Daily digest – The ballad of the cash-rich banks

What you need to know to navigate today’s most critical debates.

In Cautious Times, Banks Flooded With Cash(NYT)
Get your tiny violins ready: unlike pretty much everyone else, banks have the awful conundrum of piles of money and few mortgage-backed securities to blow it on.

Work continues on European crisis plan (WaPo)
Even with all that cash, it remains to be seen if banks will agree to take some losses on Greek debt in exchange for not crashing the world economy a second time.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the 99 Percent (TNR)
Mark Schmitt writes that while the framing may gloss over some important intricacies, it really has become most of us against a very few.

Doomed to Fail (TAP)
The first go at helping underwater homeowners had only slightly more success than Enron’s accounting skills. Robert Kuttner explains why this round may not be much better.

The Recession in Pink and Blue (NYT)
While everyone got hung up on the mancession, Nancy Folbre points out that even if women had a slightly lower unemployment rate at the beginning, mothers experience the recession much harder than fathers.

Panetta’s Pentagon, Without the Blank Check (NYT)
Now that our troops are out of Iraq, his next target will be lawmakers who unpatriotically suggest there is room to slim down in a $664 billion budget.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Homeless in America (TomDispatch)
Among lessons like “dirty hippies don’t count” and “people don’t like drum circles,” Occupy Wall Street is now learning firsthand how our country has made homelessness a high offense.

How Obama’s jobs policies would really impact the rich (hint: not much) (WaPo)
It’s no surprise that we have such high unemployment — those ‘job creators’ who will be destroyed by Obama’s surtax are hard to find.

Lobbying Blitz Barrages Budget-Cutting Super Committee (Mother Jones)
Lobbyists have managed to find and attack the top-secret meetings. They can smell compromise.

Five myths about Dodd-Frank (WaPo)
Proving that even former Congressmen can be masters of the listicle, Chris Dodd defends the bill with half of his name from critics on both sides.

Why do we need a financial sector? (Vox)
If you answered “So that it can suck up more and more of the economy without giving us much in return,” you would be correct.

MTV to air ‘True Life: I’m Occupying Wall Street’ on Nov. 5 (Inside TV)
Proving that there really is no limit to what can be co-opted by television.

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Posted by ThinkProgress on Oct 25 2011. Filed under New Deal 2.0, the reading room. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry