks entrusted with depositors’ funds—and insured by the government’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the agency created by Glass-Steagall—and the wilder antics of basically unregulated Wall Street investment banks like Goldman Sachs. In 1982, Reagan signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act, easing regulation of savings and loans and, in the eyes of critics such as Paul Krugman, paving the way for the S&L collapse in the 1980s as well as the subprime housing crisis decades later. Nevertheless, Reagan made clear even then that this was not the biggest target on his list:Unfortunately, this legislation does not deal with the important question of delivery of other services, including securities activities by banks and other depository institutions. But I’m advised that many in the Congress want to put this question at the top of the banking deregulatory agendas next year, and I would strongly endorse such an initiative and hope that at the same time, the Congress will consider other proposals for more comprehensive deregulation which the administration advanced during the 97th Congress.

The Money Tree: A Story About Finding the Fortune in Your Own Backyard
by Chris Guillebeau
Published 6 Apr 2020

He was determined to regroup on yet another failure in front of the team, and this time he had an idea—but it turned out that she had one, too. “Hey, Jake.” She stopped him before they split off to work on separate tasks. “There’s something I wanted to talk with you about on Friday. With your housing crisis and those loans coming due, I figured you’re in need of extra money.” He nodded. “Yeah, I was hoping for a money tree to sprout from the ground and solve all my problems, but . . .” “Ha. Well, you’re not the only one with money on your mind!” she said. Preena told him that she was learning to make and sell handcrafted jewelry and had already earned a few thousand dollars since starting.

Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States
by Bernadette Hanlon
Published 18 Dec 2009

I identify four contributing forces: housing market dynamics, the new suburban demographic, labormarket restructuring, and metropolitan fragmentation. The housing stock in many aging inner-ring suburbs is outdated. The older houses are being left behind for newer, larger houses on the outer fringes. Development of pristine, greenfield sites is occurring, but redeveloping older inner-ring suburban communities takes much more time. With a housing crisis gripping many parts of the United States, the sustainability of consistent growth and development in the outer ring is called into question. This lack of capital investment in the housing stock is detrimental to many aging suburbs, and the high rates of housing foreclosures in poorer minority inner-ring suburbs are devastating.

Retirementology: Rethinking the American Dream in a New Economy
by Gregory Brandon Salsbury
Published 15 Mar 2010

If we truly want to plan correctly for retirement, we need to address the mistakes we have made, and may still be making, with regard to how we think about money, how we feel about money, and how we behave with money. In developing this book, our research team conducted nearly a dozen focus group interviews with pre-retirees and retirees, ranging in ages from 25 to 70. Our researchers posed a number of questions on topics such as the housing crisis, family issues, overspending, investor behavior, and more. Some of the responses are included in relevant chapters throughout the book and specifically identified as findings from our focus group research. In other cases, hypothetical names, people, and situations have been used to illustrate points.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
by Ronald Purser
Published 8 Jul 2019

They define wisdom as “learning to focus, to truly connect, to empathize,” a hazy definition that anyone can, quite literally, buy into — through the distraction-providing sponsors. On the morning of Saturday 15 February 2014, at the start of a panel on “3 Steps to Build Corporate Mindfulness the Google Way,” a group of activists, called Heart of the City, took the stage. They unfurled a banner that read: “Eviction Free San Francisco,” alluding to the city’s housing crisis. The leader of the protest, Amanda Ream, distributed bright-yellow flyers to attendees, saying: “Thank you for your practice. We invite you to consider the truth behind Google and the tech industry’s impact on San Francisco.” Another protestor, Erin McElroy, used a bullhorn, chanting “Wisdom means stop displacement!

The City: A Global History
by Joel Kotkin
Published 1 Jan 2005

With the overthrow of capitalism, Friedrich Engels predicted the end of the large megacity and dispersal of the industrial proletariat into the countryside. The dispersing city dwellers would “deliver the rural population from isolation and stupor” while finally solving the working class’s persistent housing crisis.22 Suburbanization also appealed to more conservative thinkers. Setting the stage for later reformers, Thomas Carlyle believed the growth of the industrial city had undermined the traditional ties between workers and their families, communities, and churches. Moving the working and middle classes to “villages” in the outlying regions of major cities could “turn back the clock” to the more wholesome and intimate environment.

I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay
by John Lanchester
Published 14 Dec 2009

When houses are completely unoccupied and can be broken into, they are an immediate magnet for vandals, crack smokers, firebugs, you name it; sometimes the power is cut off, sometimes the water, and sometimes one but not the other, leading to a simple and easy and devastating form of havoc for happy vandals—just turn on a tap and walk away. I came to Baltimore because it is the subject of the only sustained work of art I’ve seen attempting to describe the lives lead in this urban desolation: David Simon’s HBO series The Wire. From the point of view of writing about the housing crisis, it was almost an arbitrary choice. All across America a boom turned into a bust; foreclosures on housing loans are a pandemic. (The difference between a pandemic and an epidemic: a pandemic is everywhere at the same time.) This is one form of “deleveraging”: the withdrawal of credit from people who often weren’t in a position to repay it in the first place.

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream
by Arianna Huffington
Published 7 Sep 2010

It’s happening on Main Street. And it’s not scantily clad teens being slashed—it’s jobs and incomes and stability and quality of life.1 It’s our future. And we’re afraid—very afraid—that the worst may not be over, and that the real economy, as opposed to the one on Wall Street, is still melting down. The housing crisis is still raging. The first run of foreclosures was because of subprime loans; the second run is because of people thrown out of work. And the government’s loan modification programs won’t be of any help with this round of foreclosures. As Newsweek’s Nancy Cook pointed out, “If you’re unemployed, you don’t qualify for a loan modification.”

Crapshoot Investing: How Tech-Savvy Traders and Clueless Regulators Turned the Stock Market Into a Casino
by Jim McTague
Published 1 Mar 2011

The actual nature of a recovery was a matter of intense debate among bulls, bears, and super bears even before many recognized that the recession had ended. The most optimistic economists, and there were not many of them, predicted a V-shaped economic rebound, meaning that economic activity would pick up as quickly as it had come down in 2007 and 2008 during the credit and housing crisis. In their view, the market rally reflected this outcome and thus was behaving rationally by bouncing back up like a super ball. The conventional view was a pessimistic one. This broad camp argued that the recovery would be U-shaped, with slow gross domestic product (GDP) growth and high unemployment into the early years of the next decade.

Rigged Money: Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game
by Lee Munson
Published 6 Dec 2011

Instead of the realization as in 1994 that there were simply not enough people who could put 5 percent down, we just started doing cash out loans for 125 percent of the already over-inflated value of houses. It was so far removed from the days I worked at the mortgage company that year that the news describing the housing crisis was simply unrecognizable from that awesome year driving around California in a yellow moving truck. As a postscript, the credit card I still have from that company was sold this year to another firm. Clearly, my old place didn’t want anything to do with credit cards in the end. What can we learn from this and how do we play it?

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
by Cathy O'Neil
Published 5 Sep 2016

At first I was excited and amazed by working in this new laboratory, the global economy. But in the autumn of 2008, after I’d been there for a bit more than a year, it came crashing down. The crash made it all too clear that mathematics, once my refuge, was not only deeply entangled in the world’s problems but also fueling many of them. The housing crisis, the collapse of major financial institutions, the rise of unemployment—all had been aided and abetted by mathematicians wielding magic formulas. What’s more, thanks to the extraordinary powers that I loved so much, math was able to combine with technology to multiply the chaos and misfortune, adding efficiency and scale to systems that I now recognized as flawed.

Respectable: The Experience of Class
by Lynsey Hanley
Published 20 Apr 2016

Social Exclusion Task Force, ‘Aspiration and Attainment amongst Young People in Deprived Communities’, Cabinet Office: short studies, published December 2008 4. Meek, J., ‘Where will we live?’, London Review of Books, vol. 6, no. 1, 9 January 2014, pp. 7–16 5. Dorling, D., All That Is Solid: The Great Housing Crisis (Penguin, 2014) 6. Baggini, J., Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind (Granta Books, 2007), p. 50 7. Ware, V., ‘Towards a sociology of resentment: a debate on class and whiteness’, Sociological Research Online, 2008 8. Jones, O., Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (Verso, 2011), p. 223 9.

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes
by Mark Skousen
Published 22 Dec 2006

In her work about Soviet Russia in the 1930s entitled Everyday Stalinism, Sheila Fitzpatrick countered the old conventional view held by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw that the Soviet system during the 1930s was a glorious "new civilization." On the contrary, Fitzpatrick wrote, "With the abolition of the market, shortages of food, clothing, and all kinds of consumer goods became endemic. As peasants fled the collective villages, major cities were soon in the grip of an acute housing crisis, with families jammed for decades in tiny single rooms in communal apartments. ... It was a world of privation, overcrowding, endless queues, and broken families, in which the regime's promises of future socialist abundance rang hollow. . . . Government bureaucracy often turned everyday life into a nightmare" (Fitzpatrick 1999, dustjacket).

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better
by Andrew Palmer
Published 13 Apr 2015

The rich will still pay their way in this sort of environment, thanks to larger account balances and the prospect of higher-margin activities such as investment advice. But the economics of banking the poor is far less attractive than it was. And, of course, there is the hangover from the housing crisis. Just as entrepreneurs could use their houses as collateral to fund their businesses, the poor could use housing to gain access to credit. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, between 1999 and the end of the third quarter of 2008, when Lehman Brothers imploded, American consumers went from owing their creditors $4.6 trillion to owing them $12.7 trillion.

Borrow: The American Way of Debt
by Louis Hyman
Published 24 Jan 2012

Banks offering such loans collapsed at twice the rate of banks that did not.28 Locales with the highest proportion of lending—in Texas, for instance, mortgage bonds backed 53 percent of all loans—were hardest hit.29 Luckily for banks, the bulk of that lending was insured, which, even if it doomed the insurance companies, saved the banks. President Herbert Hoover launched a group to study the housing crisis in 1931, the White House Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, whose ideas would provide the seedbed for many ideas we usually attribute to the New Deal. Hoover inaugurated the conference by reminding the attendees about the meaning of housing: “Those immortal ballads, Home, Sweet Home; My Old Kentucky Home; and the Little Gray Home in the West, were not written about tenements or apartments.

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets
by Peter Oppenheimer
Published 3 May 2020

This was one of the best cycles in terms of earnings growth for all the major equity markets but it offered some of the lowest returns for investors. The problem was that much of the strong profit growth in this cycle was partly driven by very strong earnings in the financial sector, which, driven by increased leverage, became illusory in the aftermath of the US sub-prime housing crisis. 2008–now. This is the post-financial crisis cycle and the longest so far (discussed in more detail in chapter 9), but it is rather different from other cycles for several reasons. First, the phases of the cycle, particularly outside of the US, were heavily distorted by the rolling nature of the global financial crisis and its subsequent waves following the initial problems in the US housing market in 2007/2008.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

In the morning, the construction panels are ready for assembly. In Mexico, a whole village of 3D-printed houses is being aimed at poor people living on $3 a day. These aren’t slums. They are insulated, water-conserving, decent homes. They are environmentally friendly. 3D printing doesn’t use hugely polluting concrete blocks. We can solve our housing crisis with the help of this computer tech. * * * We are solving the deepest mysteries of the human organism too. In 2020, it was announced that IBM’s supercomputer, Blue Gene, had cracked one of the most intractable problems in biology: protein folds. Proteins are chains of amino acids. Most biological processes revolve around protein structure.

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

While well-paid tech workers get gleaming white buses to shuttle them to their jobs and home again and all-inclusive campuses with bowling allies, free food, dry-cleaning, and hair salons, working-class Valley residents get unaffordable housing, deteriorating schools, and mushrooming homeless encampments.33 These companies aren’t solely responsible for painful swings in the real estate market, but they do have a significant impact, which they have not acknowledged in a meaningful way. Facebook, Google, Apple, and the dozens of other tech companies operating in the Valley are extremely profitable. Tech companies could plow some of these profits back into the communities they are “disrupting” or use their clout to help develop serious solutions to the region’s housing crisis. But the overwhelming trend is not to put profits or influence to work for ordinary people. Instead, these tech titans use a variety of accounting tricks—such as creating “sock-puppet subsidiaries” to shift profits to low-tax locations outside the United States—to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.34 The issue of corporate tax evasion is not a new problem.

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture
by Justin McGuirk
Published 15 Feb 2014

U-TT devised a series of densely programmed buildings, housing gyms and other facilities alongside offices connected directly to key metro stations. But when U-TT refused to join the official United Socialist Party of Venezuela, the government kicked them off the project and handed the plans over to their own contractor. In the end most of the buildings were turned into apartment blocks, appropriated to ease the housing crisis. The community facilities were ditched and the buildings now have a cheap, shoddy feel. But Brillembourg is phlegmatic. Laughing, he calls them ‘exquisite corpses’ – one part U-TT and one part standard-issue contractor, the kind that siphons the cream of the budget into an offshore account. That’s how things work here.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
by Anna Wiener
Published 14 Jan 2020

The agents pitched proximity to the freeways, and inserted maps of the tech shuttle routes, color-coded by company. Coveted location, the brochures read. Fabulous investment property with no rent control. I stood on the steps of my apartment building, looking at the agents’ headshots and thinking about bleaching my teeth. San Francisco had tipped into a full-blown housing crisis. Whenever the media reported that a new tech company had filed an S-1 with the SEC, people started comparing notes on tenants’ rights. Buy a house before the next IPO, my coworkers joked. It wasn’t a joke because it was funny; it was a joke because the overnight-wealthy were bidding 60 percent over asking on million-dollar starter homes, and paying in cash.

Molly's Game: The True Story of the 26-Year-Old Woman Behind the Most Exclusive, High-Stakes Underground Poker Game in the World
by Molly Bloom
Published 23 Jun 2014

I shook their hands and sauntered off. I could feel them watching me walk away. Chapter 11 Christmas rolled around, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t been home in two years. My schedule was incredibly demanding, between Reardon’s ever-increasing needs and the game. I sensed that the looming housing crisis was taking a toll on the real-estate business. Reardon was even more stressed out and difficult than usual. I was at his side every day, and I often felt like his punching bag. I had become accustomed to the constant stress, minimal sleep, and basically living in a constant state of fear that I would lose everything.

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader
by Colin Lancaster
Published 3 May 2021

What always strikes me, from the runway, is how the Strip looks like little miniature replicas, a bunch of little Legos. It’s a good reminder that it’s all fake, just another Disney—you know, back to the original Disney dream, make it better than real, make their dreams come true. People will pay for that. But even Vegas was brought to Earth. First the GFC and the housing crisis kicked it on its ass, and then there was the mass shooting in 2019. At least they have a hockey team to help calm their nerves, and the Raiders will be here soon. As I drive down the Strip, Vegas looks like it’s back in top form. I figured the team could use a break. Trading macro for a living is physically and mentally demanding.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by Nate Silver
Published 31 Aug 2012

Contrary to the assertions they made before Congress, the problem was not that the ratings agencies failed to see the housing bubble. Instead, their forecasting models were full of faulty assumptions and false confidence about the risk that a collapse in housing prices might present. There was a widespread failure to anticipate how a housing crisis could trigger a global financial crisis. It had resulted from the high degree of leverage in the market, with $50 in side bets staked on every $1 that an American was willing to invest in a new home. Finally, in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, there was a failure to predict the scope of the economic problems that it might create.

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The confidence that the banks had in Moody’s and S&P’s ability to rate mortgage-backed securities may have been based on the fact that the agencies had generally performed competently in rating other types of financial assets. However, the ratings agencies had never before rated securities as novel and complex as credit default options. The confidence that economists had in the ability of the financial system to withstand a housing crisis may have arisen because housing price fluctuations had generally not had large effects on the financial system in the past. However, the financial system had probably never been so highly leveraged, and it had certainly never made so many side bets on housing before. The confidence that policy makers had in the ability of the economy to recuperate quickly from the financial crisis may have come from their experience of recent recessions, most of which had been associated with rapid, “V-shaped” recoveries.

A Book for Her
by Bridget Christie
Published 1 Jul 2015

It’s like him tweeting a photo of himself next to Denzel Washington with the words, ‘And finally, through the talent of a good ethnic actor, teenage, racist me is slain.’ I’m being hard on Russell. He’s not one of the seriously bad guys. He does some good stuff, such as raising awareness and media interest for the Focus E15 mothers, whose passionate campaign for social housing came to symbolise the London housing crisis.fn3 And I agree with him on many issues – capitalism, tax evasion, skinny jeans – but Russell’s type of sexism, which he once described as being ‘a bit like his granny’s racism; a bit 1970s and harmless’ is still sexism. Even if he tried to distract us by coating his sexism in flowery language and calling it ‘a cascading dichotomy of highly nuanced empiricism and the indefatigable needs of me old working-class winky’, it would still be sexism.

