Silicon Valley banks offer tech giants' new hires 100% mortgages on 24 hours'...
What to do if you've just signed up to work in one of the most expensive real-estate markets in the world, with almost all of your net worth tied up in illiquid shares in your employer's company? Just...
View ArticleBurying the past in glass coffins: Victoria & Albert museum bans sketching in...
London's Victoria and Albert Museum, one of the world's great museums devoted to material culture and design, has joined a long line of museums who've allowed the owners of loaned items for temporary...
View ArticleResidents of Silicon Valley homeless camp clear 48,000 Lbs of garbage from...
Silicon Valley's legendary housing crisis -- now several decades old -- has led to the establishment of semi-permanent homeless camps on public lands, including a notable camp on the banks of Coyote...
View ArticleAirport lounges will let anyone in, provided you can fake a QR code
When computer security expert and hardcore traveller Przemek Jaroszewski found that he couldn't enter an airline lounge in Warsaw because the automated reader mistakenly rejected his boarding card, he...
View ArticleForeign influence: how a Chinese businessman funneled $1.3M to Jeb Bush's...
Gordon Tang and Huaidan Chen -- Chinese nationals who live in Singapore -- own a global property speculation and development empire whose US branch is called American Pacific International Capital...
View ArticleMonopoly power and the decline of small business: big business vs democracy,...
In the 15 years between 1997 and 2012: 72,000 small US manufacturers shut down; as did 108,000 local retailers and 13,000 community banks (fully half of America's complement of small banks!). The...
View ArticleScalpers drive Harry Potter play prices from £140 to £8,327
What do you get when you combine fantastic wealth-inequality with winner-take-all entertainment economics and high-speed trading algorithms? The Viagogo marketplace, where botmasters who've harvested...
View ArticleWorst of McMansions: architectural criticism of inequality's most tangible...
Between the Reagan years and the crash of 2008, developers absorbed the skyrocketing wealth of the 1% with monuments to bad taste and ostentation: the McMansion. (more…)
View ArticleHedge fund paid terminally ill people to sign up for "death puts"
A "death put" on a certificate of deposit means that the bond matures immediately upon the bearer's death, rather than when its term runs out: they're used as a form of life-insurance, cushioning the...
View ArticleBrigadier General: TPP is a threat to America's national security
Retired Brigadier General John Adams served for 30 years, including a stint as a military intelligence officer: in an op-ed in The Hill, he says that while he supports trade deals, the secretive Trans...
View ArticleSupport the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's action against predatory...
The predatory payday lending industry -- "'legalized loan sharks collect 75 percent of their fees from people stuck in more than 10 loans a year by charging 300 percent APR" -- is lobbying hard to...
View ArticleBillionaire tech investors back ballot initiative to purge homeless people...
Sequoia Capital Chairman Michael Moritz and angel investor Ron Conway have donated to San Francisco's Proposition Q: if passed, "the city would give residents of tent encampments 24 hours’ notice to...
View ArticleBernie Sanders: Trump just used your taxes to reward Carrier for offshoring...
Last February, Carrier announced that it was offshoring its US air-conditioner manufacturing jobs to Mexico, despite having made a $7.6B profit that year, despite having received more than $6B in US...
View ArticlePortland proposes a special tax on companies where CEOs make 100X more than...
Environmental lawyer-turned-Portland City Commissioner Steve Novick has a cool use for the new SEC rules requiring companies to disclose executive pay starting in 2017: he's going to impose special...
View ArticleFolding Beijing: the 2016 Hugo-winning novelette about the obsolescence of...
Belatedly, I've finally read Hao Jingfang's novelette "Folding Beijing," which won the Hugo Award last summer in Kansas City: it's a story about a future in which the great cities continue to be...
View ArticleLawmakers' support for bank bailouts was correlated with their individual...
In The Personal Wealth Interests of Politicians and the Stabilization of Financial Markets, researchers from the London Business School and Tillburg University demonstrate the likelihood of US members...
View ArticleThe World Wealth and Income Database: data and visualizations from 110...
Thomas "Capital in the 21st Century" Piketty endorses the World Wealth and Income Database, where you will find "open and convenient access to the most extensive available database on the historical...
View Article98% of Bitcoin trading volume over the past six months was in Chinese Renminbi
In case you were wondering why Bitcoin experienced a crazy spike recently: China's economy is a hyperinflated bubble, poised to burst and the Chinese central bank is depreciating the Renminbi -- so...
View ArticleReminder: if you have one penny, your net worth is equal to the combined...
Every year, Oxfam publishes a headline number about global wealth inequality that takes this form: "The richest X people own more than the poorest Y billion people on Earth" (some examples: 2014,...
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