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If independent outlets like ours can’t survive, neither can democracy.has survived for one reason only: people like you. Please help us get our Winter Campaign off to a strong start. A gift of $8, $13, $27, $75, or whatever amount you can afford will help keep Common Dreams strong now and into the future.has survived for one reason only: people like you. Please help us get our Winter Campaign off to a strong start. A gift of $8, $13, $27, $75, or whatever amount you can afford will help keep Common Dreams strong now and into the future. Trump Agency ‘Setting Stage for Another Financial Crisis’ With Attack on Prediction Market Regulations "By moving to crush state safeguards for prediction markets in court, the CFTC is giving gambling companies a green light to prey on all Americans," said one critic. A key federal regulatory commission has announced that it will be fighting against individual states' powers to regulate prediction markets.on Tuesday that his agency has exclusive powers to regulate prediction markets, and that it would be backing an appeal by Crypto.com aimed at overturning state regulations.last year, said this action was necessary because the prediction markets "face an onslaught of state-driven litigation," with many states claiming that these markets are subject to their laws regulating gambling. "The CFTC will no longer sit idly by," Selig declared, "while overzealous state governments undermine the agency’s exclusive jurisdiction over these markets by seeking to establish statewide prohibitions on these exciting products." The CTFC commissioner also disputed that prediction markets constituted gambling, saying instead that they are derivative instruments of the kind that the CFTC was given sole jurisdiction to regulate under the 1936 Commodity Exchange Act. "These exchanges aren’t the Wild West, as some critics claim, but self-regulatory organizations that are examined and supervised by experienced CFTC staff," Selig concluded. "America is home to the most liquid and vibrant financial markets in the world because our regulators take seriously their obligation to police fraud and institute appropriate investor safeguards.""The 2008 financial crisis happened because we let bankers gamble on housing," said Peterson-Cassin. "Now the CFTC is trying to let gamblers gamble on every aspect of life. By moving to crush state safeguards for prediction markets in court, the CFTC is giving gambling companies a green light to prey on all Americans and is setting the stage for another financial crisis."Gov. Spencer Cox, who said that state regulations for online betting markets are fundamentally different from the kinds of futures markets traditionally regulated by the commission. "I don’t remember the CFTC having authority over the 'derivative market' of LeBron James rebounds," he wrote in a. "These prediction markets you are breathlessly defending are gambling—pure and simple. They are destroying the lives of families and countless Americans, especially young men. They have no place in Utah." Cox further vowed to "use every resource within my disposal as governor of the sovereign state of Utah, and under the Constitution of the Former Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also criticized Selig for trying to interfere in the rights of states to regulate betting markets, arguing that "sports betting is not a derivative, it’s gambling."last month, Trump Jr. "is both an investor in and an unpaid adviser to Polymarket, and a paid adviser to Kalshi," as well as "a director of the Trump family’sWarren Warns 'Trump Could Be Setting the Stage' for Next Financial Crash Discussing the post-2008 financial rules, Trump's Treasury chief told a Fox host that "we have to take the financial system out of this straitjacket."Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection ActRecalling that era, Warren said: "We all know how that ended—with taxpayers bailing out Wall Street while millions lost their homes and got fired from their jobs.said: "I chair something called FSOC, the Financial Stability Oversight Council, and these 2008, 2009, 2010 financial rules were too tight. They have hamstrung the American financial system. It was time for a change. We're gonna be safe, smart, and sound in terms of our deregulation. But we have to take the financial system out of this straitjacket." The main problem with the post-2008 reforms is that they did not do nearly enough to limit the nonbank risk-taking that Bessent and his allies have enabled."appearance on Tuesday came after Bessent earlier this month announced an overhaul to the structure of FSOC—which was established by Dodd-Frank—and wrote in the introduction letter to the council'sthat it "would shift its focus from 'prophylactic' regulatory and supervisory policies to an approach aimed at removing red tape in areas like expressed concern that the FSOC has met fewer times this year than in any past year of its existence and that the council is "sabotaging its own authorities." Dennis Kelleher, CEO of Better Markets, an advocacy group focused on regulation, stated that "undermining the FSOC is undermining the economy and the financial system."that "this is a dereliction of duty by the Financial Stability Oversight Council. But if there is a silver lining, it is that theSummers’ influence was immense, but so were his blind spots. It’s time for economics that values people and the planet over power and prestige.Summers has been just about everywhere money talks. From Harvard to the Treasury, through the Clinton and Obama White Houses, onto, and into think tanks and policy networks that shape the nation’s economy—including the Center for American Progress, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution—he has left a mark few economists ever achieve. Yet his career also shows the risks of concentrating authority in economists whose prestige, ambition, and attachment to abstract models can outweigh attention to real lives. Time and again, he let the interests of financial elites, spreadsheet obsession, and ingrained biases create troubling blind spots. The consequences for ordinary people and the planet simply faded into the background.Let’s be blunt: Economists who don’t see women as equals weaken the very core of their discipline. Tasked with understanding how people, resources, and institutions interact, they can’t model societies, predict outcomes, or craft effective policy if they don’t accurately perceive half the population. Bias isn’t just a moral failure. It corrupts analysis. If Summers had respected women’s intellectual authority, he might have heeded Brooksley Born when she pushed to regulate derivatives as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission .reveal a deeper flaw: outdated, discriminatory, and intellectually sloppy thinking. . Instead, he joined forces withand Robert Rubin to shut her down—a disastrous misstep that helped set the stage for the unregulated derivatives boom and the 2008 financial crisis.shows that structural bias in hiring, research evaluation, and theoretical norms pushes women and fresh ideas to the margins, producing models and policies that miss the full picture of