The End of Growth
by Jeff Rubin
Published 2 Sep 2013

And since it often comes at the cost of endangering our own survival, there are other standards we should take into account. The surprising thing is that if we look at it through a different lens, the end of growth will leave us all richer than we ever may have thought. [ SOURCE NOTES ] INTRODUCTION this page: A copious amount of ink has been spilled dissecting the US housing crisis and subsequent stock market crash in 2008. For a particularly lively account of the bubble that developed for collateralized debt obligations and the emergence of the credit default swap market, see The Big Short (2010) by Michael Lewis. CHAPTER 1: CHANGING THE ECONOMIC SPEED LIMIT this page: For a broader take on how Reaganomics fostered the culture of deregulation that still persists in the United States, see The Price of Civilization: Economics and Ethics After the Fall (2011) by Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Colombia University.

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City
by Alan Ehrenhalt
Published 23 Apr 2012

But there are equally compelling, and strikingly different, results on the other side. A competing study by the consulting firm RCLCO, in 2008, revealed an almost precisely opposite result: 77 percent of Generation Y wanted to live some variant of the urban life. “Generation Y’s attitudes toward home ownership have been changed by the housing crisis and the recession,” the Urban Land Institute found in commenting on the RCLCO study. “The number of people trapped by underwater homes that cannot be sold and the millions of foreclosures are tempering their interest in buying their own homes and they will be renters by necessity rather than by choice for years ahead.”

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income
by Guy Standing
Published 3 May 2017

Now, area differences in rents and house prices are much greater, rents in the private sector have soared, and the sale at a discount of council and social housing has resulted in a massive shortage of affordable homes. The cost of means-tested housing benefit has ballooned to some £25 billion a year. While Britain’s housing crisis needs to be tackled through urgent measures to boost affordable supply, it poses a difficulty here and now for the design of social protection systems. The basic income costings summarized above all assume continuation of the current means-tested housing benefit in broadly its present form, at least for the time being.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

San Francisco, once a city full of artists and hippies, with a vibrant gay community, has become overrun with dipshit tech bros zipping around on electric scooters, complaining about the growing ranks of homeless people, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they—the tech bros—are the ones who created the housing crisis that has pushed so many people onto the streets. “San Francisco has become unrecognizable,” a sixty-something techie told me, explaining why she had sold her home and fled the city. What didn’t she like? “The greed,” she said. Now those same mercenary, clueless tech bros who have ruined San Francisco are gaining ever more power and wielding influence that reaches beyond the tech industry into the culture at large.

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality
by Laurence Scott
Published 11 Jul 2018

We looked wistfully over a stranger’s shoulder and into the road, imagining the soot-stained chimney sweep who would soon come whistling up the path. We convinced ourselves that crumbling sash windows wouldn’t be cold and that plastic ones would be worth the energy savings and eco-righteousness. In the London of my time, I could be someone’s child or a mortgage-holder, but not both. In the midst of a disgraceful housing crisis, even this dilemma was a privilege. Once in the new flat, I began the work of assembling a post-parental world. After an adult life lived in temporary accommodation, I had fun buying bedside tables from markets, stocking up on towels and pillows, climbing a rung on the duck-down ladder. I walked to the flat carrying shopping bags with a blasphemous spring in my step.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 5 Oct 2020

Schneider and Daniele Tavani, “Tale of Two Ginis in the United States, 1921–2012,” Levy Institute Working Paper (January 2015), http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_826.pdf; see also Thomas Piketty, Paris School of Economics, excerpted figures and tables, Table 1.1, http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014FiguresTables.pdf. 150 “defining challenge”: Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Economic Mobility,” White House, Office of the Press Secretary, December 4, 2013, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/12/04/remarks-president-economic-mobility. 151 five years ahead of schedule: United Nations, “Millennium Development Goals Report 2015,” 15, https://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/2015_MDG_Report/pdf/MDG%202015%20rev%20(July%201).pdf. 151 to 650 million: Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Global Extreme Poverty,” Our World in Data, 2019, https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty. 151 mortality rate for young children dropped 59%: “Under-Five Mortality,” Global Health Observatory (GHO) data, WHO, https://www.who.int/gho/child_health/mortality/mortality_under_five_text/en/#:~:text=Trends,1%20in%2026%20in%202018. 151 just 14% of the world’s known deaths from Covid-19: Philip Schelle­kens and Diego Sourrouille, “Tracking COVID-19 as Cause of Death: Global Estimates of Relative Severity,” Brookings Institution, May 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Tracking_COVID-19_as_-Cause_of_Death-Global_Estimates_of_Severity.pdf. 151 Heat may have some effect: Islam et al., “Temperature, Humidity, and Wind Speed Are Associated with Lower COVID-19 Incidence,” 2020, https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.27.20045658, cited in: Rapid Expert Consultation on SARS-CoV-2 Survival in Relation to Temperature and Humidity and Potential for Seasonality for the COVID-19 Pandemic (April 7, 2020), National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, https://www.nap.edu/read/25771/chapter/1. 152 170 million in 2019: “Chinese Tourists Made 169 Million Outbound Trips in 2019: Report,” China Global Television Network, February 29, 2020, citing China’s National Bureau of Statistics, https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020–02–29/Chinese-tourists-made-169-million-outbound-trips-in-2019-report-OtIYWsZmOQ/index.html. 152 thirty times: “Dharavi slum has a population density almost 30 times greater than New York—about 280,000 people per square kilometer”: Vedika Sud, Helen Regen, and Esha Mitra, Mercury News, citing CNN, April 4, 2020, https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/03/doctors-india-must-prepare-for-onslaught-of-coronavirus/. 152 two-thirds of people live in congested slums: According to Leilani Farha, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on housing, as of 2019: Paul Wallace and Tope Alake, “Lagos Building Luxury Homes in Face of Affordable Housing Crisis,” Bloomberg, December 20, 2019. 152 eight hospital beds for every 10,000 people: World Bank DataBank, “Hospital Beds (Per 1,000 People)—Bangladesh, European Union, United States,” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.BEDS.ZS?locations=BD-EU-us. 152 fewer than 2,000 ventilators: Ruth Maclean and Simon Marks, “10 African Countries Have No Ventilators.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

Centre for Local Economic Strategies. 2019. “Community Wealth Building 2019: Theory, Practice and Next Steps.” September. https://cles.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/CWB2019FINAL-web.pdf. Cheshire, Paul, and Boyana Buyuklieva. 2019. “Homes on the Right Tracks: Greening the Green Belt to Solve the Housing Crisis.” Centre for Cities, September. https://www.centreforcities.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Homes-on-the-Right-Tracks-Greening-the-Green-Belt.pdf. Clancy, Matt. 2019. “Innovation and the City: Are Local Knowledge Spillovers Getting Weaker?” New Things under the Sun, December 19. https://mattsclancy.substack.com/p/innovation-and-the-city.

Debunking Economics - Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned?
by Steve Keen
Published 21 Sep 2011

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available eISBN 9781780322209 CONTENTS Tables, figures and boxes Preface to the second edition Preface to the first edition 1 Predicting the ‘unpredictable’ 2 No more Mr Nice Guy Part 1 Foundations: the logical flaws in the key concepts of conventional economics 3 The calculus of hedonism 4 Size does matter 5 The price of everything and the value of nothing 6 To each according to his contribution Part 2 Complexities: issues omitted from standard courses that should be part of an education in economics 7 The holy war over capital 8 There is madness in their method 9 Let’s do the Time Warp again 10 Why they didn’t see it coming 11 The price is not right 12 Misunderstanding the Great Depression and the Great Recession Part 3 Alternatives: different ways to think about economics 13 Why I did see ‘It’ coming 14 A monetary model of capitalism 15 Why stock markets crash 16 Don’t shoot me, I’m only the piano 17 Nothing to lose but their minds 18 There are alternatives Bibliography Index TABLES, FIGURES AND BOXES Tables 2.1 Anticipations of the housing crisis and recession 3.1 ‘Utils’ and change in utils from consuming bananas 3.2 Utils arising from the consumption of two commodities 3.3 The commodities in Sippel’s ‘Revealed Preference’ experiment 4.1 Demand schedule for a hypothetical monopoly 4.2 Costs for a hypothetical monopoly 4.3 Sales and costs determine the level of output that maximizes profit 4.4 Cost and revenue for a ‘perfectly competitive’ industry identical in scale to hypothetical monopoly 5.1 Input and output data for a hypothetical firm 5.2 Cost drawings for the survey by Eiteman and Guthrie 5.3 Empirical research on the nature of cost curves 7.1 Sraffa’s hypothetical subsistence economy 7.2 Production with a surplus 7.3 Relationship between maximum and actual rate of profit and the wage share of surplus 7.4 The impact of the rate of profit on the measurement of capital 10.1 Anderson’s ranking of sciences 12.1 The alleged Money Multiplier process 13.1 A hypothetical example of the impact of decelerating debt on aggregate demand 13.2 The actual impact of decelerating debt on aggregate demand 14.1 A pure credit economy with paper money 14.2 The dynamics of a pure credit economy with no growth 14.3 Net incomes 14.4 A growing pure credit economy with electronic money 15.1 Von Neumann’s procedure for working out a numerical value for utility 15.2 The Allais ‘Paradox’ 15.3 The Allais ‘Paradox’ Part 2 16.1 The solvability of mathematical models 17.1 Marx’s unadjusted value creation table, with the rate of profit dependent upon the variable-to-constant ratio in each sector 17.2 Marx’s profit distribution table, with the rate of profit now uniform across sectors 17.3 Steedman’s hypothetical economy 17.4 Steedman’s physical table in Marx’s value terms 17.5 Steedman’s prices table in Marx’s terms 17.6 Profit rate and prices calculated directly from output/wage data 17.7 Marx’s example where the use-value of machinery exceeds its depreciation Figures 2.1 US inflation and unemployment from 1955 2.2 Bernanke doubles base money in five months 2.3 Private debt peaked at 1.7 times the 1930 level in 2009 3.1 Rising total utils and falling marginal utils from consuming one commodity 3.2 Total utils from the consumption of two commodities; 3.3 Total ‘utils’ represented as a ‘utility hill’ 3.4 The contours of the ‘utility hill’ 3.5 Indifference curves: the contours of the ‘utility hill’ shown in two dimensions 3.6 A rational consumer’s indifference map 3.7 Indifference curves, the budget constraint, and consumption 3.8 Deriving the demand curve 3.9 Upward-sloping demand curve 3.10 Separating out the substitution effect from the income effect 3.11 Engel curves show how spending patterns change with increases in income 3.12 A valid market demand curve 3.13 Straight-line Engel ‘curves’ 3.14 Economic theory cannot rule out the possibility that a market demand curve may have a shape like this, rather than a smooth, downward-sloping curve 4.1 Leijonhufvud’s ‘Totems’ of the Econ tribe 4.2 Stigler’s proof that the horizontal firm demand curve is a fallacy 4.3 Profit maximization for a monopolist: marginal cost equals marginal revenue, while price exceeds marginal cost 4.4 Profit maximization for a perfectly competitive firm: marginal cost equals marginal revenue, which also equals price 4.5 A supply curve can be derived for a competitive firm, but not for a monopoly 4.6 A competitive industry produces a higher output at a lower cost than a monopoly 4.7 The standard ‘supply and demand’ explanation for price determination is valid only in perfect competition 4.8 Double the size, double the costs, but four times the output 4.9 Predictions of the models and results at the market level 4.10 Output behavior of three randomly selected firms 4.11 Profit outcomes for three randomly selected firms 4.12 Output levels for between 1- and 100-firm industries 5.1 Product per additional worker falls as the number of workers hired rises 5.2 Swap the axes to graph labor input against quantity 5.3 Multiply labor input by the wage to convert Y-axis into monetary terms, and add the sales revenue 5.4 Maximum profit occurs where the gap between total cost and total revenue is at a maximum 5.5 Deriving marginal cost from total cost 5.6 The whole caboodle: average and marginal costs, and marginal revenue 5.7 The upward-sloping supply curve is derived by aggregating the marginal cost curves of numerous competitive firms 5.8 Economic theory doesn’t work if Sraffa is right 5.9 Multiple demand curves with a broad definition of an industry 5.10 A farmer who behaved as economists advise would forgo the output shown in the gap between the two curves 5.11 Capacity utilization over time in the USA 5.12 Capacity utilization and employment move together 5.13 Costs determine price and demand determines quantity 5.14 A graphical representation of Sraffa’s (1926) preferred model of the normal firm 5.15 The economic theory of income distribution argues that the wage equals the marginal product of labor 5.16 Economics has no explanation of wage determination or anything else with constant returns 5.17 Varian’s drawing of cost curves in his ‘advanced’ microeconomics textbook 6.1 The demand for labor curve is the marginal revenue product of labor 6.2 The individual’s income–leisure trade-off determines how many hours of labor he supplies 6.3 An upward-sloping individual labor supply curve 6.4 Supply and demand determine the equilibrium wage in the labor market 6.5 Minimum wage laws cause unemployment 6.6 Demand management policies can’t shift the supply of or demand for labor 6.7 Indifference curves that result in less work as the wage rises 6.8 Labor supply falls as the wage rises 6.9 An individual labor supply curve derived from extreme and midrange wage levels 6.10 An unstable labor market stabilized by minimum wage legislation 6.11 Interdependence of labor supply and demand via the income distributional effects of wage changes 7.1 The standard economic ‘circular flow’ diagram 7.2 The rate of profit equals the marginal product of capital 7.3 Supply and demand determine the rate of profit 7.4 The wage/profit frontier measured using the standard commodity 9.1 Standard neoclassical comparative statics 9.2 The time path of one variable in the Lorenz model 9.3 Structure behind the chaos 9.4 Sensitive dependence on initial conditions 9.5 Unstable equilibria 9.6 Cycles in employment and income shares 9.7 A closed loop in employment and wages share of output 9.8 Phillips’s functional flow block diagram model of the economy 9.9 The component of Phillips’s Figure 12 including the role of expectations in price setting 9.10 Phillips’s hand drawing of the output–price-change relationship 9.11 A modern flow-chart simulation program generating cycles, not equilibrium 9.12 Phillips’s empirically derived unemployment–money-wage-change relation 10.1 Hicks’s model of Keynes 10.2 Derivation of the downward-sloping IS curve 10.3 Derivation of the upward-sloping LM curve 10.4 ‘Reconciling’ Keynes with ‘the Classics’ 10.5 Unemployment–inflation data in the USA, 1960–70 10.6 Unemployment–inflation data in the USA, 1950–72 10.7 Unemployment–inflation data in the USA, 1960–80 10.8 The hog cycle 11.1 Supply and demand in the market for money 11.2 The capital market line 11.3 Investor preferences and the investment opportunity cloud 11.4 Multiple investors (with identical expectations) 11.5 Flattening the IOC 11.6 How the EMH imagines that investors behave 11.7 How speculators actually behave 12.1 Inflation and base money in the 1920s 12.2 Inflation and base money in the post-war period 12.3 Bernanke’s massive injection of base money in QE1 12.4 Change in M0 and unemployment, 1920–40 12.5 Change in M1 and unemployment, 1920–40 12.6 Change in M0 and M1, 1920–40 12.7 M0–M1 correlation during the Roaring Twenties 12.8 M0–M1 correlation during the Great Depression 12.9 Bernanke’s ‘quantitative easing’ in historical perspective 12.10 The volume of base money in Bernanke’s ‘quantitative easing’ in historical perspective 12.11 Change in M1 and inflation before and during the Great Recession 12.12 The money supply goes haywire 12.13 Lindsey, Orphanides, Rasche 2005, p. 213 12.14 The empirical ‘Money Multiplier’, 1920–40 12.15 The empirical ‘Money Multiplier’, 1960–2012 12.16 The disconnect between private and fiat money during the Great Recession 13.1 Goodwin’s growth cycle model 13.2 My 1995 Minsky model 13.3 The vortex of debt in my 1995 Minsky model 13.4 Cyclical stability with a counter-cyclical government sector 13.5 Australia’s private debt-to-GDP ratio, 1975–2005 13.6 US private debt to GDP, 1955–2005 13.7 Aggregate demand in the USA, 1965–2015 13.8 US private debt 13.9 The change in debt collapses as the Great Recession begins 13.10 The Dow Jones nosedives 13.11 The correlation of debt-financed demand and unemployment 13.12 The housing bubble bursts 13.13 The Credit Impulse and change in employment 13.14 Correlation of Credit Impulse and change in employment and GDP 13.15 Relatively constant growth in debt 13.16 The biggest collapse in the Credit Impulse ever recorded 13.17 Growing level of debt-financed demand as debt grew faster than GDP 13.18 The two great debt bubbles 13.19 Change in nominal GDP growth then and now 13.20 Real GDP growth then and now 13.21 Inflation then and now 13.22 Unemployment then and now 13.23 Nominal private debt then and now 13.24 Real debt then and now 13.25 Debt to GDP then and now 13.26 Real debt growth then and now 13.27 The collapse of debt-financed demand then and now 13.28 Debt by sector – business debt then, household debt now 13.29 The Credit Impulse then and now 13.30 Debt-financed demand and unemployment, 1920–40 13.31 Debt-financed demand and unemployment, 1990–2011 13.32 Credit Impulse and change in unemployment, 1920–40 13.33 Credit Impulse and change in unemployment, 1990–2010 13.34 The Credit Impulse leads change in unemployment 14.1 The neoclassical model of exchange as barter 14.2 The nature of exchange in the real world 14.3 A nineteenth-century private banknote 14.4 Bank accounts 14.5 A credit crunch causes a fall in deposits and a rise in reserves in the bank’s vault 14.6 A bank bailout’s impact on loans 14.7 A bank bailout’s impact on incomes 14.8 A bank bailout’s impact on bank income 14.9 Bank income grows if debt grows more rapidly 14.10 Unemployment is better with a debtor bailout 14.11 Loans grow more with a debtor bailout 14.12 Profits do better with a debtor bailout 14.13 Bank income does better with a bank bailout 14.14 Modeling the Great Moderation and the Great Recession – inflation, unemployment and debt 14.15 The Great Moderation and the Great Recession – actual inflation, unemployment and debt 14.16 Modeling the Great Moderation and the Great Recession – output 14.17 Income distribution – workers pay for the debt 14.18 Actual income distribution matches the model 14.19 Debt and GDP in the model 14.20 Debt and GDP during the Great Depression 15.1 Lemming population as a constant subject to exogenous shocks 15.2 Lemming population as a variable with unstable dynamics 17.1 A graphical representation of Marx’s dialectics Boxes 10.1 The Taylor Rule 13.1 Definitions of unemployment PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Debunking Economics was far from the first book to argue that neoclassical economics was fundamentally unsound.

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He also identified four common aspects of our work: 1 a concern with financial assets as distinct from real-sector assets, 2 with the credit flows that finance both forms of wealth, 3 with the debt growth accompanying growth in financial wealth, and 4 with the accounting relation between the financial and real economy. (Ibid.: 8) TABLE 2.1 Anticipations of the housing crisis and recession If you have never studied economics before, this list may surprise you: don’t all economists consider these obviously important economic issues? As you will learn in this book, the answer is no. Neoclassical economic theory ignores all these aspects of reality – even when, on the surface, they might appear to include them.

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism
by Arun Sundararajan
Published 12 May 2016

Others were concerned that Airbnb rentals might further restrict an already constrained residential rental environment if landlords or enterprising New Yorkers started renting out units on Airbnb instead of allowing them to be rented by long-term residents.3 A coalition of legislators and homeowner associations called “Share Better” launched in 2014 to generate grassroots opposition to Airbnb. The organization’s website proclaims: “Far from being a harmless service where New York City residents can share their homes with guests to the City, Airbnb enables New York City tenants to break the law and potentially violate their leases, it exacerbates the affordable housing crisis in our neighborhoods, and it poses serious public safety concerns for Airbnb guests, hosts and their neighbors.”4 In May 2014, Airbnb agreed to hand over anonymized data on its New York City users, but only after a judge ruled that Schneiderman’s initial subpoena to access information on hosts across the state was too broad.

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way
by Steve Richards
Published 14 Jun 2017

Her Labour colleague Chuka Umunna, in a New Statesman article on 6 March 2017, argued for devolving greater power to the regions: Wherever there is a case to devolve power and resources, we should be required to have a very good reason to say ‘no’. Labour can use the authority of government to help enable people’s participation in reform. For example, the land market needs reforming to give communities the power to tackle our acute housing crisis. Immigration needs to be brought under democratic control with decision making devolved to regions. The decentralization of power to take decision making closer to people’s lives requires a more democratic model of the state and a genuine redistribution of capital and funding. Whitehall departments need joining up and the Treasury needs a collaborative not autocratic approach to local government.6 There are dangers in focusing too heavily on the devolution of power as a solution to the sense of powerlessness felt by many voters.

The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy's Only Hope
by John A. Allison
Published 20 Sep 2012

Second, Freddie and Fannie were huge contributors to both political parties. Between 1998 and 2008, Freddie Mac spent $94.9 million and Fannie Mae spent $79.5 million to lobby Congress.5 They also provided many intangible benefits to various members of Congress. The individuals who are most responsible for the collapse of Freddie and Fannie and the related housing crisis are Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd. They both had the information to know that something needed to be done and refused to do it. I particularly blame Barney Frank. Most of the members of Congress involved simply were not intellectual enough to understand the fundamental issue.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class
by Guy Standing
Published 27 Feb 2011

He could have risked attacking the neo-liberal project. Instead he backed the International Monetary Fund, which had been a primary culprit in its hubris, bailed out the banks and appointed Larry Summers as his principal economic adviser, the man who devised the policy responsible for the sub-prime housing crisis. Obama never tried to reach out to the precariat, even though many in it had been hopeful that he would do so. The social democratic imagination could not empathise with real predicaments. In the United States and elsewhere, anger grew at some of the corrupt aspects of the globalisation era. Recall the systemic use of subsidies.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

Similarly, recent anti-fracking movements have been able to stop test drilling in various localities – but governments nevertheless continue to search for shale gas resources and provide support for companies to do so.7 In the United States, various movements to stop evictions in the wake of the housing crisis have made real gains in terms of keeping people in their homes.8 Yet the perpetrators of the subprime mortgage debacle continue to reap the profits, waves of foreclosures continue to sweep across the country, and rents continue to surge across the urban world. Small successes – useful, no doubt, for instilling a sense of hope – nevertheless wither in the face of overwhelming losses.

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made
by Tom Wilkinson
Published 21 Jul 2014

Le Corbusier chose to carefully render his walls, painting them white to achieve the appearance of concrete. He said he wanted houses to be made ‘on the same principles as the Ford car’, and proposed a mass-produced system of reinforced concrete construction. War-ravaged Europe was suffering an unprecedented housing crisis, and industrial prefabrication offered hope of homes for all. This hope turned out to be unjustified, but if houses couldn’t yet be made that way, they could at least be made to look that way. Real and illusory high-tech Americanismus: a Mercedes advertisement shot outside Le Corbusier’s brick and stucco house for the Werkbund exhibition, Stuttgart (1927) Albert Kahn, however, did not share the modernists’ enthusiasm for the industrial look: I can see a very close analogy between the modern industrial building and the modern box-like, flat-roofed house, so many of which are erected today.

Death of the Liberal Class
by Chris Hedges
Published 14 May 2010

Triple-A Plowed Under, Power, One-Third of a Nation, Spirochete, were researched by journalists, written by dramatists, acted by huge casts with full orchestras and explored the struggle of farmers, the debate over the Tennessee Valley Association’s plan to bring subsidized electricity to the rural South; the reasons behind the housing crisis—“One-third of the nation is ill-housed, ill-fed,” President Roosevelt had said—the race for the cure for syphilis. Labor intensive, provocative, using and inventing all sorts of non-realistic acting and staging techniques, the Living Newspapers, a new form of theater, were precursors of American 1960s experimentalism, documentary and collectively created political theater.32 The Living Newspapers were wildly popular.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
by Michael Lewis
Published 1 Nov 2009

Back in July 2003, he'd written them a long essay on the causes and consequences of what he took to be a likely housing crash: "Alan Greenspan assures us that home prices are not prone to bubbles--or major deflations--on any national scale," he'd said. "This is ridiculous, of course.... In 1933, during the fourth year of the Great Depression, the United States found itself in the midst of a housing crisis that put housing starts at 10% of the level of 1925. Roughly half of all mortgage debt was in default. During the 1930s, housing prices collapsed nationwide by roughly 80%." He harped on the same theme again in January 2004, then again in January 2005: "Want to borrow $1,000,000 for just $25 a month?

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies
by Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer
Published 14 Apr 2013

Says Lawrence Lau, professor of economic development, emeritus, Stanford University, and chairman, CIC International (Hong Kong): “The overwhelming majority of foreign exchange transactions are thus purely speculative, in effect, pure gambles, and serve no useful social purposes.”3 This disconnect between the financial and the real economy produces the financial bubbles that keep plaguing the global economy: the Latin American debt crisis (1980s); the Asian financial crisis (1997); the dot-com bubble (2000); and the US housing crisis (2006–07), which was followed by the world financial crisis (2007–09) and the euro crisis (2010–). Such financial bubbles destabilize the real economy instead of serving it. 2. A disconnect between the infinite growth imperative and the finite resources of Planet Earth. The disconnect between the infinite growth that current economic logic demands and the finite resources of Planet Earth has produced a massive bubble: The overuse of scarce resources such as water and soil has led to the loss of a third of our agricultural land globally in roughly one generation’s time. 3.

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing
by Josh Ryan-Collins , Toby Lloyd and Laurie Macfarlane
Published 28 Feb 2017

Dutch Land Use Planning. Abingdon: Routledge. New Economics Foundation. 2014. Inequality and Financialisation: A Dangerous Mix. London: New Economics Foundation. http://b.3cdn.net/nefoundation/005f-379c2df9c812f1_gqm6ivky0.pdf. New Economics Foundation. 2016. The Financialisation of UK Homes: The Housing Crisis, Land and the Banks. London: New Economics Foundation. http://neweconomics.org/the-financialisation-of-uk-homes/?lost=true&_sf_s=+publications+++the+financialisation+of+uk+homes. New Economics Foundation, CDS Co-operatives, Pat Conaty, Johnston Birchall, Steve Bendle, and Rosemary Foggitt. 2013.

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
by Sarah Smarsh
Published 17 Sep 2018

You might have lived in a house that didn’t look poor, but trailers would have been closeby. In coming years, the deregulated banking industry would remain largely unchecked by the government. In a speech touting a supposedly rebounded housing market, President Barack Obama would reflect on what the defining economic event of several generations had meant to our country: “This housing crisis struck right at the heart of what it means to be middle class in America: our homes,” Obama said. “The place where we invest our nest egg. The place where we raise our family. The place where we plant roots in a community. The place where we build memories.” What we lost in stability, by way of our economic lot, we gained in adaptability, in hard clarity about what does and doesn’t last.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
by Gaia Vince
Published 22 Aug 2022

On average, 1.7 million people will be displaced for each centimetre of global sea-level rise, so hundreds of millions of people would have to move by 2100. The whole of southern Vietnam is expected to be below sea level by 2050, as well as much of the central and northern parts of the country.30 Coastal Florida is already seeing the signs of a climate-driven housing crisis, with first sales tumbling and then prices, as luxurious waterfront homes become too risky to purchase. Sales in vulnerable areas were down 20 per cent on safe areas in 2018, after Hurricane Sandy, which damaged some 650,000 homes and left 8.5 million people without power (some for months), made buyers more wary.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It
by Daniel Knowles
Published 27 Mar 2023

To tackle climate change we need to change our economies to produce more wealth with fewer natural resources. And it goes beyond climate change. We live in a world where the biggest cities are where the best jobs are. But the biggest, most successful cities are also expensive, crowded, and unequal places to live. To tackle the housing crisis we need to make those cities more livable. That means we need more space for humans, and less for cars. The car industry also wants you to think it has the solution to some of these problems. Electric cars will supposedly solve the problem of climate change emissions. Self-driving cars will solve the problem of traffic and make trains redundant.

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives
by Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez
Published 5 Jan 2010

Eerily echoing the reviled Gordon Gekko of Oliver Stone’s morality tale Wall Street, Ray Diallo, founder of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, noted, “The money that’s made from manufacturing stuff is a pittance in comparison to the amount of money made from shuffling money around.” 2007 was the year many first learned 124 Carjacked the terms “predatory lending” and “hedge fund,” both of which have come to hit American car owners, not just home owners, with a vengeance. The housing crisis grabbed the headlines beginning in 2007, but auto loans played a meaningful role in the CDO market that helped precipitate the crisis. CDOs are collateralized debt obligations, also known as credit derivatives, a financial instrument dating back to the early 1990s that is essentially the securitization of risk.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value
by Eduardo Porter
Published 4 Jan 2011

WHEN PRICES GO OFF THE RAILS The housing bubble might be the most painful case of financial excess in recent memory, but it surely isn’t the only one. Through the ages, virtually every potentially profitable new frontier opened up to investment has led to a speculative bubble, as investors have scrambled to tap into its promise only to stampede in retreat a few years later. A decade before the housing crisis we experienced the dot-com bubble. The NASDAQ index, heavy with technology stocks, quadrupled between 1996 and March of 2000. Drunk on information technology’s promise, people poured retirement savings into companies like Pets.com, which achieved fame, though never profit, on the strength of a cute ad with a sock puppet.

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women
by Hanna Rosin
Published 31 Aug 2012

What dried up was a path to the middle class and all the familiar landmarks that went along with it. I visited Alexander City in the aftermath, when the town was still trying to make sense of what had happened. The town was in the same situation as any number of American suburbs near Las Vegas or Houston or Fort Lauderdale, where the recession and the housing crisis had ripped the roots out of the middle class. But here the effect was concentrated and stark, and you could see more clearly what had been lost, and also what was rising up in its place. In the last decade or so, the broad middle swath of America has become unrecognizable, with a rapid decline in marriage and a rapid increase in divorce and single motherhood.

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism
by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller
Published 1 Jan 2009

Just as families sometimes cohere and at other times argue, are sometimes happy and at other times depressed, are sometimes successful and at other times in disarray, so too do whole economies go through good and bad times. The social fabric changes. Our level of trust in one another varies. And our willingness to undertake effort and engage in self-sacrifice is by no means constant. The idea that economic crises, like the current financial and housing crisis, are mainly caused by changing thought patterns goes against standard economic thinking. But the current crisis bears witness to the role of such changes in thinking. It was caused precisely by our changing confidence, temptations, envy, resentment, and illusions—and especially by changing stories about the nature of the economy.

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
Published 14 Jan 2020

As a philosophy of personal responsibility took hold in the 1980s, President Reagan cut the federal housing budget in half, and housing subsidies have never recovered. The Great Recession of 2008–09 also meant that millions of homeowners lost their jobs and then their homes when they couldn’t make mortgage payments. “We have an affordable housing crisis and, in fact, it’s reached historic heights,” Diane Yentel, chief executive officer of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told us. “Today we have a shortage of over seven million homes affordable and available to the lowest-income people.” Research suggests that when families are decently housed, children do better in school and, probably as a result, earn more as adults and even live longer.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas
Published 27 Aug 2018

Of course not. That’s why he had begun to feel a need to talk about systems. “Why do we live in a society where that can happen?” he asked. “And what do we need to fix that? And we who are privileged ought to be engaged in that, because we can’t say, on the one hand, ‘Isn’t it horrible, this affordable-housing crisis we have in New York?,’ and then, by the same token, accept a system that is essentially corrupt.” He mused, “I really wonder about my own privilege, and am I too comfortable in it?” He said his guilt “definitely nags at me on a daily basis.” Social scientists speak of “idiosyncrasy credits,” a kind of resource that a leader earns, which allows him or her from time to time to innovate on, or even defy, group norms.

Corbyn
by Richard Seymour

He has pledged to end austerity, and in its stead implement a People’s Quantitative Easing programme with money invested in infrastructural development, job-creation and high-technology industries. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau won office on an agenda like this. Even the OECD is anti-austerity these days.16 He promises to address the housing crisis through extensive home-building, to fully nationalise the railways, and to bring all academies back under local democratic control. These objectives are to be funded, not so much by squeezing the rich like a sponge to water the gardens of the poor, as by closing tax loopholes, stimulating growth, and spending less on controversial programmes such as Trident.

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
by Reeves Wiedeman
Published 19 Oct 2020

Adam and Miguel had friends scouting potential spots in Toronto and San Francisco, and Joel Schreiber sent them to a building in Midtown, across from the Empire State Building on Fifth Avenue. It had been previously occupied by a branch of JPMorgan Chase’s lending and mortgage division, which didn’t have much work in a post–housing crisis world. The space had been on the market for months, and Schreiber knew the owners; the Zars were an Iranian-American family who ran a conservative business averse to speculative risks. Schreiber told Adam that if he could charm David Zar, the youngest family member, a deal might happen. Adam met Zar at 349 Fifth Avenue wearing a bomber jacket over a white T-shirt.

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Jul 2023

He revealed he was formerly an auditor for a large bank, but he left his job during the 2008 recession and made a career switch to law enforcement. But the subprime crisis wasn’t done with him. It followed Gelan to his new job. For years, he explained, the courts were full with lawsuits between banks and customers—the combined wreckage of a generational housing crisis slowly moving its way through the legal system. Why did I get the feeling a similar wave of litigation was brewing as some $2 trillion of crypto wealth had vanished overnight? Then an even more chilling thought ran through me: Because crypto had been purposefully set up to avoid regulation, would everyday victims have any shot at justice?

