Journal: Chuck Spinney Flags Jeff Madrick on Greed and Corruption in Form of Economic “Rents” in Form of Massive Unwarranted Bonuses and Salaries Among Wall Street, Federal Reserve, and Revolving Department of Defense Leaders

Budgets & Funding, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Military
In the attached essay, my friend Jeff Madrick uses the unbridled greed of the finance industry (now trying to rescue itself from its own excesses by sucking at the government teat) to highlight the basic hypocrisy in the so-called free-market economy of go-go capitalism.  Jeff summarizes the results of two recent mainstream economic studies which show the egregious bonuses in the finance industry are simply the fruits of unfair economic privilege.  To economists, this privilege takes the form of obscene economic “rents” — i.e., the excessive revenues and inefficiencies that competition is supposed to eliminate under the capitalist theory (ideology) of free markets.