how economies really function. Summers’ personal conduct compounds his professional failings. In the Epstein files, Summers discussed a Chinese female mentee in explicitly sexual terms. He, asking Epstein whether it was “meaningful” to discuss “the probability of my getting horizontal w peril,” a code name for the woman in question. He speculated about how to make himself seem “invaluable and interesting” to her, implying that intimacy could follow. This behavior obviously violates professional boundaries. Sexual harassment isn’t just harmful to the people targeted—it hurts businesses, families, and the economy too, as I have documented ,” were disregarded by Summers. . Summers’ investment strategy backfired sharply when the 2008 crash hit, costing the university dearly: 27% of its endowment, to be precise. By then, Summers was working at a hedge fund and would soon spin through theprogram. Shleifer and associates were found liable by a federal court for using insider access to invest in Russia while advising on US-funded economic programs: a clear conflict-of-interest. Harvard ended up shelling out a $26.5 million settlement, but Shleifer kept his tenured position, thanks in part to Summers’ influence. Summers’ Wall Street-friendly instincts have reached deeply into policy. During the 1990s and early 2000s, he advocated deregulation and reduced oversight for banks, contributing to the conditions that triggered the 2007-2008 financial meltdown, when millions of regular people lost jobs, homes, and savings. After public office, he, arguing that failing to do so would be a “Lehman-like error,” while downplaying conflicts of interest with firms tied to the bank. He warned against listening to “moral hazard lectures” about bailouts. , these moves reinforced a career-long pattern: prioritizing the interests of the wealthy while leaving Main Street to fend for itself.Regrettably, it bears repeating that economics has too often been treated as a game for elites, focused on numbers on paper, financial flows, and abstract deficits, while the jobs, homes, and livelihoods of working people are pushed aside. Summers personifies this very problem. For example, Summers pushed interest‑rate hikes and emphasized deficit reduction over job creation. As political protégé of deficit‑hawk Rubin, and later as head of the National Economic Council , under Obama, Summers repeatedly plugged In December 2008, a full month before Obama’s inauguration, Summers drafted a 57‑page memo warning of a grim economic outlook, but he also downplayed how severe the downturn could be. That memoLarry Summers’s record on global economic policy offers a revealing portrait of his priorities: market logic over human lives, and financial returns over planetary survival.. Actual job losses far outpaced the administration’s optimistic estimates, and the recovery was painfully slow for millions of Americans. After leaving the NEC, Summers went on to warn against aggressive fiscal support, focusing instead on deficit risk and, Summers repeatedly championed what many view as market-first, investor-friendly economic priorities over aggressive support for working-class Americans. In 2021 he as “the least responsible macroeconomic policy in 40 years,” warning that huge fiscal spending combined with loose monetary policy was “kindling” an inflation fire. This neglect of working people is a failure of economics. When economists treat deficits and interest rates as ends in themselves, rather than tools to support lives and livelihoods, they lose the real purpose of economic analysis.Perhaps this background helps explain his longstanding emphasis on austerity over labor-market protections.Larry Summers’s record on global economic policy offers a revealing portrait of his priorities: market logic over human lives, and financial returns over planetary survival. Over decades, he repeatedly helped shape policies that forced vulnerable populations, particularly in developing countries, to subordinate basic needs like health, education, and environmental protection to debt repayment and economic “efficiency.”drafted by Lant Pritchet and cosigned by himself, which suggested that dumping toxic waste in developing countries would actually benefit them economically. The memo noted that, because wages and estimated “economic losses” from illness were lower in developing countries, the health costs ofthe memo was merely sarcasm, the fact that it moved through Summers’ office and carried his signature sparked international outrage.: "I think the best that can be said is to quote La Guardia and say, 'When I make a mistake, it's a whopper.'"Summers’s logic as “perfectly logical but totally insane,” noting that it exemplified “the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness, and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional ‘economists’ concerning the nature of the world we live in.”Even when he later moved toward what some considered climate-friendly policies, his proposals revealed much about his real concerns. For instance, in 2017 he backed a modest carbon-pricing scheme, but only if it replaced stronger environmental regulation and came with rebates and border adjustments. In an op-ed titled, “,” he favored “raising the price of carbon and less emphasis on command-and-control regulation.” That approach aligns neatly with the wish lists of deep-pocketed polluters and carries little of the urgency environmental scientists and communities fighting climate disaster demand.), which has been widely criticized for undermining environmental regulations in Mexico, weakening labor protections, and allowing corporations to externalize ecological costs across borders. Once again, Summers appeared to prioritize trade liberalization and corporate profits overand encourage a “global green transition.” On the surface, this looks progressive, until the focus on financing and efficiency is revealed. Rather than advocating real structural change, Summers continues a pattern of putting capital and market mechanisms over meaningful, just environmental action.In the big picture, Summers’s retreat leaves both a gap and a long‑overdue opportunity. More than ever, the US—and the world—needs economists who put real people first: who design policies that protect jobs, homes, and communities; who confrontrather than downplay it; who treat women, working people, and marginalized groups as full participants; and who put their focus on social well‑being. As the 19h‑century critic John Ruskin famously wrote, “The only wealth is life.” Economics must finally reflect that truth ( We now have a chance to build a life‑centered economics, one that prioritizes human flourishing, environmental stewardship, and equitable opportunity—not just the interests of the elite few.'Most Vile Scumbags on Earth': Critics Appalled by Explosive Report on Kristi Noem's CorruptionUS Military Helping Trump to Build Massive Network of ‘Concentration Camps,’ Navy Contract Reveals Twin Cities Unions Planning ‘Largest US Rent Strike in 100+ Years’ as ICE Occupation Drives Eviction CrisisCourts Have Ruled That ICE Illegally Jailed People More Than 4,400 Times in Less Than Five Months
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