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice
by Jamie K. McCallum
Published 15 Nov 2022

“But many of these workers do not earn enough to adequately support their families, even at a subsistence level.”6 Meanwhile, mid-wage jobs were hollowed out while high-paying ones took much longer to bounce back.7 The recession especially affected heavily unionized sectors like the building trades because home and large office construction stalled after the housing crisis. In the wake of the recession’s economic fallout, Americans scrambled to find work, creating an opening for new start-ups to sell low-wage workers and the unemployed on the concept of a “gig” or “side hustle.”8 Once viewed as temporary, these types of jobs quickly became a permanent feature of the economy.

The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy
by Nick Romeo
Published 15 Jan 2024

“Nothing epitomizes market failures more than the cost of insulin,” Governor Gavin Newsom said. State-manufactured insulin will cost a tiny fraction of its current price of roughly $300 per vial.46 Just a few weeks before, a state assembly bill in California proposed the creation of a new housing authority to deal with the state’s affordable housing crisis. Using both public and private funding, it would build a portfolio of assets and reinvest profits from market-rate properties to subsidize the provision of below-market-rate housing for others (not unlike the MINT model described in Chapter 7).47 It was defeated by a single vote, but it’s likely to reappear.

The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York
by Caro, Robert A
Published 14 Apr 1975

He was not unaware, moreover, of the fact that any major public works projects which were not started almost at once would not be finished when he ran for re-election in 1949. His city, his grasp for party power, his personal career—all these required money. And he didn't have any. Action in the housing crisis was conceived of by press and public as construction of new housing. New housing projects had been planned with the state money Moses had obtained, but the very crisis that made construction imperative—the lack of vacant livable apartments in the city—made construction difficult, because there were no apartments into which to relocate families living on the sites on which planned housing was to be built.

…

Moses was building under a system in which permission to build could be granted only by officials who derived their power from the people. And, in that light, what was most significant about the Cross-Bronx Expressway was not that seven miles of brick and mortar and steel and iron had to be removed from its path but that seven miles of people had to be removed, removed from homes which in a time of terrible housing crisis in New York were simply irreplaceable. "People said that [the route] was so built up that you'd never get the politicians to say okay," Ernie Clark would later recall, and engineers who had built bigger roads even than Ernie Clark agreed. Farrell and Chapin's legendary Burma Road would symbolize to history the epitome of difficulty in construction.

…

Sherman. "And Mrs. Aronofsky—her husband died. Same thing. One thing could do it, and so fast. Boom, and you were gone. Your friends never saw you again." Happy therefore to have those apartments, the people of East Tremont were made desperate to keep them by the harsh realities of New York's housing crisis. Finding an apartment at any price was difficult in a city whose postwar vacancy rate was an habitual 1 percent. Finding an apartment at a rent they could afford to pay, in a neighborhood they felt they could live in, was all but impossible. They knew how difficult it was to obtain an apartment in East Tremont; one could wait for years even after one had promised a "schmear" to any super who let you know about an upcoming vacancy.

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
by David Callahan
Published 1 Jan 2004

If you're selling power during an energy crunch, you might be tempted to manipulate the energy market and artificially drive up electricity prices in order to make a killing. Why? Because you can—because deregulated energy markets and unsophisticated enforcers allow you to get away with profiteering. If you're a landlord in New York City, with its perpetual housing crisis, you'll be tempted to cut all sorts of corners because you know that these days the city has the resources to send out investigators only if there's a flood or a collapse, leaving much illegal behavior unpunished. If you're Wal-Mart, America's biggest company, you'll be tempted to continue the pervasive practice of forcing workers in your stores to put in overtime without paying them for it or using illegal immigrants.

In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic
by David Wessel
Published 3 Aug 2009

Now, two years later, the hangover from the Greenspan years was giving his successors a massive and growing headache. The formal topic was timely and reinforced the pain: housing and housing finance. This year, a revisionist account of the Greenspan years began to take hold inside the fraternity. John Taylor, the noted Stanford monetary expert, indicted Greenspan for having created the current housing crisis by keeping interest rates too low too long earlier in the decade. Taylor believed that government economic policy worked best when the people who made policies publicly described the rules that governed their decision making. He was famous among central bankers around the world for “the Taylor rule,” a simple formula for setting interest rates that depended on where inflation was versus the Fed’s goal for it, how far from full employment the economy was, and what the short-term interest rate should be when the economy was perking along.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire
by Bruce Nussbaum
Published 5 Mar 2013

Goizueta, Coca-Cola Chairman Noted for Company Turnaround, Dies at 65,” New York Times, October 19, 1997, accessed September 13, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/19/us/ roberto-c-goizueta-coca-cola-chairman-noted-for-company-turnaround-dies-at-65.html. 231 After talking to Wall Street: interview with Professor Ho at a copresentation she gave with Gillian Tett of the Financial Times, March 10, 2010, at Columbia University; Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 231 The value of millions of houses remains: Binyamin Appelbaum, “Cautious Moves on Foreclosures Haunting Obama,” New York Times, August 19, 2012, accessed September 14, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/business/economy/ slow-response-to-housing-crisis-now-weighs-on-obama.html; Les Christie, “Troubled Homeowners Get a Lifeline,” CNN Money, October 24, 2011, accessed September 14, 2012, http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/24/real_estate/ housing_refinance/index.htm. 231 Interest rates, zero for many: David Shulman, “The Downside of the Fed’s Zero Rate Policy,” US News and World Report, April 30, 2012, accessed September 14, 2012, http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/ economic-intelligence/2012/04/30/the-downside-of-the-feds-zero-interest-rate-policy. 231 the volatility of the markets: Tami Luhby, “Credit Freeze and Your Paycheck,” CNN Money, September 28, 2008, accessed September 14, 2012, http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/28/news/economy/ main_street_impact/index.htm?

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
by Dan Ariely
Published 19 Feb 2007

In the absence of such an understanding, however, the banks tempted individuals to borrow more than they could possibly afford. Sure, the banks could threaten borrowers with the financial equivalent of breaking legs, but they didn’t help borrowers do what’s best for the banks—or themselves. It’s no wonder that, when the housing crisis finally hit, both banks and their customers wound up with broken legs. Now, let’s say that after all is said and done, the banks finally wise up and decide to conduct empirical studies that examine how people might go about computing the ideal loan amount. Assuming their data reveal the same results as my small study (that people simply borrow to the maximum), the bankers might then realize that it is in their best interest to help borrowers make better decisions.

Unfinished Business
by Tamim Bayoumi

The remaining regulated banks used the new-found flexibility to expand and make their commercial banking operations more efficient. Rather than diversifying into investment banking, they sold increasing amounts of loans to shadow banks. The repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act in 1999 has often been seen as a key moment in a deregulatory process that led to banking excesses and the housing crisis.12 However, by then the important transformation of the US banking system had already taken place, as the relatively heavily capitalized US regulated banks sold standardized loans such as mortgages to the less capitalized investment banks and other parts of the shadow banking system, thereby undermining the capital buffers behind bank loans.

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis
by David Boyle
Published 15 Jan 2014

[14] See for example Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations (New York, Random House, 1986). [15] Evidence for the link with fair pay scales is in D. Cowherd and D. Levie (1992), ‘Product quality and pay equity between low level employees and top management’, Administrative Science Quarterly, vol. 37. [16] See Ross Clark, A Broom Cupboard of One’s Own: The housing crisis and how to solve it (Petersfield, Harriman House, 2012). [17] See Josh Ryan-Collins et al, Where Does Money Come From? A guide to the UK monetary and banking system, second edn (London, New Economics Foundation, 2012). [18] Quoted in Lewis and Maude, 47. [19] Quoted in David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–1951 (London, Bloomsbury, 2008), 503.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

Many of the best American colleges until today have so-called legacy preferences, giving preferred admission to children of parents who also studied at the institution or, in some cases, gave money to it. And while US governments for decades promoted homeownership, opaque financial innovation with mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations led to a housing crisis in 2008, pushing millions of Americans out of their houses and out of their jobs. To this day, some people have not recovered financially from that crisis. Finally, some 28 million Americans, almost 10 percent of the total, did not have health insurance in 201819 (the last year for which data were available at the time of writing).

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs
by Guy Raz
Published 14 Sep 2020

It was following the historically seismic candidacy of Barack Obama for the presidency of the United States, and that summer it was set to crash into Denver, Colorado, at the Democratic National Convention, where Obama was going to speak and accept the Democratic nomination for president. This presented a unique opportunity. “A hundred thousand people were anticipated to see Obama speak, and there were less than 30,000 hotel rooms, most of which were picked up by delegates,” Joe remembered. It was a legitimate housing crisis. At one point, Denver’s mayor even considered opening the city’s parks to campers. Suddenly, there was a real need for the service that Joe, Brian, and Nate were trying to bring into being. They just had to get the word out. “We thought what if we timed the relaunch of our service during the DNC?

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 26 Nov 2020

Day after day the message was hammered home in giant, shouty slabs of text: ‘THERE ARE TOO MANY MIGRANTS’. ‘BRITAIN’S WIDE OPEN BORDERS’. ‘MIGRANTS PAY JUST £100 TO INVADE BRITAIN’. ‘THE INVADERS’. ‘MIGRANT SEIZED EVERY SIX MINUTES’. ‘MIGRANT MOTHERS COST NHS £1.3bn’. ‘WE CAN’T STOP MIGRANT SURGE’. ‘MIGRANTS SPARK HOUSING CRISIS’. ‘FURY OVER PLOT TO LET 1.5m TURKS INTO BRITAIN’. ‘WE’RE FROM EUROPE – LET US IN’. And on and on and on. Enemies came in a number of forms. ‘ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE’ was the Mail’s notorious denunciation of the UK’s ‘“out of touch” judges’ for insisting that Parliament should be given a say in any plans for implementing the result of the referendum.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

Many of the best American colleges until today have so-called legacy preferences, giving preferred admission to children of parents who also studied at the institution or, in some cases, gave money to it. And while US governments for decades promoted homeownership, opaque financial innovation with mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations led to a housing crisis in 2008, pushing millions of Americans out of their houses and out of their jobs. To this day, some people have not recovered financially from that crisis. Finally, some 28 million Americans, almost 10 percent of the total, did not have health insurance in 201819 (the last year for which data were available at the time of writing).

The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All
by Mary Childs
Published 15 Mar 2022

Still, the fire was less severe than for its peers, as dire housing forecasts and visions of shadow banking had helped Pimco avoid the nastiest stuff. And externally, Pimco continued to look brilliant. Charlie Rose interviewed Mohamed El-Erian in July 2008. Rose lurched forward in his creepy-grandfather tilt, wanting to know how, how had Pimco seen the housing crisis coming? Simple, El-Erian said. Stocks and bonds had been living in different worlds: In “2005, 2006, into 2007, the bond market, for example, was telling you, ‘There’s a major dislocation coming, be careful.’ The equity market was telling you, ‘It’s Goldilocks; everything’s perfect; the great moderation, nothing to worry about.’

Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy
by Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin
Published 7 Nov 2023

A latticework of elevated paths wound through the ever-shifting and expanding warren of homes and shops. A disaster at one such informal site was foundational to Chai Wan’s development. On Christmas Day 1953, a rolling fire consumed the sprawling slum at Shek Kip Mei, leaving fifty thousand people homeless. Pushed to finally address the housing crisis, between 1957 and 1966 the British colonial government constructed the Chai Wan Resettlement Estate, which included a twenty-seven-block public-housing project to shelter refugees from the fire. The accommodations were spartan. Small workshops and factories located in the surrounding area were moved into the complex.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

Every American family wanted to buy a home, he figured; the only things stopping them were that they didn’t have enough money and there weren’t enough houses. Home loans were high-interest and short-term, and they only covered around half the purchase price. That suppressed building, and when the Depression hit and prices fell, home construction nearly ceased, exacerbating the housing crisis. In 1931, with radicals breathing down his neck, Hoover assembled hundreds of real estate and construction professionals at the President’s National Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, one of his classic associative state meetups. There they brainstormed how to fight their common enemy: the menace of public housing.

…

The Y2K bubble looks like a great cautionary tale, but any capitalist who kept taking their investment cues from the collapse of Pets.com missed out on a lot of money. The growth that leading firms have accomplished since then has almost fully obscured the Y2K bubble on the stock chart, reducing it to mere first-night jitters. The 2008 housing crisis demonstrated the perils of confusing advertising with innovation, and blending up risky subprime home loans didn’t actually improve the quality of the underlying assets. When the house of cards fell, it took down a few storied financial institutions and a lot more homeowners with it. But as they do in the aftermath of every bubble, the winners bought up the losers: Bank of America took Merrill Lynch, and JPMorgan Chase got Bear Stearns.

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy
by David Hale and Lyric Hughes Hale
Published 23 May 2011

These include: • Developing Country Debt Crisis (1983) • US Savings and Loan Crisis (1980s) • Resolution Trust Company, which created REITS (Real Estate Investment Trusts) (late 1980s) • The 1988 Basel Capital Accord (1988) • The beginning of derivatives (early 1990s) • Proliferation of derivatives and Special Purpose Entities (SPEs) (1990s) • Asian Financial Crisis (1997–1998) • Collapse of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) (1998) • The repeal of Glass-Steagall (1999) and the adoption of Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Modernization Act (GLBA) (1998) • The failure of dot-coms (2000) Causes of the Global Financial Crisis after SOX and Prior to September 18, 2008 It is also important to understand the events and economic climate after the July 31, 2002, passage of SOX and prior to September 18, 2008. These events include: • The increasing complexity of derivative products, including CDSs (Credit Default Swaps) and CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations)4 • The ascendancy of rating agencies • Alt-A subprime lending • Basel II (2005–2006) • The subprime housing crisis in the United States, including the rise of “NINJA” (no income, no jobs, no assets) financing • The rise of hedge funds • The oil crisis (2008) • The collapse of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Lehman Brothers (2008) Understanding the causes of the global financial crisis will go hand in hand with regulatory reform and increasing targeted global compliance and ethics programs.5 Why SOX Failed SOX was supposed to remedy the financial improprieties and excesses that existed prior to July 31, 2002.

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism
by Kevin Phillips
Published 31 Mar 2008

But that same grassroots America will be even more aroused should the values of their homes drop by 8-10 percent or even 15-20 percent over a year or two. This could occur if Alan Greenspan’s prophecy about malfunctioning CDOs quoted at the beginning of this chapter proves correct, and the connections to unworkable securitization deepen and prolong the mortgage and housing crisis. Then the Wall Street financial architects who packaged mortgage-backed securities or structured CDOs to include subprime exposure might come to realize that they should have thought more broadly: not just about the difficulty of tracing where the original mortgage made in Cleveland or San Diego eventually wound up, or anticipating blowback over the subprime content of the CDOs sold to dummkopf provincial bankers in Germany, but also about domestic political backlash—the prospect that aroused homeowners in Hackerville or Warrentown might begin to take their first serious look at the new U.S. financial sector and what it has become.

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America
by Jon C. Teaford
Published 1 Jan 2006

Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition: The Making of San Francisco’s Ethnic and Nonconformist Communities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 172, 184–85, 187, 190–91. 30. Ibid., p. 192. 31. Levy and Cybriwsky, “Hidden Dimensions of Culture and Class,” p. 150. 32. Hodge, “Inner-City Revitalization,” p. 198. 33. Washington Post, 22 October 1990, p. D5. 34. Revitalization, Gentrification, and the Low-Income Housing Crisis: Hearing Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1986), p. 100. 35. Ibid., pp. 3, 7. 36. John King, “Protecting Industry from Yuppies and Other Invaders,” Planning, June 1988, p. 4. See also Robert Giloth and John Betancur, “Where Downtown Meets Neighborhood: Industrial Displacement in Chicago, 1978–1987,” Journal of the American Planning Association 54 (1988): 287. 37.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
by Brad Stone
Published 14 Oct 2013

The last thing we wanted to do was to sell. It was mortifying.” Hsieh wanted to keep going but even he came to acknowledge that Amazon could be a good home for Zappos. One of the factors he considered was that Zappos employees in Las Vegas and near its distribution center in Kentucky lived at ground zero of the housing crisis. Many had seen the value of their homes plummet, and the only valuable thing they owned was Zappos stock. Hsieh saw that the acquisition could offer a sizable payout for employees at a moment when many desperately needed it. The Zappos board ultimately decided to sell to Amazon; the vote was bittersweet but unanimous.

