Articles

BY MICHAEL HUDSON Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair. The crashes of Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and the related bank insolvencies are much more serious than the 2008-09 crash. The problem at that time was crooked banks making bad mortgage loans. Debtors were unable to pay and were defaulting, and it turned out that the real estate that they had pledged as collateral was fraudulently overvalued, “mark-to-fantasy” junk mortgages made by false valuations of the property’s actual market price and the borrower’s income. Banks sold these loans to institutional buyers such as pension funds, German savings banks and other gullible buyers who had drunk Alan Greenspan’s neoliberal Kool Aid, believing that banks would not cheat them. Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) investm...

BY DAVID SCHULTZ Homeless encampment, Portland waterfront. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. If American cities died after World War II only to see their rebirth with New Urbanism in the 1990s, the covid pandemic has dealt a second death to cities that we are only beginning to see. The United States started as a rural nation.  Rapid urbanization occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as immigration, the Great Migration of former slaves from the South,  and America’s second industrialization around steel, cars, and other forms of manufacturing-built metropolises from New York to San Francisco. But post WWII the urbanization of America cooled.  Outdated dirty factories, overcrowded, cheap land, and the emergence of cars as well as federal money ...