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38 thoughts on “Jeffrey Sachs From the Heart”

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  • April Showers

    US central bank keeps buying bonds to boost economy

    The US Federal Reserve has kept its $85bn-a-month bond buying in place, in an effort to keep borrowing costs low and bolster the economy.

    The central bank’s rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee also kept its key interest rate at zero to 0.25%.

    It said unemployment remained too high for a change in its quantitative easing policy.

    BBC website

  • April Showers

    We will soon be paying the bankers to hold our money, that’s if we have any.

    ECB cuts eurozone interest rate to new record low of 0.5%

    Eurozone unemployment at record high
    Spain’s economy continues to shrink

    The European Central Bank (ECB) has cut its benchmark interest rate to a new record low amid ongoing worries about the eurozone’s economic health.

    The widely-expected cut to 0.50% from 0.75% is the first in 10 months.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22369765

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella)

    @ April Showers :

    You’ve just told us something we’ve already heard for ourselves on the msm.

    So what is your point?

    Are you signalling that you think this is a bad thing, a good thing, or are you just making sure we hadn’t missed it?

  • Amadeus Minkowski

    Craig, thanks for posting this. I only recently came accross Jeffrey Sachs after a casual reference to him in the “Keiser Report”. I’m mighty impressed by him, and like you, his inherent moral compass has guided him to reject corrupt power, and rather to work towards a Just Power, where LIfe and Love and Compassion abide.

    For those unfamiliar with the Kaiser Report, and interested in the corrupting power of “Big Money” in the World, I’m not eware of any better, or more humorous, place to look. The recent Thatcher edition is particularly good:

    http://rt.com/shows/keiser-report/keiser-report-rpisode-430-626/

  • me in us

    Hi Craig — Sachs’ talk was given at a 4/17/13 conference at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, and an excerpt (the last part of your YouTube) was recorded by a guy (Bill Still) listening on his iPhone and immediately posted on YouTube and went kinda viral. Naked Capitalism on 4/19/13 has full transcript of that, and this is the best part, to my ears:

    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/04/jeffrey-sachs-calls-out-wall-street-criminality-and-pathological-greed.html

    Jeffrey Sachs: I believe we have a crisis of values that is extremely deep, because the regulations and the legal structures need reform. But I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now. I’m going to put it very bluntly. I regard the moral environment as pathological. And I’m talking about the human interactions that I have. I’ve not seen anything like this, not felt it so palpably. These people are out to make billions of dollars and nothing should stop them from that. They have no responsibility to pay taxes. They have no responsibility to their clients. They have no responsibility to people, counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control, you know, in a quite literal sense. And they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent, and they have a docile president, a docile White House, and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can’t find its voice. It’s terrified of these companies.

    If you look at the campaign contributions, which I happened to do yesterday for another purpose, the financial markets are the number one campaign contributors in the U.S. system now. We have a corrupt politics to the core, I’m afraid to say, and no party is – I mean there’s – if not both parties are up to their necks in this. This has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. It really doesn’t have anything to do with right wing or left wing, by the way. The corruption is, as far as I can see, everywhere. But what it’s led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning, and you feel it on the individual level right now, and it’s very, very unhealthy.

    I have waited for four years, five years now, to see one figure on Wall Street speak in a moral language, and I’ve not seen it once. And that is shocking to me. And if they won’t, I’ve waited for a judge, for our president, for somebody, and it hasn’t happened. And by the way it’s not going to happen anytime soon it seems.

    In comments at NC, see David Graeber’s account of what happened afterwards:

    David Graeber says:
    April 19, 2013 at 12:47 pm

    I was at that conference. Sach’s talk was greeted with loud applause. Later some guy from the CATO institute got up and condemned him for using inappropriate language and echoing a “Communist-style” morality that assumes all hedge fund managers must be crooks by definition. Exactly one person applauded. Then the IMF economist on the stage (Michael Kumhof) said: “actually, not only agree with Sachs, I think he doesn’t go far enough…”

    At the time, shorter excerpt transcripts were also posted on Huffington Post and Jesse’s Cafe Americain. Now a couple of weeks later (4/29/13) the full YouTube video that you have embedded here is up, so we can hear the beginning of what Sachs said before Still turned on his iPhone audio recorder. As I write this, the iPhone one has been seen (heard) 47,326 times, and the new video one above has been seen 15,394 times. Lots of interest.

  • April Showers

    More on that HMRC deal with Goldman Sachs. Note their QC on the NAO – “James Eadie QC, appearing for HMRC, said UK Uncut was using the courts “to pursue politics by other means”. He said the Goldman Sachs deal had been examined in detail by the National Audit Office and found to be neither irrational nor improper.”

    Tax chief waived £20m owed by bank ‘for fear of embarrassing chancellor’
    Dave Hartnett overruled legal advice and HMRC guidelines to settle dispute with Goldman Sachs, high court hears
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/may/02/tax-chief-bank-goldman-sachs

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