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives
by Sasha Abramsky
Published 15 Mar 2013

They’d go into houses and strip out the wire, pull it out through the ceilings. They take every last single thing you could think of. Leaving the houses with holes, basically nothing inside there. Every last thing down to the light bulbs. We’re talking toilets, every fixture you can think of, the lamps, the microwaves. In Tucson, Arizona, the housing crisis was taking down owners and renters alike. Homeowners unable to pay the monthly bills were losing their homes; renters in foreclosed homes were being evicted. And others, not in foreclosed homes, were losing their jobs, falling behind on their monthly payments and also ending up without roofs over their heads.

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 8 Apr 2012

Italy and Japan share membership in the small and undesirable club of rich nations with a ratio of public debt to GDP in the triple digits, and the politics of both Rome and Tokyo have been shaped by a recent succession of leaders who make vague noises about change and then leave only a vague impression on the system. Spain, on the other hand, has suffered real drama and pain, with a deep housing crisis, but it is now moving more aggressively in the right direction, including serious labor market reform to deal with its high unemployment rate. Between these two southern rivals, Spain is more likely to bounce high off a hard landing, with a chance to become a breakout nation in the coming decade.

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
by Brad Stone
Published 30 Jan 2017

Peter Kwan and his fellow hosts mobilized against Prop F. They started a separate group, called the Home Sharers Democratic Club, to give hosts a political voice in the fray, convened press conferences, and organized phone campaigns to educate the citizenry on the folly of the initiative. “We were made a scapegoat for the housing crisis,” Kwan told me over home-cooked Singapore-style noodles in his dining room that year, which I ate while Haley nipped at my ankles. “Yes, we do have a severe housing shortage and affordability problem, and yes, home sharing probably does play some part in contributing to the severity, but I don’t think anybody really knows the degree of the contribution.”

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

In fact, in turning to real estate itself, we will see that those changing skylines are only the start of this transformation. Real Estate Our story begins in the Great Recession of 2008, where the reckless behavior of two familiar players—big banks and big insurance—plunged the country into chaos. Real estate was especially hard hit. The bottom fell out of the market, and kept on falling. The housing crisis ensued, and things went from bad to worse to downright miserable. Which is when Glenn Sanford had what really should have been a stupid idea: start a real estate company. But it was a company built for the times. In the face of rising overhead costs and decimated revenues, Sanford decided not to do what real estate agents had always done: open an office.

Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction
by David Enrich
Published 18 Feb 2020

Morgan & Co., 112 JPMorgan Chase, 51, 95, 147, 247, 270, 310 Justice Department, U.S., 195 Deutsche Bank money laundering, 344–45 Deutsche Bank penalty, 339–40 Libor investigation, 291 Trump presidency and, 344–45 Val and father’s files, 320–21, 357–59 Kavanaugh, Brett, 338 Kebede, Kassy Mitchell and Estelle, 60–61 Mitchell’s death, 89 recruitment, 47, 48 Kebede, Liya, 47 Keitel, Harvey, 59 Kelly, Megyn, 277–78 Kennedy, Anthony, 70, 74, 90–91, 139, 336, 338 Kennedy, Justin background of, 70 at Goldman Sachs, 70–72 Trump presidency, 336–38 Kennedy, Justin, at Deutsche Bank, 80 departure, 145 housing crisis, 139–40 Mitchell’s death, 90–91 recruitment, 73–74 Trump loans, 75–76, 113, 115–17, 145 Khuzami, Robert, 93, 344–45, 345n Kim Jong Un, 253 Kissinger, Henry, 24, 179 Kohl, Helmut, 24, 25–26 Komansky, David H., 86 Kopper, Hilmar, 42–44, 53 Kostin, Andrey, 109–10 Kostin, Andrey, Jr., 110, 196–98 KPMG, 154 Kravis, Henry, 75 Kroenke, Stan, 170 Kushner, Charles, 275–76, 312 Kushner, Jared, 169, 172, 275–77, 315–16 Deutsche Bank investigation, 310, 311–13, 312n, 316, 358 Deutsche Bank loans, 275–76, 306–307, 336–37, 356 New York Observer, 172, 276, 277, 336–37 Kushner, Seryl, 277, 306–307 Kushner Companies, 169, 275–77, 311–13, 315–16, 336–37 Kvalheim, Grant, 47–48, 92 Labor Department, U.S., 343–44 Labor unions, 78, 234, 264–65 Lagarde, Christine, 179, 299 LaGuardia Airport, 278 “Last Day of Our Acquaintance, The” (song), 90, 229 Las Vegas, 32, 282–83 Latvian money laundering, 110–11, 118, 332 Lehman Brothers, 4, 63, 66 Lemon, Don, 278 Levin, Carl, 153–54, 238–39 Levinson, Charles, 256–57 Lewis, Michael, 138n Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate), 151–52 Broeksmit and, 288–94 criminal investigations, 195–96, 261–62 criminal settlement, 261–62 Gambino and, 251 Menke’s letter, 263–64 Lincoln, Abraham, 14 Lippmann, Greg, 138–40, 138n Little Dix Bay Resort, 207–208 Loans to Donald Trump.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis
by Leo Hollis
Published 31 Mar 2013

The new owners were then given a passport as proof of ownership and left to their own devices; Tellinga hopes that ‘self-build leads to more socially cohesive cities whose inhabitants have a much stronger attachment to their surroundings’.23 Many cities are watching to see how Homeruskwartier grows and develops as a potential solution to the current housing crisis. While it might be common sense to offer people more say in the way they build their own homes, do the same rules apply when thinking about public spaces? For so long our streets and public squares were barren places, to be traversed without hesitation, reminders of our anonymous smallness. We have lost touch with the city, as proven in a report conducted by Transport for London in 2006, which revealed that most people only understood London’s geography by the underground railway map, which presents a spacially distorted picture of the city; as a result one in twenty people exiting Leicester Square station on the Piccadilly Line had hopped on to the train at one of the two nearest stations, both of which are only 800 metres away.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

After all, an Airbnb transaction on one side calls for letting a stranger sleep in your home, and on the other side involves sleeping in a stranger’s home. Of course, the investors who passed were wrong; plenty of people were happy to bear those risks once Airbnb set up a marketplace to do so. The opposite can be true as well, in that people can substantially underestimate risks, such as in the 2007/2008 U.S. housing crisis, which led to a global financial crisis. The few people who correctly assessed this risk and bet on their secret knowledge made a lot of money, as depicted in the 2015 film The Big Short, based on a 2010 book of the same name by author Michael Lewis. A secret can also be how to turn someone else’s good idea into a great idea.

The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime
by Mj Demarco
Published 8 Nov 2010

Deep in our soul we know this, yet we continue to faithfully pledge obedience to a financial roadmap that promises wealth after four or five decades. And the bigger concern you should have is, does it even work? The global recession has exposed the Slowlane for the fraud it is. With no job, the plan fails. When the stock market loses 50% of your savings, the plan fails. When a housing crisis erases 40% of your illiquid net worth in one year, the plan fails. The plan is a failure because the plan is based on time and factors you can't control. Unfortunately, millions of people have faithfully invested decades into the plan only to discover the ugly truth: The Slowlane is risky and insufferably impotent.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
by Emily Guendelsberger
Published 15 Jul 2019

The person I’d planned to stay with in Oakland had an emergency the week before I was supposed to arrive, and rentals in San Francisco and the close parts of Oakland were way more out of my price range than I’d anticipated. Even subletting a tiny bedroom in a place with roommates would run me $3,000, minimum. There’s been some innovative, thinking-outside-the-box solutions to San Francisco’s housing crisis, including “coliving spaces,” a.k.a. dorms for adults. A depressing number of listings I looked at showed barracks-like rows of bunk beds. I actually did look into a few coliving spaces, thinking it might be an interesting window into the broke wannabe startup life. But rent on a single bunk bed would have been roughly twice my mortgage, and my money situation wasn’t any better than it had been in Hickory.

Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 16 May 2023

Godin, though obliged legally to remain the owner of the capital represented in the Familistere, has placed the control of the affairs in the population, who elect those who carry on its operations, and the result has shown how quickly men demonstrate, where the only law is liberty, that human nature is inherently good, and learn to seek their own happiness in that of others.”30 Four years later, the American Socialist celebrated that, in Guise, “a new human habitation has been invented against which even our prejudice in favor of individualism or isolation can make no attack,”31 and in 1875, the weekly journal American Artisan reported that the experiment sparked international conversations about how industrial life could be better organized to maximize the happiness of workers “all over the civilized globe.”32 The Familistery model never caught on in the way these American periodicals predicted. In an 1872 series of articles on “The Housing Crisis,” Friedrich Engels criticized the Familistery as an unworkable “bourgeois” solution: “No capitalist has any interest in establishing such colonies, and in fact none such exists anywhere in the world, except in Guise in France and that was built by a follower of Fourier, not as profitable speculation but as a socialist experiment.”33 Eight years before his death, Godin converted the ownership structure of the Familistery into a cooperative enterprise owned in common by its employees.34 Although he died in 1888, the community of workers Godin left behind in Guise continued to flourish as a cooperative for another eighty years, until the enterprise became less financially viable as the market for iron stoves dried up and French ironworkers faced growing international competition.

Portfolio Design: A Modern Approach to Asset Allocation
by R. Marston
Published 29 Mar 2011

seven cities examined, the nominal appreciation for the FHFA index exceeds that of the Case-Shiller index. In the case of Los Angeles, the average rate of appreciation is 4.7 percent for the Case-Shiller index, but it is 0.6 percent faster for the government series. The gap between the two indexes is largely due to price changes since the housing crisis began. If rates of appreciation are compared over the period from 1987 to 2006 (prior to the crisis), they are much more similar.18 Figure 11.8 shows the cumulative fall in prices over the 36 months starting in January 2007. In the case of Los Angeles, for example, the Case-Shiller index fell 36.5 percent over this period, while the FHFA index falls only 28.2 percent.

The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism
by John U. Bacon
Published 7 Nov 2017

But the world once again made an exception for Halifax. Throughout Thursday, a storm that had started brewing off the Carolinas was making its way up the East Coast through a thick cloud cover, timed to land in Nova Scotia at the end of the most tragic day in the city’s history. But Colwell was surely right about the housing crisis. The explosion destroyed 1,630 buildings and damaged 12,000 more, leaving some 25,000, almost half the population of Halifax-Dartmouth, without adequate housing and dangerously exposed to the elements. After Deputy Mayor Colwell asked Colonel W. E. Thompson for help with temporary shelter, the Engineer and Ordnance Corps outdid itself, putting up tents on the North Commons for 250 people, equipping them with canvas floors, cots, blankets, and oil stoves, and adding temporary hospital accommodations, more than enough to keep people warm through the cold night ahead, in a clean, safe environment—a rare commodity that first night.

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe
by Antony Loewenstein
Published 1 Sep 2015

This situation was repeated across the country, with few of the asylum seekers having a chance to be heard. The media was largely uninterested, and the Home Office and charity bureaucracy resented having to talk to journalists and migrants at all. Activists and immigrants all told me that the system was close to useless. This reality of privatized housing for refugees was linked to the country’s housing crisis, both for asylum seekers and for the general population, but not for the reasons its defenders claimed. It had not brought greater freedom in the market; it had simply allowed profiteers to thrive, because the mantra of “self-reliance” for the poor—another term for hanging the underclass out to dry —had become official government policy.

What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences
by Steven G. Mandis
Published 9 Sep 2013

The Washington Post states that one of Goldman’s 2006 mortgage deals, the GSAMP Trust 2006-S3, may actually be “the worst deal … floated by a top-tier firm.”2 (One in every six of the 8,274 mortgages bundled in GSAMP Trust 2006-S3 would be in default eighteen months later. People who bought the S3 bonds either had to take a 100 percent loss or sell it at a heavy discount.) In December, anticipating a housing crisis, Goldman takes a negative stance on the mortgage market but does not announce this publicly. Head of the Special Situations proprietary trading area in FICC, who reportedly was paid a $70 million bonus (larger than the CEO’s reported $53 million), leaves Goldman—supposedly because he was frustrated by the bureaucracy at Goldman and because the group was not compensated like a hedge fund or private equity firm for the reported $4 billion in profits the group generated (O).

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
by Charles Montgomery
Published 12 Nov 2013

Ryan, “The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior,” Psychological Inquiry, 2000: 227–68. activity is its own reward: Frey, Happiness: A Revolution, 130. freshmen at Harvard: Baker, Meredith C., and Cara K. Fahey, “The Housing Market, 2009: Mather House,” Harvard Crimson, March 9, 2009, www.thecrimson.com/article/2009/3/15/the-housing-crisis-mather-house (accessed January 9, 2011). concrete tower of Mather House: “Dictionary of Harvardisms from A to Z: The Vocabulary You Need to Get Through Your Life at Harvard,” Harvard Crimson, August 24, 2009, www.thecrimson.com/article/2009/8/24/dictionary-of-harvardisms-2-am-1 (accessed January 9, 2011).

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City
by Richard Sennett
Published 9 Apr 2018

A city is crooked because it is diverse, full of migrants speaking dozens of languages; because its inequalities are so glaring, svelte ladies lunching a few blocks away from exhausted transport cleaners; because of its stresses, as in concentrating too many young graduates chasing too few jobs … Can the physical ville straighten out such difficulties? Will plans to pedestrianize a street do anything about the housing crisis? Will the use of sodium borosilicate glass in buildings make people more tolerant of immigrants? The city seems crooked in that asymmetry afflicts its cité and its ville.2 It is sometimes right that there be a mis-fit between the builder’s own values and those of the public. This mis-fit ought to occur if people reject living with neighbours unlike themselves.

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times
by Lionel Barber
Published 5 Nov 2020

Bernanke is bald with a trim black beard, a soft-spoken man who explains complex economics as if he were lecturing one of his old student classes at Princeton. (I cannot speak for Krishna, but that’s fine by me.) The Fed chair describes the credit crunch as sinister. ‘It’s not like appendicitis. It’s spread through the body and you don’t know what it is.’ He is more certain on two counts. First, ‘We’re still early in the housing crisis’ (an implicit recognition that real-estate prices have yet to hit bottom). Second, financial institutions are now at risk of not being able to repay their debts. This is a revelation. Wall Street bosses have insisted to me that they are financially sound and that the crisis is largely about liquidity, the temporary provision of funding.

The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend
by Rob Copeland
Published 7 Nov 2023

In December 2007, as the world economy teetered, Dalio organized an event at which the British rock-and-roll singer Eric Clapton was paid $1.5 million to perform a private, roughly hour-long concert at a Connecticut country club. Another $1 million donation was reportedly thrown into the charity of Clapton’s choice. As the housing crisis spread, Dalio discarded many of his earlier caveats on the uncertainty ahead, settling back into the dark storyline he’d spent three decades polishing. In January 2008 he wrote to Bridgewater clients, “If the economy goes down, it will not be a typical recession.” He predicted a disaster in which “the financial deleveraging causes a financial crisis that causes an economic crisis.”

Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase
by Duff McDonald
Published 5 Oct 2009

Losses on the home equity portfolio had surpassed Dimon’s stress-testing scenarios, and the CFO, Mike Cavanagh, said that in the future the company would be assuming a more conservative stance. He dropped a bomb on the audience by explaining that the firm could add as much as $450 million more to loan-loss reserves in the first quarter alone. “We did not see the magnitude of the housing crisis coming,” he admitted. Though it had sold off much of its subprime portfolio, the company still owned $15.5 billion worth, and more than 12 percent of those home owners had been delinquent for 30 days or more. The company also shifted $4.9 billion of leveraged loans from “held for sale” to “held to maturity” on its balance sheet; this shift allowed it to delay taking losses on the loans.

Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain
by John Grindrod
Published 2 Nov 2013

‘She visited six families in a blackened Victorian tenement … But even as she stood on the pavement, smiling at the milling crowd who struggled to see her, she also saw at the corner the tall towers of the first Hutchesontown-Gorbals redevelopment area, the gigantic 20-storey flats that are now nearing completion.’1 The story of Glasgow’s attempts to tackle its housing crisis is one of the more extreme episodes in the history of postwar rebuilding, and marks the start of a radical new wave of redevelopment. In the fifties, tenement life for people like Danny hadn’t changed much since the Industrial Revolution first gripped the Clyde valley: whole families still lived in single gas-lit rooms, side by side with a disturbing complement of bugs and rodents, with no hot running water (and often no cold water indoors), and a single outside toilet shared by several households.

To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010
by T M Devine
Published 25 Aug 2011

Leisure patterns were transformed by the television and, for a long time after its introduction, cinema audience figures tumbled. The number of TV sets in Scotland grew from 41,000 in 1952 to well over 1 million ten years later, fuelled partly by the huge demand for televisions at the time of the Coronation in 1953. The nation’s housing crisis was now tackled for the first time on a large scale with the extraordinary total of over 564,000 new houses built in the two decades after 1945. As the urban slums came down, many thousands of Scots now had decent houses, equipped to modern standards with inside toilets.11 Yet such gains in living standards failed to stem the flow of emigrants.

