Finance Archives - Public Seminar

Economy

Tracing financial capital—from J. P. Morgan to BlackRock

June 25, 2024 • by Scott Aquanno, Stephen Maher and Anna Pick

Democratizing the state means deepening public control over the Fed and other macroeconomic institutions, to run finance as a public utility....

Capitalism

Private equity and the rise of permanent capital

September 20, 2021 • by Andrew Moon and Janet Roitman

The consensus is that the road to economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic is K-shaped: certain sectors and populations will thrive while others stagnate or decline. Outsized online retailers and digital infrastructure providers, like Amazon, have experienced boom times, while many Main Street small businesses have gone bust. Those with a stake ...

Education

Student Loans: The Origins of a Racket

The road to student loan hell was paved with good intentions

February 18, 2021 • by Devan Lindey

"Education can lift people and propel the country’s economy, but it can’t do that if it leaves many of its beneficiaries weighed down by life-altering amounts of debt." - Devon Lindey ...

Capitalism

As New York City Rebuilds, Business Can Be Part of the Solution

Higher taxes are necessary, but who will have the political courage to make it happen?

October 1, 2020 • by Kim Phillips-Fein

Early in September, more than 160 executives from companies like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, the white-shoe corporate law firm Skadden Arps, and a host of real estate developers and financial firms sent a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio. They expressed their fear that “deteriorating conditions” in the city might slow ...

As New York City Rebuilds, Business Can Be Part of the Solution

Economy

Where Is the Risk in the COVID Economy?

A look at shadow banking

July 30, 2020 • by Janet Roitman and Andrew Moon

We are witnessing a public bailout of the private sector that dwarfs the bailout response to the 2007–2008 Great Recession. Compared to the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) implemented in 2008, today’s mobilization of public funds through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act amounts to ...

Finance

#Unis4all: An Open Letter to the U.S. Higher Education Community

Universities can immediately bypass feckless state and federal legislatures and finance themselves directly with “Unis” supported by the Federal Reserve.

May 22, 2020 • by Scott Ferguson, William Saas, Maxximilian Seijo and Benjamin Wilson

In truth, however, the collapse of the American university is far from inevitable. As the present health emergency suggests, moreover, it will take more than business-as-usual to remediate its long-standing structural inequalities and injustices, according to an emerging minority of educators, staff, and students. In our capacity as a 501(c)(3) dedicated to bringing accurate and ...

#Unis4all: An Open Letter to the U.S. Higher Education Community

Capitalism

Of Viruses, Distressed Sales, and Stocks’ “Rightful Owners”

Why the current US retirement system and safety net need dynamite

April 23, 2020 • by William Bernstein

As legendary investor Benjamin Graham put it less than a year later in the pages of Forbes, "Those with enterprise haven't the money, and those with money haven't the enterprise, to buy stocks when they are cheap." In other words, those with the will to invest—the “plungers”—had long since run ...

Of Viruses, Distressed Sales, and Stocks’ “Rightful Owners”

Economy

The COVID-19 Crisis Demands Bold, Progressive Economic Ideas

A Call for Papers

April 2, 2020 • by Teresa Ghilarducci, Richard McGahey and Paulo L. dos Santos

This pandemic poses a series of unprecedented economic challenges. It compromises our ability to engage in productive and commercial activities that require close contact between groups of people. Because fighting the disease requires non-essential workers to stay at home, it threatens to trigger a catastrophic recession, if not depression, as entire ...

The COVID-19 Crisis Demands Bold, Progressive Economic Ideas

“Embeddedness” in the Federal Reserve Comic Books

An Inquiry into the Ideological Constructions of the Social

July 23, 2019 • by John P. Antonacci

Three such comic books can currently be accessed on the Federal Reserve’s website. The Fed’s website offers us a short introduction to the series, claiming that “The New York Fed’s Educational Comic Book series teaches students about basic economic principles and the Federal Reserve’s role in the financial system.” Entitled The Story ...

Feature

Machine Learning and the Project of Autonomy

Technology in the philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis

September 20, 2018 • by Conrad Moriarty-Cole

“Every society creates its own world, internal and external, and of this creation technique is neither an instrument nor a cause; it is a dimension… an everywhere dense sub-set. For it is present at every point at which the society constitutes what is, for it, the real-rational.” Cornelius Castoriadis, Crossroads in the ...

Machine Learning and the Project of Autonomy

Feature

Crafting, the 2008 Financial Crisis, and the Marshmallow Test

Past Present Episode 146

September 18, 2018 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Niki, Natalia, and Neil discuss the new reality show Making It, the 2008 financial collapse ten years later, and the death of Walter Mischel, the social psychologist who created the “marshmallow test.” Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Making It, a crafting competition show hosted ...

Crafting, the 2008 Financial Crisis, and the Marshmallow Test

Feature

Playground Ambiguities

Unequal childhoods and imaginative play in an era of financialized capitalism

July 20, 2018 • by Rachel Rosen

Rising up from a grassy knoll on the edge of the City of London, the naturalist wooden playground structure at Tower Hill Garden both blends into the park space and jolts the senses, lying as it does at the core of global finance. In dominant social imaginaries, nothing and no one could ...