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America
by Diana Elizabeth Kendall
Published 27 Jul 2005

In the past, middle-class occupations were considered relatively secure and thought to provide opportunities for advancement if people worked hard, increased their level of education, and gained more experience on the job. Today, however, a number of factors—including the recession of the 2000s, the housing crisis and high mortgage-foreclosure rates, occupational insecurity and long-term job loss, and the continual cost-of-living squeeze—are subjects of major concern and increasing analysis in various media sources. The working class (about 30 percent of the U.S. population) comprises semiskilled workers such as machine operators in factories (blue-collar jobs) and some service-sector workers, including clerks and salespeople whose jobs involve routine, mechanized tasks that require little skill beyond basic 9781442202238.print.indb 15 2/10/11 10:46 AM 16 Chapter 1 literacy and brief on-the-job training.

The Downfall of Money: Germany's Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class
by Frederick Taylor
Published 16 Sep 2013

The new statutes provide for an increase in rents all over the country of 300 per cent on pre-war figures. Building a house containing twelve to twenty such flats has thus become the latest form of profitable investment.28 The other fashionable speculative object was furniture. That was being hoarded, too, on the basis of the same hopes that the housing crisis would ease in a year or two, as would the inflation, and suddenly people would need to furnish new homes. The trend had been clear for years. Now, for those who could manage it, the headlong flight into ‘things’ had begun. 18 Kicking Germany When She’s Down On 22 November 1922, four years and eleven days after the armistice that ended the First World War, President Ebert undertook what appeared to be a desperate throw of the dice for the Republic to which he had been midwife in those dark days of defeat.

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies
by Jeremy Siegel
Published 7 Jan 2014

As noted above, there was widespread disagreement, even among experts, about whether there was a paradigm shift in the housing market that justified higher prices. 22. John G. Taylor, professor at Stanford and author of Getting off Track: How Government Actions and Invention Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis, blamed Greenspan’s Fed for keeping interest rates too low too long. Other who blamed the Fed for causing the housing crisis included Gerald O’Driscoll, Jr., of the Cato Institute, David Malpass, president of Encima Global, and Representative Ron Paul of Texas, a steadfast critic of the Fed. 23. BBC news sourcing Federal Reserve, Bank of England, and SIFMA, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7073131.stm. 24. These funds carried fancy names such as High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund. 25.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
by Tim Wu
Published 14 May 2016

Classification: LCC HF5811 .W82 2016 | DDC 659.1/042—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016010140 Ebook ISBN 9780385352024 Cover design by Jon Gray v4.1 ep Contents Cover Also by Tim Wu Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction: Here’s the Deal Part I: Masters of Blazing Modernities Chapter 1: The First Attention Merchants Chapter 2: The Alchemist Chapter 3: For King and Country Chapter 4: Demand Engineering, Scientific Advertising, and What Women Want Chapter 5: A Long Lucky Run Chapter 6: Not with a Bang but with a Whimper Part II: The Conquest of Time and Space Chapter 7: The Invention of Prime Time Chapter 8: The Prince Chapter 9: Total Attention Control, or The Madness of Crowds Chapter 10: Peak Attention, American Style Chapter 11: Prelude to an Attentional Revolt Chapter 12: The Great Refusal Chapter 13: Coda to an Attentional Revolution Part III: The Third Screen Chapter 14: Email and the Power of the Check-in Chapter 15: Invaders Chapter 16: AOL Pulls ’Em In Part IV: The Importance of Being Famous Chapter 17: Establishment of the Celebrity-Industrial Complex Chapter 18: The Oprah Model Chapter 19: The Panopticon Part V: Won’t Be Fooled Again Chapter 20: The Kingdom of Content: This Is How You Do It Chapter 21: Here Comes Everyone Chapter 22: The Rise of Clickbait Chapter 23: The Place to Be Chapter 24: The Importance of Being Microfamous Chapter 25: The Fourth Screen and the Mirror of Narcissus Chapter 26: The Web Hits Bottom Chapter 27: A Retreat and a Revolt Chapter 28: Who’s Boss Here? Epilogue: The Temenos Acknowledgments Notes A Note About the Author For Sierra INTRODUCTION HERE’S THE DEAL In 2011, the Twin Rivers school district in central California faced a tough situation. The district, never wealthy, was hit hard by the housing crisis of the early 2000s and the state government’s own financial meltdown. By the 2010s, schools were cutting not only extracurricular activities but even some of the basics, like heat. One day in winter, a student posted a picture of a classroom thermostat reading 44 degrees Fahrenheit. Such were the circumstances when the Twin Rivers board was approached by a company named “Education Funding Partners.”

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze
Published 15 Nov 2021

Ford, “The New Wartime Economy in the Era of Coronavirus,” Financial Times, March 25, 2020. “How to Battle the Coronavirus and Win: A Historians’ Roundtable,” www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-29/history-s-coronavirus-lessons-going-to-war-against-covid-19. 22. E. Levitz, “This Recession Is a Bigger Housing Crisis Than 2008,” Intelligencer, July 13, 2020. 23. M. Konczal, “Our Political System Is Hostile to Real Reform,” Dissent, March 26, 2020. 24. A. Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (Viking, 2018) and A. Mian and A. Sufi, House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again (University of Chicago Press, 2015). 25.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff
Published 22 Mar 2022

You could find advice about complications when cutting the cord after birth; a short discussion of whether “sportsmen should take dope”; an endorsement of New Scientist magazine; a reproduction of the Ariadne astrological symbol; an article about how house shells quickly made from epoxy could solve the world’s housing crisis; a discussion of “bioholography,” which argued that animals take advantage of “a ‘coherent’ level of background ultrasound”; a cartoon of a naked woman with an elephant head; instructions (printed upside down) on how to correctly use a barometer to measure building height; sketches of the molecular structure of LSD, psilocybin, trimethoxyamphetamine, and inactive bufotenine under the headline ALL THE WAY WITH DNA; and an analysis of the causes of urban rioting—and that was just up to page twenty-four.

Straphanger
by Taras Grescoe
Published 8 Sep 2011

Logan, Michael F. Desert Cities: The Environmental History of Phoenix and Tucson. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. Luckingham, Bradford. Phoenix: The History of a Southwestern Metropolis. Phoenix: University of Arizona Press, 1995. Lucy, William H. Foreclosing the Dream: How America’s Housing Crisis Is Reshaping Our Cities and Suburbs. Chicago: American Planning Association, 2010. Mees, Paul. Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age. Oxford: Earthscan, 2009. Pew Research Center. “For Nearly Half of America, Grass Is Greener Somewhere Else.” http:// pewresearch.org/pubs, January 29, 2009.

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire
by Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson
Published 15 Jan 2019

Perhaps we should not be surprised that in such turbulent times the Labour Party is again at war within itself. The brief ceasefires in the Conservative civil war are unlikely to hold for long. That civil war resulted in Brexit and is far from settled despite the referendum. At the time of writing, the countries of the UK are in economic peril as the pound weakens, food prices start to climb and the housing crisis approaches a crescendo. Absolute poverty rates are rising, and life expectancy is now falling. You have to look back as far as the 1930s to find so much going wrong so quickly. Today is different, but the echo is uncanny, and the ideas of the one leader calling for social progress at a time of economic disaster are again widely ridiculed, ignored or dismissed.

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas
by Janek Wasserman
Published 23 Sep 2019

On the Taussig controversy, see Mises, Theory, 204. On Austrian currency policy, see Ebeling, Political Economy, 65–68. For Menger’s verdict, see C. Menger, Das Goldagio, 1. 7. Die direkte Personalsteuern, 1–7. On the Austrian bureaucracy, see Deak, Forging. 8. Fürth, Die Einkommensteuer; Die direkten Personalsteuern, ii, 11–14. 9. On the housing crisis, see Feldbauer, Stadtswachstum; John and Lichtblau, Schmelztiegel. On populist politics, see McGrath, Dionysian Art; Schorske, Vienna; Boyer, Political Radicalism. 10. On the Second International, see Braunthal, International. 11. Bonnell, “Marx.” See Sweezy, introduction to Karl Marx, vi–x.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz
Published 13 May 2020

In November 2019, the US Census Bureau announced that Americans’ rate of moving was the lowest it had been in decades; Balazs Szekely, ‘Renters Became the Majority Population in 22 Big US Cities’, Rent Café Blog, 25 January 2018, https://www.rentcafe.com/blog/rental-market/market-snapshots/change-renter-vs-owner-population-2006-2016; Wendell Cox, ‘Length of Residential Tenure: Metropolitan Areas, Urban Cores, Suburbs and Exurbs’, New Geography, 17 October 2018, https://www.newgeography.com/content/006115-residential-tenure. 28 Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Anna Brown, Richard Fry, D’Vera Cohn and Ruth Igielnik, ‘What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities’, Pew Research Center, 22 May 2018, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/what-unites-and-divides-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/. 29 Peter Stubley, ‘Berlin to freeze rents and give tenants rights to sue landlords after rising costs force residents out to suburbs’, Independent, 23 October 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/berlin-rent-freeze-tenants-sue-landlords-housing-crisis-germany-a9167611.html. 30 Ben Knight, ‘Berlin’s new rent freeze: How it compares globally’, Deutsche Welle, 23 October 2019, https://www.dw.com/en/berlins-new-rent-freeze-how-it-compares-globally/a-50937652. 31 Prasanna Rajasekaran, Mark Treskon, Solomon Greene, ‘Rent Control: What Does the Research Tell Us about the Effectiveness of Local Action?’

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis
by Jeanna Smialek
Published 27 Feb 2023

To put those numbers into context, Americans had $1.3 trillion in outstanding subprime mortgages headed into the 2008 crisis,[18] and when those debts went bad, it had helped to knock the financial system to its knees. If a silver lining existed, it was where the riskiest corporate loans were not. Banks appeared to be far less exposed to leveraged borrowers than they had been to exotic debt bundles during the housing crisis. Unfortunately, nobody had perfect insight into just where the leveraged loans were. In a 2019 report, the Financial Stability Board had been able to directly identify the holders of eight in ten leveraged loans. “Little is known, in particular, about the direct exposures of certain non-bank investors to these markets,” the FSB had acknowledged.[19] As recently as their January meeting, Fed officials had worried that “financial imbalances—including overvaluation and excessive indebtedness—could amplify an adverse shock to the economy.”[20] In 2019, Powell himself had warned that “a highly leveraged business sector could amplify any economic downturn as companies are forced to lay off workers and cut back on investments.”[21] He was an expert on the topic: He had helped to pile debt onto companies during his work in the private sector and had himself questioned whether the Fed’s bond purchases risked sowing the seeds of instability during his early days as a Fed governor.

Vanishing New York
by Jeremiah Moss
Published 19 May 2017

End tax abatements and other incentives for developers, corporations, and chains. Reroute those deals to developers of affordable housing and to small, local businesspeople. 8. Strengthen and expand residential rent regulation. Create real affordable housing not tethered to luxury development. 9. Enforce a moratorium on new luxury construction. New York’s housing crisis is an affordability crisis. Politicians in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities are fighting for this measure. 10. Reduce speculative real estate investment with a tax on luxury pieds-à-terre, as recommended by New York state senator Brad Hoylman. This is similar to London’s “ghost town” tax.

On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System
by Henry M. Paulson
Published 15 Sep 2010

Dodd had interrupted his presidential campaign for what appeared to be a publicity event. I was new enough to Washington to be put off by this request, and I was also frustrated that GSE reform had been held up during the year. Ben and I met with Dodd in his office at the Russell Senate Office Building, discussing the markets and the housing crisis. The affable Dodd was friendly but criticized me to reporters afterward, questioning whether I understood the importance of the subprime mortgage problem. In fact, I was watching the mortgage market more closely than the senator realized. It was becoming increasingly clear that the housing problems had crossed into the financial system, producing the makings of a much more ominous crisis.

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law
by Timothy Sandefur
Published 16 Aug 2010

According to California’s Department of Housing and Community Development, the state “leads the nation in imposing fees on new residential development . . . which vary widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, often with no explicit rationale. They average $20,000 to $30,000 per unit and account for more than 15 percent of new home prices in jurisdictions providing substantial shares of affordable housing.” State of California Little Hoover Commission, “Rebuilding the Dream: Solving California’s Affordable Housing Crisis,” Report no. 165, May 2002, p. 39, http://www. lhc.ca.gov/studies/165/report165.pdf. 89. Marla Dresch and Steven M. Sheffrin, Who Pays for Development Fees and Exactions? (Sacramento: Public Policy Institute of California, June 1997), p. v, http://www. ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_697SSR.pdf. 90.

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets
by Michael W. Covel
Published 19 Mar 2007

Although our larger portfolio gains happened in October, this position profited throughout the fall of 2008.” Sure, we all focus on “stocks,” but what about lumber? Vandergrift explained his lumber trade (see Chart 4.10): “Lumber was another great market over the fall of 2008. Lumber fell due to the housing crisis in the U.S. Lower demand means lower lumber prices. We sold the market short in the late summer and held the position until mid-November. However, it is important to keep in mind that we went short based off of price action, not fundamentals.” 133 134 This evidence of structure in stock prices suggests alluring possibilities in the way of forecasting.

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain
by Robert Chesshyre
Published 15 Jan 2012

Headlines from one paper were daubed on an Asian-owned Tower Hamlets newsagent’s shop. The story was the flavour of the week in mid-October 1986. The headlines cited by Jubo Barta included: ‘THEY’RE STILL FLOODING IN’ – London Standard; ‘3,000 ASIANS FLOOD BRITAIN’ – the Sun; ‘IMMIGRANTS PARALYSE HEATHROW’ – Daily Mail; ‘ASIANS START HOUSING CRISIS’ – Daily Mail. The Star commented: ‘Britain finally began to drop the portcullis and raise the drawbridge against the alien hordes.’ The Sun, under the banner headline ‘THE LIARS’, reported ‘the 1,001 lies used by immigrants to cheat their way into Britain’. One pop paper wrote: ‘Remember too that every male immigrant to this country represents either an addition to the dole queues, or a job lost to a native Briton, or both.

The Lost Bank: The Story of Washington Mutual-The Biggest Bank Failure in American History
by Kirsten Grind
Published 11 Jun 2012

Not long before the shareholder meeting, McMurray made a presentation to WaMu’s board of directors, outlining an even bleaker situation than shareholders read about in the year-end report. Killinger allowed him to deliver his thoughts, but he preceded McMurray’s report with a preemptive explanation of the bank’s position. For perhaps the first time, the board saw, in detail, WaMu’s perilous concentration of mortgages in the states hit hardest by the housing crisis. McMurray included a series of charts and graphs illustrating home appreciation in different California markets growing sharply, then falling. In one breathtaking slide, he showed that WaMu’s home equity loans represented 1,366 percent of the bank’s total equity. That startling percentage was colored red.

Economic Dignity
by Gene Sperling
Published 14 Sep 2020

The student is thousands of dollars in debt—on average $14,000—with higher forgone opportunity costs.5 But once the for-profit college gets an enrollment, it receives its $14,000 a year—no risk, no skin in the game. Enrollment equals payment and profit, usually paid for with your taxpayer dollars. Sound familiar? It should. It is precisely the formula that contributed to the subprime housing crisis. Once the secondary markets were willing to buy even the shadiest of mortgages and stamp them with AAA ratings, those actors who originated mortgages were going to get fully paid even if these mortgages were reckless or illegitimate. The government might lose because it was guaranteeing investors; the borrower might have massive debt and could even lose their home, down payment, and credit.

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth
by Selina Todd
Published 11 Feb 2021

‘I saw poverty all around me while people worked long hours, often in physically demanding and filthy jobs.’8 Lyn O’Reilly’s father, a casual worker hired by the day, did not enjoy the benefits of secure employment and overtime that some factory workers had – ‘if my dad didn’t have work then we’d be hungry’.9 And many families better off than the O’Reilly’s endured housing poverty in the 1950s. Although the Conservatives built more council accommodation in the 1950s, they relied heavily on the private sector to solve the housing crisis. Their refusal to implement rent controls helped a few slum landlords – most famously London’s Peter Rachman – to make their fortune, but left thousands of families languishing in overcrowded, dilapidated rented housing. Don Milligan, his parents and his older brother ‘lived in three rooms … it wasn’t a flat; there were three separate rooms in a tenement house … no bath’.

Politics on the Edge: The Instant #1 Sunday Times Bestseller From the Host of Hit Podcast the Rest Is Politics
by Rory Stewart
Published 13 Sep 2023

James O’Brien, the radio presenter and journalist, had written, ‘For good or ill, Rory Stewart would absolutely annihilate Jeremy Corbyn in a general election.’ Generally, faced with this type of praise I felt queasy, both overvalued and misunderstood, guilty at having got away with something. But on this occasion, I felt I had come into my own. Meanwhile, Britain remained a mess. There was a housing crisis; incomes were stagnating; adult social care was hardly functioning, and the Union itself was under strain. We hadn’t invested sufficiently in research or education or infrastructure, or how to respond to a world in which AI and robots would replace millions of existing jobs. Our economy was weak, and we were borrowing tens of billions of pounds more every year.

The Rough Guide to Berlin
by Rough Guides

Concern about the arms race and the environment was widespread; feminism and gay rights commanded increasing support. Left-wing and Green groups formed an Alternative Liste to fight elections, and a left-liberal newspaper, Tageszeitung, was founded. Organized squatting was the radical solution to Berlin’s housing crisis. In 1981, the new Christian Democrat administration (elected after a financial scandal forced the SPD to step down) tried to evict the squatters from about 170 apartment buildings, and police violence sparked rioting in Schöneberg. The administration compromised by allowing some of the squatters to become legitimate tenants, which had a big effect on life in West Berlin.

Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House
by Peter Baker
Published 21 Oct 2013

Bush had fought to reform the two entities repeatedly over the years, only to run into a buzz saw of opposition in Congress. “It was literally like William Wallace fighting the British,” said Tony Fratto, a deputy press secretary who specialized in economic issues. “It was a slaughter.” Now with a housing crisis in full flame, the question was whether it was too late. A week later, John McCain began airing a new ad with a theme typically used by the party out of power. “We’re worse off than we were four years ago,” the ad said. ON AUGUST 8, Bush was standing in a reception line in Beijing about to shake hands with President Hu Jintao marking the opening of the Summer Olympics when his deputy national security adviser, James Jeffrey, sidled up and whispered in his ear.

…

.: Afghanistan War as conducted by, see Afghanistan War Africa visited by AIDS in Africa initiative of, 13.1, 16.1, 25.1, 31.1, 33.1, 34.1, 35.1, 35.2, 36.1, epl.1, epl.2, epl.3 anthrax attacks and response of, 8.1, 9.1, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 12.1, 13.1, 13.2, epl.1 approval ratings and popularity of, prl.1, 9.1, 12.1, 12.2, 18.1, 21.1, 24.1, 25.1, 28.1, 28.2, 29.1, 31.1, 31.2, 35.1, epl.1, epl.2 assassination attempt on, 21.1, 35.1, nts.1n “axis of evil” speech of, 10.1, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, 20.1, 27.1 background of, prl.1, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1 Baghdad visited by, 16.1, 26.1, 32.1, 32.2, 36.1 baseball as interest of, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 11.1, 18.1, 20.1, 31.1, 33.1, epl.1 bicycle riding as sport of, 1.1, 22.1, 27.1, epl.1 bipartisanship of, 2.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 6.1, 8.1, 10.1, 11.1, 17.1, 24.1, 29.1, 31.1, 32.1, epl.1 birth of Blair’s relationship with, 5.1, 6.1, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 11.1, 12.1, 12.2, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4, 14.1, 16.1, 17.1, 18.1, 27.1, 27.2, 29.1, 37.1 “bring ’em on” comment of cabinet of, 5.1, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 10.1, 12.1, 18.1, 19.1, 20.1, 22.1, 33.1, 35.1 Cheney’s influence on, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 10.1, 11.1, 12.1, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4, 16.1, 17.1, 17.2, 20.1, 21.1, 21.2, 23.1, 23.2, 26.1, 27.1, 27.2, 29.1, 30.1, 31.1, 31.2, 31.3, 32.1, 32.2, 32.3, 32.4, 34.1, 35.1, 35.2, 35.3, 36.1, 37.1, epl.1 Cheney’s relationship with, prl.1, 1.1, 1.2, 3.1, 3.2, 6.1, 10.1, 11.1, 12.1, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 16.1, 17.1, 17.2, 21.1, 24.1, 25.1, 25.2, 29.1, 31.1, 31.2, 31.3, 32.1, 32.2, 33.1, 34.1, 36.1, 37.1, 37.2, epl.1, epl.2 Clinton compared with, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1, 8.1, 8.2, 9.1, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 11.5, 12.1, 12.2, 13.1, 23.1, 23.2, 24.1, 26.1, 29.1, 33.1, 37.1 colonoscopies of, 11.1, 32.1 “compassionate conservatism” of, 3.1, 3.2, 5.1, 9.1, 13.1, 13.2, 15.1, 16.1, epl.1 congressional campaign of (1978), 2.1, 17.1 congressional relations of, 5.1, 6.1, 8.1, 12.1, 12.2, 15.1, 16.1, 17.1, 21.1, 24.1, 25.1, 27.1, 28.1, 28.2, 29.1, 29.2, 29.3, 30.1, 31.1, 31.2, 32.1, 33.1, 32.2, 34.1, 35.1, 36.1, 36.2 as conservative, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 11.1, 16.1, 17.1, 21.1, 22.1, 23.1, 24.1, 27.1, 27.2, 27.3, 35.1, 35.2, 37.1, epl.1 Crawford, Tex., ranch of, 3.1, 4.1, 6.1, 10.1, 10.2, 11.1, 11.2, 16.1, 19.1, 22.1, 23.1, 23.2, 27.1, 28.1, 28.2, 30.1, 30.2, 32.1, 33.1, 34.1, 34.2, 36.1, 37.1 “dead or alive” comment of, 8.1, 15.1 democracy and freedom agenda of, prl.1, 6.1, 8.1, 10.1, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, 12.2, 14.1, 16.1, 17.1, 19.1, 20.1, 21.1, 21.2, 21.3, 21.4, 21.5, 21.6, 24.1, 25.1, 27.1, 27.2, 27.3, 27.4, 27.5, 28.1, 28.2, 31.1, 32.1, 32.2, 33.1, 34.1, 35.1, 35.2 37.1, epl.1, epl.2, epl.3, epl.4 Democratic opposition to, 5.1, 5.2, 8.1, 8.2, 10.1, 17.1, 21.1, 24.1, 24.2, 24.3, 26.1, 28.1, 28.2, 28.3, 29.1, 31.1, 31.2, 32.1, 32.2, 33.1, 33.2, 33.3, 33.4, 34.1, 35.1, 36.1, 36.2, epl.1 detainee policy of, 10.1, 11.1, 13.1, 18.1, 18.2, 20.1, 21.1, 24.1, 24.2, 27.1, 28.1, 28.2, 31.1, 34.1, 35.1, epl.1 domestic policies of, prl.1, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 11.1, 16.1, 18.1, 21.1, 23.1, 31.1, 32.1, 34.1, epl.1, epl.2 drinking problem of, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 4.1 drunk-driving arrest of, 1.1, 3.1, 4.1 economic policies of, prl.1, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 4.2, 11.1, 13.1, 18.1, 21.1, 21.2, 24.1, 460–61, 32.1, 33.1, 33.2, 34.1, 35.1, 36.1, 36.2, 36.3, 37.1, epl.1, epl.2, epl.3, epl.4, epl.5 education of, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 11.1 education reform supported by, 3.1, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 7.1, 7.2, 10.1, 21.1, 31.1, epl.1, epl.2, epl.3 energy policies of, 5.1, 6.1, 9.1, 18.1, 22.1, 24.1, 30.1, 33.1, epl.1 environmental policies of, 2.1, 2.2, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 6.1, 6.2, 15.1, 25.1, 31.1, 34.1, 35.1 as father, prl.1, 2.1, 2.2, 13.1, 14.1, 14.2, 16.1, 16.2, 17.1, 34.1 final days and retirement of financial bailouts approved by, 34.1, 35.1, 36.1, 36.2, 36.3, epl.1, epl.2, epl.3, epl.4 first term of, prl.1, prl.2, prl.3, 4.1, 5.1, 21.1, 21.2, 21.3, 21.4, 23.1, 25.1, 25.2, 27.1, 31.1, 31.2, 35.1, epl.1, epl.2 foreign policy of, prl.1, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 6.2, 8.1, 10.1, 11.1, 14.1, 17.1, 20.1, 20.2, 21.1, 23.1, 26.1, 27.1, 34.1, 35.1, 35.2, 35.3 free market ideology of, 11.1, 34.1 at G-8 summit gay rights and, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 17.1, 17.2, 17.3, 18.1, 18.2, 18.3, 30.1, epl.1, nts.1n at Ground Zero, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 9.1, 10.1, 11.1, 18.1 gubernatorial campaign of (1994) gubernatorial campaign of (1998) at Harvard Business School, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 homeland security policy of, 8.1, 9.1, 11.1, 13.1, 14.1, nts.1n housing crisis and policies of, 24.1, 26.1, 27.1, 33.1, 34.1, 35.1, 35.2, 36.1, 37.1, epl.1 Hurricane Katrina response of, 23.1, 23.2, 23.3, 24.1, 27.1, 31.1, 35.1, 35.2, epl.1, epl.2, nts.1n–29n, nts.2n–49n immigration policy of, 2.1, 3.1, 20.1, 21.1, 21.2, 24.1, 31.1, 32.1, 32.2, 33.1, 37.1, epl.1, epl.2 inaugurations of, epi.1, 5.1, 19.1, 20.1 intelligence information of, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, 12.2, 13.1, 15.1, 17.1, 18.1, 33.1 Iraq War as conducted by, see Iraq War Kabul visited by, 25.1, 36.1 at Kennebunkport compound, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 27.1, 32.1 legal council of Libby pardon denied by, prl.1, prl.2, prl.3, prl.4, prl.5, 31.1, 31.2, 32.1, 32.2, 32.3, 36.1, 37.1, epl.1, nts.1n–62n loyalty to, prl.1, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 5.1, 10.1, 12.1, 17.1, 19.1, 20.1, 23.1, 23.2, 26.1, 27.1, 28.1, 28.2, 30.1, 31.1, 31.2, 31.3, 32.1, 32.2, 34.1, 36.1, 36.2, 37.1, epl.1 media coverage of, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 10.1, 11.1, 11.2, 13.1, 15.1, 16.1, 17.1, 17.2, 18.1, 19.1, 21.1, 21.2, 24.1, 28.1, 34.1, 37.1 memoir of, prl.1, prl.2, 5.1, 11.1, 13.1, 16.1, 17.1, 36.1, epl.1, epl.2, epl.3, epl.4 Middle East policy of, prl.1, prl.2, 6.1, 8.1, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 12.1, 12.2, 13.1, 14.1, 16.1, 19.1, 21.1, 24.1, 25.1, 27.1, 27.2, 27.3, 28.1, 29.1, 31.1, 31.2, 33.1, 33.2, 34.1, 34.2, 35.1, 35.2, 35.3, 37.1 in Midland, Tex., 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 9.1, 37.1 military commissions established by, 10.1, 20.1, 20.2, 22.1, 27.1, 28.1, 28.2, 33.1, 34.1, epl.1, epl.2, nts.1n “Mission Accomplished” ceremony of, 14.1, 15.1, 23.1, 18.1 nicknames given by, prl.1, 1.1, 2.1 North Korean policy of, prl.1, 5.1, 5.2, 10.1, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, 13.1, 16.1, 17.1, 21.1, 22.1, 23.1, 25.1, 28.1, 30.1, 31.1, 31.2, 32.1, 32.2, 33.1, 33.2, 33.3, 34.1, 34.2, 34.3, 36.1, 37.1, epl.1 in oil industry, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2 Ownership Society agenda of, 18.1, 21.1, 32.1, epl.1 Palestinian state supported by, 11.1, 27.1, 33.1, 34.1 personality of, prl.1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 6.1, 7.1, 8.1, 9.1, 10.1, 15.1, 18.1, 25.1, 26.1, 26.2, 30.1, 32.1, 36.1, 37.1 pets owned by, 6.1, 7.1, 8.1, 9.1, 14.1, 17.1, 31.1 Powell’s relationship with, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 13.1, 13.2, 14.1, 16.1, 18.1, 20.1, 20.2 preemptive war doctrine of, prl.1, 11.1, 12.1, 18.1, 20.1, 32.1 prescription drugs program of, 16.1, 21.1, 22.1, epl.1, epl.2 in presidential debates, 4.1, 18.1, 18.2 Putin’s relationship with, 6.1, 7.1, 8.1, 10.1, 10.2, 11.1, 11.2, 13.1, 21.1, 21.2, 27.1, 27.2, 32.1, 33.1, 34.1, 35.1, 37.1, nts.1n reading by, 4.1, 8.1, 9.1, 11.1, 27.1, 28.1, 29.1, 35.1 religious convictions of, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 4.1, 4.2, 6.1, 7.1, 8.1, 11.1, 17.1, 19.1, 25.1, 26.1, 31.1 as Republican leader, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 10.1, 12.1, 12.2, 13.1, 15.1, 17.1, 17.2, 18.1, 21.1, 23.1, 23.2, 25.1, 26.1, 27.1, 28.1, 28.2, 28.3, 28.4, 29.1, 29.2, 30.1, 30.2, 31.1, 32.1, 33.1, 33.2, 34.1, 34.2, 35.1, 35.2, 35.3, 36.1 reputation of, prl.1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 8.1, 9.1, 12.1, 12.2, 16.1, 18.1, 21.1, 23.1, 24.1, 25.1, 28.1, 31.1, 31.2, 35.1, 37.1, 37.2, epl.1, epl.2 Rice’s relationship with, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 6.1, 8.1, 10.1, 11.1, 11.2, 13.1, 13.2, 14.1, 16.1, 20.1, 20.2, 21.1, 26.1, 27.1, 27.2, 28.1, 29.1, 29.2, 30.1, 30.2, 30.3, 31.1, 31.2, 33.1, 33.2, 34.1, 35.1, 35.2 Rumsfeld’s relationship with, 6.1, 10.1, 12.1, 13.1, 16.1, 18.1, 18.2, 20.1, 20.2, 25.1, 25.2, 26.1, 26.2, 27.1, 27.2, 28.1, 28.2, 28.3, 28.4, 29.1, 29.2, 29.3, 30.1, 31.1 running by, 7.1, 8.1, 10.1, 11.1, 13.1, 16.1 at St.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
by Jane Mayer
Published 19 Jan 2016

Marco Rubio, a rising Republican star from Florida, for instance, who had defeated a moderate in the 2010 Republican Senate primary with the help of forty-nine donors from the June 2010 Koch seminar, soon proclaimed, “This idea—that our problems were caused by a government that was too small—it’s just not true. In fact, a major cause of our recent downturn was a housing crisis created by reckless government policies.” Against this backdrop, on April 15, 2011, Ryan’s budget plan, now packaged as “The Path to Prosperity,” came up for a vote in the House of Representatives. In the past, its prospects had been uncertain at best. Not just Democrats but many Republicans had deemed previous versions too harsh.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
by Geoffrey West
Published 15 May 2017

Many writers have picked up this theme, including the urban economists Edward Glaeser and Richard Florida, but none has been as forthright and bold as Benjamin Barber in his book with the provocative title If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities.5 These are indicative of a rising consciousness that cities are where the action is—where challenges have to be addressed in real time and where governance seems to work, at least relative to the increasing dysfunctionality of the nation-state. 3. AN ASIDE: A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE OF GARDEN CITIES AND NEW TOWN Following the destruction wrought by the Second World War in which millions of houses were destroyed, the socialist government in Britain faced a mammoth housing crisis. The majority of these damaged houses were in working-class areas, so this greatly accelerated the ongoing processes of “urban development” and “slum clearance” that had already been on the agenda before the war, and in which Ebenezer Howard’s idea of garden cities was a classic visionary example.

Turing's Cathedral
by George Dyson
Published 6 Mar 2012

She would give you what you needed: moral support, good advice, and just the warmth of her character. And if you had practical problems: a car that needed fixing, or a rat in the basement, or a problem to get the coal furnace either to work at all or not to work too much, Julian would always be able to fix it. Those were wonderful years.”15 With the housing crisis solved, and the computer building completed, the engineers could start building the computer—along with its power supplies and cooling equipment—rather than working on one component at a time. The computer building was adjacent to the housing project, and, says Rubinoff, “you could get to work and get home to lunch and back to work in less time than you can do it anywhere else.”

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
by George Packer
Published 4 Mar 2014

They warned him not to buy real estate until 2009 at the earliest. Biden was running for president again, and Connaughton joined the campaign and traveled to Des Moines, where a city councilman told him that one of the top three issues in Iowa was foreclosures. Connaughton relayed the message to a Biden staffer: the growing housing crisis should be a focus. (In the seventies, when Biden was still a freshman senator, Hubert Humphrey advised him, “You have to pick an issue that becomes yours. You should become Mr. Housing. Housing is the future.”) The idea went nowhere. The candidates weren’t talking about foreclosures. Connaughton ignored the warnings, too.

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?
by Alan Weisman
Published 23 Sep 2013

“Synod Working Document Seeks Ways to Promote Justice, Peace in Africa.” Catholic News Service, March 19, 2009. Grandoni, Dino. “98% of Catholic Women Have Used Contraception the Church Opposes.” Atlantic Wire, February 10, 2012. Gumbel, Andrew. “Italian Men Cling to Mamma; Unemployment and a Housing Crisis Force Males to Live at Home in Their Thirties.” The World section, Independent (UK), December 15, 1996. Hebblethwaite, Peter. “Science, Magisterium at Odds: Pontifical Academy Emphasizes Need for Global Population Control—Pontifical Academy of Sciences.” National Catholic Reporter, July 15, 1994.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 26 Feb 2019

Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales, “Long Term Persistence,” Journal of the European Economic Association 14, no. 6 (December 1, 2016): 1401–36. 3. Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara, “Ethnic Diversity and Economic Performance,” Journal of Economic Literature 43, no. 3 (September 2005): 762–800. 4. Henry Grabar, “California Bill Would Allow Unrestricted Housing by Transit, Solve State Housing Crisis,” Slate, January 05, 2018, https://slate.com/business/2018/01/california-bill-sb827-residential-zoning-transit-awesome.html. 5. “Internet/Broadband Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Center (website), accessed August 07, 2018, http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/internet-broadband. 6. “Archive: Internet Access and Use Statistics—Households and Individuals,” eurostat (website), https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
by Greta Thunberg
Published 14 Feb 2023

Without such insurance, most homebuyers can’t get a mortgage, and in those fire and flood zones where insurance rates skyrocket, many owners will try to sell – but to whom, and who will finance the purchase? This would set the stage for panic selling and a housing market collapse more serious than the crisis of 2008 because it would not be a one-off event. As we saw in 2008, a housing crisis can quickly morph into a systemic financial crisis because banks own most of the value, and thus the risk, in housing and commercial real estate. Our global economy is a tightly coupled system – that’s the message of 2008 and, more recently, of the supply-chain disruptions resulting from the pandemic.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

See also leverage market capitalization, 252, 257, 259, 263, 264–267, 353, 397 marketing, 40, 41–43 market makers, 289–290, 327–328, 360 Markopolos, Harry, 350–351 Markowitz, Harry, 27, 48 Marshall, Alfred, 207 martingales, 17–19, 21, 27 Martin Marietta Corporation, 13, 14, 15 Marx, Karl, 211, 219 Marxism, 172, 219 Maslach, Christina, 347 mass extinction, 201, 233, 242 Matrix, The (film), 313 Mauritius, 149 maximum drawdown (MDD), 270 May, Robert M., 366 “May Day” (1975), 281–282 Maynard Smith, John, 169, 172 Mayr, Ernst, 141, 146, 152 Mazen, Henrietta, 127 MBIA, Inc., 300 McAuliffe, Christa, 12 McCulloch, Warren, 131 McDonald, Lawrence, 317 McClure, Samuel, 99 McCrea, Sean M., 65 McGuire, Joseph T., 100 McQuown, John A., 263 Mean Genes (Burnham), 337 mean reversion, 286, 292, 324–326 Medallion Fund, 6 “ME HURT YOU” narrative, 339–340, 341, 343, 345 Melanesia, 151–152 memory, 130 merger arbitrage, 267 Meriwether, John, 241 Merrill Lynch, 242–243, 306, 308, 309 Merton, Robert C., 27, 127, 266, 356–357; financial engineering innovations by, 211; housing crisis viewed by, 322–323; at Long-Term Capital Management, 241; network contagion viewed by, 376–377; Nobel Prize awarded to, 97. See also Black-Scholes/Merton option pricing formula mescaline, 79 meta-analysis, 100 Metallgesellschaft, 320, 321 method acting, 105 Microsoft Windows, 372 Milgram, Stanley, 346, 347 Mill, John Stuart, 211 Milner, Peter, 87 Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research, 159 Minsky, Marvin, 132–133 mirror neuron, 110, 157 miscarriages, 152 Mischel, Walter, 120–121 mobile banking, 356 money market funds, 228, 300, 301, 409 Moffitt, Terrie, 160 Montague, Read, 97, 98 Moore, Gordon, 356 Moore, Jesse W., 12 Moore’s Law, 356, 358, 385 Morgan Stanley, 235–237, 240, 284, 286, 307, 308 Morgenbesser, Sidney, 46–47 morphine, 89, 90 Morse, Adair, 353–354 mortgages, 7, 290, 292, 293, 297–329, 376, 377, 410 Morton Thiokol Inc., 13–16 Mossin, Jan, 263 motor control, 153 MSCI World Index, 251 Mulherin, J.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski
Published 24 Jun 2013

Some economists who had been strong advocates of behavioral approaches prior to the crash, such as Robert Shiller and Robert Frank, leaped in with op-eds essentially blaming the entire crisis on native cognitive weaknesses of market participants.37 This line became entrenched with the appearance of George Akerlof and Robert Shiller’s Animal Spirits: displaying an utter contempt for the history of economic thought, they “reduced” the message of Keynes’s General Theory to the proposition that people get a little irrational from time to time, and thus push the system away from full neoclassical general equilibrium.38 They wrote: The idea that economic crises, like the current financial and housing crisis, are mainly caused by changing thought patterns goes against standard economic thinking. But current crisis bears witness to the role of such changes in thinking. It was caused precisely by our changing confidence, temptations, envy, resentment, and illusions . . . In Keynes’ view these animal spirits are the main cause for why the economy fluctuates the way it does.

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping
by Roger Faligot
Published 30 Jun 2019

While the mama-san, the matriarch who ran the bar, served us another shot of whisky from Kodama’s personal bottle, he told me the tragic saga of a Chinese man who had fallen deeply in love. His tale was embellished with multiple details from reliable sources that I was subsequently able to cross-check, point by point. For 4,000 yen, Xu had rented a small studio in the love hotel for a few hours, to engage in a bout of phoenix and dragon. Given the housing crisis and the small size of Tokyo apartments, it is common for married couples to use love hotels to have some intimate time together, away from the rest of the family. Naturally, I am summarizing. After the autopsy, the background of 58-year-old Xu Yuanhai, director of the Sino-Japanese Friendship Association, left investigators with some serious reservations about Madame Liu’s version of events—the pillow talk on this particular futon seemed to have been of a particular flavour: the spice of an espionage case.

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong
Published 6 Apr 2020

So, I figured, there was a $500 billion financial loss from the housing crash that holders of financial securities would have to bear, one way or another. But, the dot-com crash involved an even greater financial loss—and the dot-com crash only pushed unemployment up by about 1.5 percent. The housing crisis, I concluded, was unlikely to have large effects on the economy. But the market reasoned differently. As a large swath of those with money who move financial markets saw things, there were $500 billion in known losses somewhere. But maybe that was just the tip of an iceberg. Maybe the trained professionals who had told us that owning tranches of millions of houses between Los Angeles and Albuquerque was safe had lied, or were profoundly misinformed.

The Rough Guide to Florence & the Best of Tuscany
by Tim Jepson , Jonathan Buckley and Rough Guides
Published 2 Mar 2009

Yet during this short period a radical transformation of Florence was begun, following a masterplan conceived by engineer-architect Giuseppe Poggi (1811–1901). So great was the impact of Poggi’s scheme that the present-day appearance of Florence owes more to him than to any architect of the Renaissance. The housing crisis Aerial view of Piazza Beccaria  Porta San Gallo, Piazza della Libertà  In 1865 Florence had a population of 150,000, so an influx of twenty thousand government employees plus their families created an immediate strain. Finding offices wasn’t a problem – while the parliament moved into the Palazzo Vecchio, the ministries requisitioned buildings such as the Uffizi and the Palazzo Medici.

Too big to fail: the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system from crisis--and themselves
by Andrew Ross Sorkin
Published 15 Oct 2009

Rattling off reams of housing data, Greenspan described how he considered the crisis in the markets to be a once-in-a-hundred-year event and how the government might have to take some extraordinary measures to stabilize it. The former Fed chairman had long been a critic of Fannie and Freddie but now realized that they needed to be shored up. He did have one suggestion about the housing crisis, but it was a rhetorical flourish befitting his supply-and-demand mind-set: He suggested that there was too much housing supply and that the only real way to really fix the problem would be for the government to buy up vacant homes and burn them. After the call, Paulson, with a laugh, told his staff: “That’s not a bad idea.

Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel
by Max Blumenthal
Published 27 Nov 2012

While the process of gentrification kept tensions at a constantly elevated state in Jaffa, a reverse migration of fundamentalist settlers to Israel’s coastal heart threatened to set the neighborhood of Ajami alight. In 2010, the Israeli Supreme Court authorized a group of religious nationalist Jewish settlers from the West Bank to build a Jews-only settlement in the heart of Ajami, on a plot of land originally promised by the state to the local Arab population to help ameliorate its housing crisis. The new settlement was a central cog in the radical right’s “building in the hearts” campaign, which aimed to create a bloc of settlements in the center of mixed Arab-Jewish cities that would be impossible to dislodge, and to use them as citadels for the incitement of ethnic conflict. Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, a West Bank rabbi who planned to lead the Jaffa settlement’s yeshiva, said that if settlers “would send one-tenth of their residents to large cities . . . this one-tenth of people imbued with faith will establish a community, a yeshiva, and a center amid the Jewish populace, which will create a different reality than we know today.”

Lonely Planet Washington, Oregon & the Pacific Northwest
by Lonely Planet

Rainbow flags and emblems are posted in the windows and yards of countless businesses and residences. Unlike most progressive cities with high LGBTQ+ populations, Portland lacks a definitive ‘gayborhood.’ The collective, speculative sentiment as to why is that it’s already a liberal bubble, or that everyone in town is a little bit gay. Undoubtedly, gentrification and the city’s housing crisis play a larger part in this. But no matter where you find yourself, it is generally safe – and even empowering – to exist in your skin here. However, despite an embrace of LGBTQ+ people and culture by Portland’s wider population, bias crimes (especially toward transgender and nonbinary people) do still occur.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
by Adam Tooze
Published 31 Jul 2018

The median wealth of the Hispanic population, which had participated particularly actively in the housing boom, plunged by 86.3 percent between 2007 and 2010.43 The median African American household saw virtually its entire housing wealth wiped out, and African American home owners were twice as likely to suffer foreclosure as white borrowers.44 It did not produce the memorable imagery of the 1930s Dust Bowl, but the housing crisis that began in 2007 forced the largest mass movement of people in the United States since the Great Depression. And as minority home ownership collapsed, the result was resegregation along racial lines.45 With households suffering, in America’s economic downswing of 2008 it was consumption that led the way.46 As demand fell, so did production and employment.

A History of Modern Britain
by Andrew Marr
Published 2 Jul 2009

Architects are as keen on high density as ever but now want to devise street patterns, squares and low-rise homes on a human scale. By the early eighties Britain’s housing shortage was, in general terms, solved by the concrete boom: some 440,000 homes were created in tower blocks alone. But migration and the break-up of families since then have created a new housing crisis and once again skyscrapers are coming back in fashion. They are different now. From Manchester’s new forty-seven-storey Beetham Tower, with its queasy-making overhang, to plans for a 66-storey shard-shaped London Bridge Tower, these are chic palaces for the urban rich, not upended slums. They are as close to Harry Watton’s off-the-peg blocks as the drug habits of supermodels are to the ravages of heroin in prison.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016

Burns, George. (1988). Gracie: A Love Story. New York: Putnam. Bushway, Shawn D., and Stoll, Michael A., and Weiman, David, eds. (2007). Barriers to Reentry? The Labor Market for Released Prisoners in Post-Industrial America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Butkiewicz, James L. (2009). “Fixing the Housing Crisis,” Forbes, April 30, p. 26. Caillau, Robert. (1995). “A Little History of the World Wide Web,” World Wide Web Consortium, www.w3.org/History.html. Cain, Louis P., and Paterson, Donald G. (2013). “Children of Eve: Population and Well-being in History,” Population and Development Review 39, no. 3.

Northern California Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

It also serves tapas and good burgers (mains $11 to $22). 7Shopping Cheese CentralFOOD ( GOOGLE MAP ; www.cheesecentrallodi.com; 11 N School St; h10am-6pm Mon-Sat, 1- 5pm Sun) Ask Cindy the cheesemonger for thoughtful pairings with Lodi wines. If you want to make a weekend out of Lodi’s wine region, try one of the cooking classes. Stockton Stockton has had its share of ups and downs – including recent challenges with the housing crisis and large civic debt – but the downtown and waterfront redevelopment is one of the valley’s more promising grassroots efforts. In the summer, when festivals take over the Weber Point Events Center, Stockton makes for a fun detour. The city has an interesting past that is just under the surface of its checkered facades.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
Published 18 Dec 2007

Those who knew him from Berkeley understood that this was a man with a remarkable flair for drawing others into his orbit. And those, like Dorothy McKibbin, who met him for the first time in New Mexico invariably found themselves eager to please him. “He made you do the impossible, ” McKibbin recalled. One day, she was called from Santa Fe to the Site and asked if she would help to alleviate the ongoing housing crisis by taking over a lodge ten miles up the road and turning it into housing for a hundred employees. McKibbin resisted. “Well,” she protested, “I’ve never run a hotel before.” At that moment the door of Oppenheimer’s office opened and he stuck his head out and said, “Dorothy, I wish you would.” He then withdrew his head and closed the door.

Southwest USA Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Big-name entertainers, like Frank Sinatra, Liberace and Sammy Davis Jr, arrived on stage at the same time as topless French showgirls in the ‘Fabulous Fifties.’ Since then, Sin City continues to exist chiefly to satisfy the desires of visitors. Once North America’s fastest-growing metropolitan area, the recent housing crisis hit residents here especially hard. Now among the glittering lights of the Strip, you’ll spot unlit, vacant condominium towers that speak to a need for economic revival. Yet Vegas has always been a boom or bust kind of place, and if history is any judge, the city will double-down and resume its winning streak in no time.

The Rough Guide to England
by Rough Guides
Published 29 Mar 2018

The UK’s first public building built in the Modernist style was the sleek, streamlined De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, designed by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff in 1935, and described by Mendelsohn as a “horizontal skyscraper”. 1945 to 1980 The German bombing of World War II created a national housing crisis of immense dimensions: by 1945, nearly a third of the nation’s houses had been destroyed or damaged. City planners up and down the country set about the problem with vim and gusto – but, with one or two notable exceptions, they got the solutions very wrong. Terraced houses were associated with slums, so they were knocked down by the thousand, but all too often they were replaced by tower blocks in a pale imitation of the Modernist style proclaimed by the likes of Corbusier: Modernism had gained a foothold in England after London’s 1951 Festival of Britain.

Andrew Carnegie
by David Nasaw
Published 15 Nov 2007

Carnegie’s response was to integrate production forward—into finished steel. With Frick out of the way, Phipps in full retirement, and Tom Carnegie long gone, there was no one left to restrain Andrew’s adventurism. “Urge prompt action, essential,” he cabled Schwab on July 7 from the telegraph office he had set up at the Skibo lodge house. “Crisis has arrived, only one policy open; start at once hoop, rod, wire, nail mills, no half way about last two. Extend coal and coke roads, announce these; also tubes. Prevent others building…. Never been time when more prompt action essential, indeed absolutely necessary to maintain property…. Have no fear as to result, victory certain.

Fodor's California 2014
by Fodor's
Published 5 Nov 2013

Settlers of Swiss and German descent, moving west from Illinois and Nebraska, populated the area in 1886, and most residents made their living as farmers, growing alfalfa, pears, and apples. After World War II, with the creation of Edwards Air Force Base and U.S. Air Force Plant 42, the region evolved into a center for aerospace and defense activities, with contractors such as McDonnell Douglas, Rockwell, Northrop, and Lockheed establishing factories here. Until the housing crisis and recent recession struck, Palmdale was one of Southern California’s fastest-growing cities. Getting Here and Around From the Los Angeles basin take Highway 14 to get to Palmdale. From the east, arrive via the Pearblossom Highway (Highway 18/138). Regional Metrolink trains serve the area from Los Angeles.

Frommer's California 2009
by Matthew Poole , Harry Basch , Mark Hiss and Erika Lenkert
Published 2 Jan 2009

If you’re out on a F riday night and looking for something that ’s off the straight-laced path, head to the Cinch (& 415/776-4162) for its weekly Charlie Horse drag show. On weekends, check out Harry Denton’s Starlight Room ( & 415/ 395-8595): Their Sunday’s a Drag brunch performance is fit for a queen. NORTHERN C ALIFORNIA WINE COUNTRY While the r est of the countr y struggles with unstable economic times and a housing crisis, the Wine Country seems to remain unscathed, at least to the visitor. Sure, you can scoop up a house in do wntown Napa at a fraction of the cost of pr evious years, but the multimillion-dollar homes ar e still as hot as ev er, as ar e the upscale r estaurants, luxur y hotels, and r eservations-only wineries.